Written Culture In A Colonial Context

Exploring the extent to which the control over the materiality of writing has shaped the numerous and complex processes of cultural exchange from the 16th century onwards, this book introduces the specifities of written culture anchored in colonial contexts.

Canonical articles, most unexcerpted, explore postcolonialism's key themes--power and knowledge--while articles by contemporary scholars expand the discipline to include discussions of the discovery of the New World, Native American and indigenous identities in Latin America and the Pacific, settler colonies in Africa and Australia, English colonialism in Ireland, and feminism in Nigeria and Egypt. The inclusion of a broad sampling of histories and theories attests to multiple, even competing postcolonialisms, while the skillful organization of the volume provides a useful map of the field in terms of recognizable patterns, shared family resemblances, and common genealogies.

Taking an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to literature from 1947 to the present day, this concise companion is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of postcolonial literature and culture. An indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism, bringing together 10 original essays from leading international scholars including C. L. Innes and Susan Bassnett Explains the ideas and practises that emerged from the dismantling of European empires Explores the ways in which these ideas and practices influenced the period's keynote concerns, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance Chapters cover the fields of identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies. Features a useful Chronology of the period, thorough general bibliography, and guides to further reading

The term ‘postcolonial literatures in English’ designates English-language literatures from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, as well as the literatures of diasporic communities who have moved from those regions to the global north. This volume introduces the central themes of postcolonial literary studies and delineates how these themes are reflected and elaborated in exemplary literary works by postcolonial authors from around the world. It also offers succinct definitions of key terms like Orientalism, hybridity, Indigeneity or writing back.

A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

This book presents an introduction to key issues involved in the study of postcolonial literature including diasporas, postcolonial nationalisms, indigenous identities and politics and globalization. This book also contains a chapter on afterlives and adaptations that explores a range of wider cultural texts including film, non-fiction and art.

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

This broad introduction to Colonial American literatures brings outthe comparative and transatlantic nature of the writing of thisperiod and highlights the interactions between native, non-scribalgroups, and Europeans that helped to shape early Americanwriting. Situates the writing of this period in its various historicaland cultural contexts, including colonialism, imperialism,diaspora, and nation formation. Highlights interactions between native, non-scribal groups andEuropeans during the early centuries of exploration. Covers a wide range of approaches to defining and reading earlyAmerican writing. Looks at the development of regional spheres of influence inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Serves as a vital adjunct to Castillo and Schweitzer’s‘The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology’(Blackwell Publishing, 2001).

Beyond the immeasurable political and economic changes it brought, colonial expansion exerted a powerful effect on Portuguese culture. And as this book demonstrates, the imperial culture that emerged over the course of four centuries was hardly a homogeneous whole, as triumphalist literature and other cultural forms mingled with recurrent doubts about the expansionist project. In a series of illuminating case studies, Ramada Curto follows the history and perception of major colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire’s life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

During the colonial period in India, English historians portrayed the British conquest and domination of India as the realization of a historic destiny, absorbing the particular history of India into the overarching narrative of the Empire. When Indian scholars educated in the British system began to write their own histories of the period, they had to struggle to reclaim their past and to make the Indian people the subject of their history. Henry Schwarz explores this struggle through an analysis of Indian cultural histories written between 1870 and the present. Focusing on English-language texts written by Bengali historians on the subjects of literature and culture, Schwarz critically analyzes landmark works of the genre and compares Indian writing about cultural heritage to the dominant forms of European historiography prevalent during the colonial period. Indian historians incorporated European aesthetic standards and theories of history into their writing, yet they managed to transform these ideas in ways that challenged British ideological domination. Schwarz shows how, in writing a distinctly Indian history of India, they produced a unique historiographical style of great complexity deploying brilliant reconfigurations of the dominant themes, styles, ideologies, and tropes that characterize acceptable modes of history writing in the West. Moving from the late nineteenth century to the present, Schwarz identifies six distinct modes of translation and transformation produced by these writers, ranging from liberal-nationalist text to those of writers associated with the Subaltern Studies project. He analyzes the narrative modes employed during the period and traces the movement toward the metaphoric and ironic styles of the post-Independence era. Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India provides a needed counterweight to the emphasis on colonial discourse that has come to dominate recent postcolonial scholarship. By examining how the colonized interpreted and transformed the experience of oppression through their own work, this book represents postcolonial studies written from the other side.