84 research outputs found
'This was a Conradian world I was entering': Postcolonial river-journeys beyond the Black Atlantic in Caryl Phillips's work
Caryl Phillips has been accused of replicating the stereotyped view of a timeless, ahistorical Africa that Paul Gilroy puts forward in his paradigm of the Black Atlantic. Yet this article shows that Crossing the River and Phillipsâs essays about Africa suggest ways in which Gilroyâs important paradigm of the black Atlantic could be broadened to become more inclusive of writing about Africa. Phillips draws inspiration from writers such as V S Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and especially Joseph Conrad, to update the literary journey upriver and make it relevant to contemporary West African issues. A complex interplay of racial identities occurs when people from the African diaspora travel to Africa; this is a key preoccupation for Phillips when he rewrites Conrad. During the course of his river-journeys, Phillips meditates upon the complexities of being a black Westerner in Africa, examines the memory of slavery, colonialism and postcolonial unrest, problematises diasporan attempts to âreturnâ to Africa, and recognises the longstanding modernity of African countries
Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable
This article uses the term âanticipatory anti-colonial writingâ to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayanâs Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anandâs Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayanâs local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anandâs awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latterâs anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a âbridge between the Ganges and the Thamesâ and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism
A voz dos bandos: colectivos de justiça e ritos da palavra portuguesa em Timor Leste colonial
Este artigo examina as relaçÔes entre o discurso da justiça e a prĂĄtica do ritual nos bandos do governo colonial portuguĂȘs em Timor Leste, entre a segunda metade do sĂ©culo XIX e as primeiras dĂ©cadas do sĂ©culo XX. Os bandos consistiam em ordens e instruçÔes de comando emanadas pelo governador portuguĂȘs em DĂli, e comunicadas de forma cerimonial por oficiais Ă s populaçÔes dos diversos reinos timorenses dispersos pelo paĂs. Bandos eram um instrumento por excelĂȘncia de governação colonial dos assuntos indĂgenas, servindo para arbitrar conflitos, punir transgressĂ”es e, em geral, instituir realidades no mundo timorense. Contudo, esta instituição assumiu igualmente uma singular expressĂŁo nos usos timorenses, servindo bandos para comunicar tambĂ©m as ordens de autoridades tradicionais, os liurais. O artigo acompanha as variaçÔes coloniais e indĂgenas que os bandos adquiriram em Timor Leste, conceptualizando-os enquanto colectivos de justiça. Ao considerar assim os bandos como colectivos â formaçÔes heterogĂ©neas em que elementos linguĂsticos e nĂŁo linguĂsticos se combinam na produção de efeitos de poder sobre as populaçÔes â o artigo propĂ”e uma via conceptual alternativa Ă s perspectivas linguĂsticas e literĂĄrias de anĂĄlise do discurso colonial
Narrative and Normative Disjuncture: A Queer World-Literary Reading of May-Lan Tanâs âDate Nightâ
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Wasafiri on 29 May 2019, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02690055.2019.158003
Oral literature in South Africa: 20 years on
I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.DHE
David Dabydeen\u27s The Intended
Defending the Heritage of the Language is a coded resistance to an English that is being reinvented by its multiple users, and is a sign of disquiet at the challenge which a polyglot and cosmopolitan migrant population presents to the holistic notion of \u27the nation\u27 constructed and fortified by a political and intellectual rearguard. Hence the quest of David Dabydeen\u27s Guyanese narrator to redefine his identity through producing prose in Standard English can be read as beseeching entry to a community imagined as being culturally and linguistically homogeneous. His is the standard dream of a bygone colonial elite where to write the oppressor\u27s language with proper attention to grammatical and syntactic rules is to be liberated from a colonized condition
Between Creole and Cambridge English: The Poetry of David Dabydeen
David Dabydeen\u27s poetry belongs with \u27a literature in broken English\u27.^ In this revised usage, the odium directed at deviations from an ethnocentrically prescribed form is displaced by the recognition that the writing practices of those who are outside the dominant culture have opened \u27Eng. Lit.\u27 to heterogeneous and heretical modes. The notion has been differently deployed by Dabydeen to define the Creole of his native Guyana as a hybrid language which speaks the dislocations and oppressions of its history
- âŠ