Waïl S Hassan
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199792061
- eISBN:
- 9780199919239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199792061.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Ramzi Salti relates homophobia and gender discrimination to the critique of colonialism, while Rabih Alameddine focuses on the predicament of AIDS victims and satirizes the sources of American ...
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Ramzi Salti relates homophobia and gender discrimination to the critique of colonialism, while Rabih Alameddine focuses on the predicament of AIDS victims and satirizes the sources of American Orientalism, the Bible and the Arabian Nights.Less
Ramzi Salti relates homophobia and gender discrimination to the critique of colonialism, while Rabih Alameddine focuses on the predicament of AIDS victims and satirizes the sources of American Orientalism, the Bible and the Arabian Nights.
Mutsuo Takahashi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816672776
- eISBN:
- 9781452948157
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816672776.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This memoir traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, this book ...
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This memoir traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, this book presents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from youth, the text captures the full range of an internal life as a boy, shifting between experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. The text also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown. Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many others have written about, the book’s author experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. The book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan.Less
This memoir traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, this book presents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from youth, the text captures the full range of an internal life as a boy, shifting between experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. The text also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown. Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many others have written about, the book’s author experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. The book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a ...
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First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a convincing case that Mexico, as escape route, inspiration and alternative universe, was essential to Burroughs’ development as a writer, as well as the scene of the definitive incident in the writer’s life, his accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Beginning with a description of the circumstances that led Burroughs to move to Mexico, the book covers the author’s initial elation at settling into this foreign land, followed by his growing disillusionment and descent into various addictions as he discovered his literary vocation. Reconstructing the environment of 1950s Mexico through Burroughs’ correspondence and writings, reports from the Mexican press, descriptions of the cultural and political panorama of the era and interviews with Burroughs’ Mexico acquaintances, García-Robles paints a vivid picture of the world that spawned the Beat novelist’s career. Although this period of Burroughs’ life has been written on by others, García-Robles’ version provides a uniquely Mexican perspective. García-Robles, who has translated the Burroughs-Ginsberg collaboration The Yagé Letters into Spanish, has a talent for recreating the Mexico of the 1950s. Burroughs cooperated with the author while La bala perdida was being written and in fact contributed an essay about the Mexican lawyer who arranged his quick release from prison after the shooting incident. The book also includes previously unpublished letters written by Burroughs from Mexico.Less
First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a convincing case that Mexico, as escape route, inspiration and alternative universe, was essential to Burroughs’ development as a writer, as well as the scene of the definitive incident in the writer’s life, his accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Beginning with a description of the circumstances that led Burroughs to move to Mexico, the book covers the author’s initial elation at settling into this foreign land, followed by his growing disillusionment and descent into various addictions as he discovered his literary vocation. Reconstructing the environment of 1950s Mexico through Burroughs’ correspondence and writings, reports from the Mexican press, descriptions of the cultural and political panorama of the era and interviews with Burroughs’ Mexico acquaintances, García-Robles paints a vivid picture of the world that spawned the Beat novelist’s career. Although this period of Burroughs’ life has been written on by others, García-Robles’ version provides a uniquely Mexican perspective. García-Robles, who has translated the Burroughs-Ginsberg collaboration The Yagé Letters into Spanish, has a talent for recreating the Mexico of the 1950s. Burroughs cooperated with the author while La bala perdida was being written and in fact contributed an essay about the Mexican lawyer who arranged his quick release from prison after the shooting incident. The book also includes previously unpublished letters written by Burroughs from Mexico.
Elleke Boehmer
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719068782
- eISBN:
- 9781781701898
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719068782.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter extends the discussion of the interrelationship of gender and nation into an area rarely mentioned if not taboo in discourses both colonial and post-colonial, namely, the same-sex desire ...
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This chapter extends the discussion of the interrelationship of gender and nation into an area rarely mentioned if not taboo in discourses both colonial and post-colonial, namely, the same-sex desire of women. By evoking women's unruly, erotic yearnings, the two prominent Zimbabwean writers Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera explore the libidinal energies that exceed, or leak out between the fractures of, the conservative post-colonial state. Queer sexuality, in point of fact, probably still constitutes what could best be termed a virtual non-presence, or at least a covert silencing, an ‘unsaying’, in post-colonial discourses generally and in African writing in particular. It is a surprising omission or occlusion considering that, since the 1960s, post-colonial theory and criticism have grown up in tandem with the emergence of a politics of identity and cultural difference, and are deeply informed by discourses of rights and of resistance to a variety of forms of oppression.Less
This chapter extends the discussion of the interrelationship of gender and nation into an area rarely mentioned if not taboo in discourses both colonial and post-colonial, namely, the same-sex desire of women. By evoking women's unruly, erotic yearnings, the two prominent Zimbabwean writers Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera explore the libidinal energies that exceed, or leak out between the fractures of, the conservative post-colonial state. Queer sexuality, in point of fact, probably still constitutes what could best be termed a virtual non-presence, or at least a covert silencing, an ‘unsaying’, in post-colonial discourses generally and in African writing in particular. It is a surprising omission or occlusion considering that, since the 1960s, post-colonial theory and criticism have grown up in tandem with the emergence of a politics of identity and cultural difference, and are deeply informed by discourses of rights and of resistance to a variety of forms of oppression.
Nadia Ellis
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628464757
- eISBN:
- 9781628464801
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628464757.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter engages sexuality and social class in the Windrush migrant male experience. It suggests that Andrew Salkey was – but is rarely now – recognized as a crucial figure of the generation, ...
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This chapter engages sexuality and social class in the Windrush migrant male experience. It suggests that Andrew Salkey was – but is rarely now – recognized as a crucial figure of the generation, sidelined, among other reasons for the sexual politics of his writing. The chapter gives an account of his understudied 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, showing how, in it, the intersection of class, race, and, above all, sexuality raises issues that interfere with the heroic masculinity characteristic of the heterosexual nationalism purveyed by the more consecrated Windrush novels. In uncovering the ambivalent but powerful queer energies evoked by Salkey’s text, the chapter illustrates how literary accounts of the period have failed to engage with the more complicated, less overtly oppositional emotions expressed in literature portraying the experience of mid-century West Indian migration.Less
This chapter engages sexuality and social class in the Windrush migrant male experience. It suggests that Andrew Salkey was – but is rarely now – recognized as a crucial figure of the generation, sidelined, among other reasons for the sexual politics of his writing. The chapter gives an account of his understudied 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, showing how, in it, the intersection of class, race, and, above all, sexuality raises issues that interfere with the heroic masculinity characteristic of the heterosexual nationalism purveyed by the more consecrated Windrush novels. In uncovering the ambivalent but powerful queer energies evoked by Salkey’s text, the chapter illustrates how literary accounts of the period have failed to engage with the more complicated, less overtly oppositional emotions expressed in literature portraying the experience of mid-century West Indian migration.
Ben Tran
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273133
- eISBN:
- 9780823273188
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273133.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the ...
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Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the erosion of the male literati gave way to a female literary public, post-mandarin intellectuals were drawn to André Gide’s idiosyncratic synthesis of same-sex politics with socialism and his belief in individual literary expression and national particularity. The chapter argues that Gide’s influence in Vietnam during the 1930s underwrites the emergence of socialist realism. These claims challenge the historiography of the Vietnamese anticolonial revolution and its privileging of class determinism, leading to one of the main tenets of this book: that the disruption of gender and sexual relations set off by the post-mandarin rupture proves to be one of the crucial factors in Vietnam’s literary and cultural production during the era of colonial modernity.Less
Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the erosion of the male literati gave way to a female literary public, post-mandarin intellectuals were drawn to André Gide’s idiosyncratic synthesis of same-sex politics with socialism and his belief in individual literary expression and national particularity. The chapter argues that Gide’s influence in Vietnam during the 1930s underwrites the emergence of socialist realism. These claims challenge the historiography of the Vietnamese anticolonial revolution and its privileging of class determinism, leading to one of the main tenets of this book: that the disruption of gender and sexual relations set off by the post-mandarin rupture proves to be one of the crucial factors in Vietnam’s literary and cultural production during the era of colonial modernity.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and ...
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The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.Less
The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.
Jorge García-Robles
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680627
- eISBN:
- 9781452948805
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680627.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory ...
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This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”Less
This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”
Andrew van der Vlies
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198793762
- eISBN:
- 9780191835551
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198793762.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, World Literature
For many South Africans, the present state of the nation is not the future imagined during the anti-apartheid struggle: that time is no time like this present. This chapter uses Nadine Gordimer’s ...
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For many South Africans, the present state of the nation is not the future imagined during the anti-apartheid struggle: that time is no time like this present. This chapter uses Nadine Gordimer’s last published novel, aptly titled No Time Like the Present (2012), which features characters who share this assessment, as the starting point for a discussion of the monograph’s principal analyses and key theoretical engagements. These include Walter Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’, Ernst Bloch’s idea of an ‘educated hope’, and similar recuperative engagements with stalled utopian impulses, principally in queer and feminist studies (Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Jane Elliott, Lauren Berlant) that bring temporality and affect into conversation, and postcolonial studies (David Scott) that engage with stalled revolutionary potential.Less
For many South Africans, the present state of the nation is not the future imagined during the anti-apartheid struggle: that time is no time like this present. This chapter uses Nadine Gordimer’s last published novel, aptly titled No Time Like the Present (2012), which features characters who share this assessment, as the starting point for a discussion of the monograph’s principal analyses and key theoretical engagements. These include Walter Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’, Ernst Bloch’s idea of an ‘educated hope’, and similar recuperative engagements with stalled utopian impulses, principally in queer and feminist studies (Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Jane Elliott, Lauren Berlant) that bring temporality and affect into conversation, and postcolonial studies (David Scott) that engage with stalled revolutionary potential.
Andrew van der Vlies
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198793762
- eISBN:
- 9780191835551
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198793762.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, World Literature
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter ...
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South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reads her novels—David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014)—and select short fiction—in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One That Got Away (2008); ‘In Search of Tommie’ (2010)—to consider how Wicomb stages text itself as a privileged space within which to hold open the promise of the ‘loose end’ (a recurring metaphor), exploring its potential to unravel older formations in the social fabric to suggest new narrative and relational threads. It argues that the prevalence of queer subjects in her fiction mirrors Wicomb’s formally ‘queer’ strategies, including meta- and intertextuality, which offer more than the textual equivalent of characters’ displacements or the author’s own restless transnationalism (here October’s debts to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home are canvassed).Less
South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reads her novels—David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014)—and select short fiction—in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One That Got Away (2008); ‘In Search of Tommie’ (2010)—to consider how Wicomb stages text itself as a privileged space within which to hold open the promise of the ‘loose end’ (a recurring metaphor), exploring its potential to unravel older formations in the social fabric to suggest new narrative and relational threads. It argues that the prevalence of queer subjects in her fiction mirrors Wicomb’s formally ‘queer’ strategies, including meta- and intertextuality, which offer more than the textual equivalent of characters’ displacements or the author’s own restless transnationalism (here October’s debts to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home are canvassed).
Erik Gray
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198752974
- eISBN:
- 9780191815928
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198752974.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, World Literature
This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, ...
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This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, capacities. Although creatures of all kinds populate love poetry, birds are the most ubiquitous. The mating behaviors of birds, at once instinctive and highly patterned, offer a natural parallel to the combination of impulse and predetermined structure that characterizes both love and poetry. And while the same could be said of other animals, birds employ song as a key component of their courtship and so reflect the work of love poetry. A focus on birds and other animals also offers the poet scope to celebrate the role of sexual desire in love. Yet animals, in their mingled familiarity and alienness, ultimately appeal to love poets less as direct models than as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.Less
This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, capacities. Although creatures of all kinds populate love poetry, birds are the most ubiquitous. The mating behaviors of birds, at once instinctive and highly patterned, offer a natural parallel to the combination of impulse and predetermined structure that characterizes both love and poetry. And while the same could be said of other animals, birds employ song as a key component of their courtship and so reflect the work of love poetry. A focus on birds and other animals also offers the poet scope to celebrate the role of sexual desire in love. Yet animals, in their mingled familiarity and alienness, ultimately appeal to love poets less as direct models than as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.
