Matthew Hart
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390339
- eISBN:
- 9780199776191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The ...
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This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.Less
This chapter explores the relation between Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean “nation language” poetics and the poems and critical essays of T. S. Eliot. Reading Brathwaite's epic sequence, The Arrivants (1967–73) alongside his essays from the same period, the chapter explains how Eliot's ideas about poetic language and literary tradition provided an agonistic model for Brathwaite's creation of an archipelagic “nation language.” In doing so, it makes three key interventions in this developing field. First, the chapter rejects traditional narratives of postcolonial belatedness in favor of a dynamic model of literary influence that emphasizes the Caribbean poet's ability to resynthesize his problematic Euro‐American inheritance. Second, it admits the insular nature of Eliot's late poetic, but refuses to make Eliot a straw man for modernist Eurocentrism. Finally, it rejects the picture of Brathwaite as a racial essentialist, reading his “nation language” poetics as a product of the uniquely reflexive sovereignties of the postcolonial Caribbean.
Toral Jatin Gajarawala
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245246
- eISBN:
- 9780823250783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245246.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers the way in which postcolonial Anglophone fiction has addressed the politics of caste. Largely fixated on the communal problem that it reads as the outgrowth of partition, ...
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This chapter considers the way in which postcolonial Anglophone fiction has addressed the politics of caste. Largely fixated on the communal problem that it reads as the outgrowth of partition, postcolonial fiction has effectively abandoned the caste question in an attempt to create a national consensus. Beginning with V.S Naipaul, one of the few Anglophone writers who address caste, the chapter examines how such a paradigm has been set. Through an analysis of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (1997) and a series of novels that figure the servant (Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2006), Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008)) it is argued that caste has been eclipsed in this body of work by communalism, and “class” politics, the central categories of analysis, a reflection of a desire to map India within a global and globalized, and therefore more readable and transparent, framework of the Hindu and the Muslim, and the rich and the poor. Modernist and postmodern aesthetic practices, in these texts, confirm the ideological fictions underlying more realist writing rather than necessarily challenging them. The chapter juxtaposes this framework with the “castelessness” posited in the work of rising Dalit writer Ajay Navariya. In his fiction “castelessness” appears not as veil, or as “always something else” but in order to underline the structural role of caste for all figures of modernity, as well as to challenge the assumption that caste is a problem reserved exclusively for the Dalit.Less
This chapter considers the way in which postcolonial Anglophone fiction has addressed the politics of caste. Largely fixated on the communal problem that it reads as the outgrowth of partition, postcolonial fiction has effectively abandoned the caste question in an attempt to create a national consensus. Beginning with V.S Naipaul, one of the few Anglophone writers who address caste, the chapter examines how such a paradigm has been set. Through an analysis of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (1997) and a series of novels that figure the servant (Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2006), Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008)) it is argued that caste has been eclipsed in this body of work by communalism, and “class” politics, the central categories of analysis, a reflection of a desire to map India within a global and globalized, and therefore more readable and transparent, framework of the Hindu and the Muslim, and the rich and the poor. Modernist and postmodern aesthetic practices, in these texts, confirm the ideological fictions underlying more realist writing rather than necessarily challenging them. The chapter juxtaposes this framework with the “castelessness” posited in the work of rising Dalit writer Ajay Navariya. In his fiction “castelessness” appears not as veil, or as “always something else” but in order to underline the structural role of caste for all figures of modernity, as well as to challenge the assumption that caste is a problem reserved exclusively for the Dalit.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9789888083213
- eISBN:
- 9789882209831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083213.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
Religion has permeated Anglophone literature in Malaysia from colonial times to the present. This study provides insights on the practices of everyday religiosity as represented in literature, which ...
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Religion has permeated Anglophone literature in Malaysia from colonial times to the present. This study provides insights on the practices of everyday religiosity as represented in literature, which is often starkly opposed to the religious rhetoric promoted by the government. The book also reveals the intersections between religion and other facets of colonial and postcolonial identity such as class, gender and sexuality.Less
Religion has permeated Anglophone literature in Malaysia from colonial times to the present. This study provides insights on the practices of everyday religiosity as represented in literature, which is often starkly opposed to the religious rhetoric promoted by the government. The book also reveals the intersections between religion and other facets of colonial and postcolonial identity such as class, gender and sexuality.
Syrine Hout
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643424
- eISBN:
- 9780748676569
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643424.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and ...
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The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and concrete to the large and possibly elusive, metaphorical, and idealist. It also raises, and tries to answer, the question about the future of this new foreign-language variant of contemporary Lebanese literature which seems so far to be still steeped in the memories of war(s). The unfinished trauma of this harrowing experience for those who do remember, however little that may be, has predictably been showing its narratological symptoms in the post-war, here synonymous with the post-traumatic, phase. By expressing what has been silenced and repressed, the Anglophone literary constructions of the selected authors' generation-based experiences amount to testimonies that will be required to achieve so much as an outline of Lebanon's possible futures.Less
The Afterword sums up the permutations of homeness found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of ‘home’ is wide, extending from the most private and concrete to the large and possibly elusive, metaphorical, and idealist. It also raises, and tries to answer, the question about the future of this new foreign-language variant of contemporary Lebanese literature which seems so far to be still steeped in the memories of war(s). The unfinished trauma of this harrowing experience for those who do remember, however little that may be, has predictably been showing its narratological symptoms in the post-war, here synonymous with the post-traumatic, phase. By expressing what has been silenced and repressed, the Anglophone literary constructions of the selected authors' generation-based experiences amount to testimonies that will be required to achieve so much as an outline of Lebanon's possible futures.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9789888083213
- eISBN:
- 9789882209831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083213.003.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
This Introduction establishes the historical and theoretical framework for this study. It argues that scholarship on Anglophone Malaysian literature has tended towards a limited focus on race and ...
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This Introduction establishes the historical and theoretical framework for this study. It argues that scholarship on Anglophone Malaysian literature has tended towards a limited focus on race and nation-building, thus ignoring other quietist, intangible dimensions that are equally, if not more, profound in their impact on the fashioning of identities in a country fraught with racial-religious tensions. This chapter begins with a brief outline of Malaysia's colonial and postcolonial histories and the way they have shaped contemporary Malaysian identity, and by extension, its Anglophone literature. It then mounts a defense with regard to the importance of a psychoanalytical and poststructuralist reading of texts in order understand the way in which religion and the religious is experienced on intimate levels, and what these experiences means for the different individuals whose identity is also undercut by race, class and gender.Less
This Introduction establishes the historical and theoretical framework for this study. It argues that scholarship on Anglophone Malaysian literature has tended towards a limited focus on race and nation-building, thus ignoring other quietist, intangible dimensions that are equally, if not more, profound in their impact on the fashioning of identities in a country fraught with racial-religious tensions. This chapter begins with a brief outline of Malaysia's colonial and postcolonial histories and the way they have shaped contemporary Malaysian identity, and by extension, its Anglophone literature. It then mounts a defense with regard to the importance of a psychoanalytical and poststructuralist reading of texts in order understand the way in which religion and the religious is experienced on intimate levels, and what these experiences means for the different individuals whose identity is also undercut by race, class and gender.
J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628464757
- eISBN:
- 9781628464801
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628464757.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London ...
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The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London single-handedly produced Anglophone Caribbean literature and broadens our understanding of Caribbean and Black British literary history. Writers of this cohort, often reduced to George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Sam Sevlon, are referred to “the Windrush writers,” in tribute to the S.S. Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated the large-scale Caribbean migration to London. They have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anti-colonial, nationalist literary tradition, but, as this collection demonstrates, their uncritical canonization has obscured the diversity of postwar Caribbean writers and produced a narrow definition of West Indian literature. The fourteen original essays in this collection here make clear that already in the 1950s a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean and white-creole—were writing, publishing (and even painting)—and that many were in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, rather than London. Moreover, they addressed subjects omitted from the masculinist canon, such as queer sexuality and the environment. The collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (such as Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); commonly ignored genres (such as the memoir, short stories, and journalism); as well as alternative units of cultural and political unity, such as the Pan-Caribbean as well as potentially trans-hemispheric, trans-island conceptions of political identity.Less
The first book to critically redefine and reexamine West Indian literature of the 1950s, Beyond Windrush challenges the myth that an elite cohort of male novelists based in postwar London single-handedly produced Anglophone Caribbean literature and broadens our understanding of Caribbean and Black British literary history. Writers of this cohort, often reduced to George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Sam Sevlon, are referred to “the Windrush writers,” in tribute to the S.S. Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated the large-scale Caribbean migration to London. They have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anti-colonial, nationalist literary tradition, but, as this collection demonstrates, their uncritical canonization has obscured the diversity of postwar Caribbean writers and produced a narrow definition of West Indian literature. The fourteen original essays in this collection here make clear that already in the 1950s a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean and white-creole—were writing, publishing (and even painting)—and that many were in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, rather than London. Moreover, they addressed subjects omitted from the masculinist canon, such as queer sexuality and the environment. The collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (such as Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); commonly ignored genres (such as the memoir, short stories, and journalism); as well as alternative units of cultural and political unity, such as the Pan-Caribbean as well as potentially trans-hemispheric, trans-island conceptions of political identity.
Thomas O. Beebee
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195339383
- eISBN:
- 9780199867097
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195339383.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This book compares modern literary treatments of the theme of millennium—stories of the “end of the world,” conceived as the ultimate battle between good and evil resulting in the institution of an ...
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This book compares modern literary treatments of the theme of millennium—stories of the “end of the world,” conceived as the ultimate battle between good and evil resulting in the institution of an utterly new social order. The book compares fiction, plays, poetry, and other works written in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish representing a wide spectrum of communities across the Americas, from the colonial origins to the present, from the letters of Columbus to the Left Behind series of novels. The goal is to understand better a thematic that has defined the Americas since the arrival of Europeans, as a “technology of the self” that furthers national and imperial agendas, but also as a discourse of resistance used by native populations, and that has provided an inexhaustible source of literary plots and tropes. This study brings together historical, literary, and ethnographic records to show that the repeated eruptions of millenarian conflict in the Americas have been both acts of resistance to the eradication of traditional ways of life in the process of nationalization and globalization, and also important sources in the search for origins and foundations. Americans tend to understand their origins by narrating their End. Since this End is always imagined rather than experienced, literature becomes a vital element in its propagation.Less
This book compares modern literary treatments of the theme of millennium—stories of the “end of the world,” conceived as the ultimate battle between good and evil resulting in the institution of an utterly new social order. The book compares fiction, plays, poetry, and other works written in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish representing a wide spectrum of communities across the Americas, from the colonial origins to the present, from the letters of Columbus to the Left Behind series of novels. The goal is to understand better a thematic that has defined the Americas since the arrival of Europeans, as a “technology of the self” that furthers national and imperial agendas, but also as a discourse of resistance used by native populations, and that has provided an inexhaustible source of literary plots and tropes. This study brings together historical, literary, and ethnographic records to show that the repeated eruptions of millenarian conflict in the Americas have been both acts of resistance to the eradication of traditional ways of life in the process of nationalization and globalization, and also important sources in the search for origins and foundations. Americans tend to understand their origins by narrating their End. Since this End is always imagined rather than experienced, literature becomes a vital element in its propagation.
Syrine Hout
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643424
- eISBN:
- 9780748676569
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643424.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Middle Eastern Studies
The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, ...
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The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, with some references to Francophone Lebanese literature; the second one, focusing on routes, is an overview of post-war Anglophone literature as a phenomenon of the last fourteen years. It explains why and how, emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon in 1990, these narratives display a newer version of ‘survivor memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, in the form of a generation-specific consciousness, one alternatively replete with irony, parody, nostalgia, and critiques of self and nation. It focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of these texts in two ways: on these authors' views on writing in a foreign language; and on several critics' observations on the increased diversification of Lebanese literature. Drawing on theories of transnational literatures, it argues that these novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what is predicted to become a fuller-fledged branch of Lebanese diasporic literature. By questioning home from a spatial and a temporal distance, these texts offer different visions of ‘Lebaneseness’ in the twenty-first century.Less
The introductory chapter is divided into two sections: the first one, focusing on roots, is a review of Arabic-language Lebanese war literature of the 1970s and 1980s, its main authors, and trends, with some references to Francophone Lebanese literature; the second one, focusing on routes, is an overview of post-war Anglophone literature as a phenomenon of the last fourteen years. It explains why and how, emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon in 1990, these narratives display a newer version of ‘survivor memory’, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, in the form of a generation-specific consciousness, one alternatively replete with irony, parody, nostalgia, and critiques of self and nation. It focuses on the cross-cultural aspect of these texts in two ways: on these authors' views on writing in a foreign language; and on several critics' observations on the increased diversification of Lebanese literature. Drawing on theories of transnational literatures, it argues that these novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what is predicted to become a fuller-fledged branch of Lebanese diasporic literature. By questioning home from a spatial and a temporal distance, these texts offer different visions of ‘Lebaneseness’ in the twenty-first century.
Saikat Majumdar
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156950
- eISBN:
- 9780231527675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156950.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter analyzes the fiction of Amit Chaudhuri, who had been the most articulate voice in expressing a persistent critique of the ethos of the national allegory that had, at one point, come to ...
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This chapter analyzes the fiction of Amit Chaudhuri, who had been the most articulate voice in expressing a persistent critique of the ethos of the national allegory that had, at one point, come to be nearly synonymous with Anglophone Indian literature. The clearest enunciation of this critique was The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which he edited, in particular, in the essays that form the editorial introduction to the volume. In these essays, Chaudhuri points out that notwithstanding the national allegory's claims to a subversive and experimental narrative form, the genre is driven by an ideological conformity to the Nehruvian vision of modern India. Chaudhuri provides a valuable alternative tradition of contemporary postcolonial writing that deserves far greater attention than it has received so far. The publication of his anthology in 2001 is a pivotal moment in the articulation of this tradition.Less
This chapter analyzes the fiction of Amit Chaudhuri, who had been the most articulate voice in expressing a persistent critique of the ethos of the national allegory that had, at one point, come to be nearly synonymous with Anglophone Indian literature. The clearest enunciation of this critique was The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which he edited, in particular, in the essays that form the editorial introduction to the volume. In these essays, Chaudhuri points out that notwithstanding the national allegory's claims to a subversive and experimental narrative form, the genre is driven by an ideological conformity to the Nehruvian vision of modern India. Chaudhuri provides a valuable alternative tradition of contemporary postcolonial writing that deserves far greater attention than it has received so far. The publication of his anthology in 2001 is a pivotal moment in the articulation of this tradition.
Ankhi Mukherjee
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804785211
- eISBN:
- 9780804788380
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804785211.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring ...
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What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature and an international field of literary criticism, Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Topics discussed include the canonical conceptions of Eliot and Coetzee, the intertextuality of Derek Walcott's works, the legacy of Joseph Conrad's fiction and narrative theory, rewriting and postcolonial revisionism, variant Englishes and vernacularization, and popular Shakespeare in the postcolony. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.Less
What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature and an international field of literary criticism, Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Topics discussed include the canonical conceptions of Eliot and Coetzee, the intertextuality of Derek Walcott's works, the legacy of Joseph Conrad's fiction and narrative theory, rewriting and postcolonial revisionism, variant Englishes and vernacularization, and popular Shakespeare in the postcolony. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.
Martin Joseph Ponce
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814768051
- eISBN:
- 9780814768662
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814768051.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This book charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the United States, forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first ...
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This book charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the United States, forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century. It theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. The book considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. It elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, the book proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.Less
This book charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the United States, forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first century. It theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. The book considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. It elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, the book proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.
George Akita
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824825607
- eISBN:
- 9780824869328
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824825607.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This concluding chapter explains that younger scholars are better equipped to handle Japanese language sources than many of the generation that followed the wartime-trained specialists. The ...
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This concluding chapter explains that younger scholars are better equipped to handle Japanese language sources than many of the generation that followed the wartime-trained specialists. The Inter-University Center and the considerable improvement in language training at universities may be cited for this development. They also are producing works much more sophisticated, and seen from perspectives that had escaped the older generation. The chapter, however, notes one minor “failing,” which is the apparent lack of interest in the Anglophone literature produced from the mid-nineteenth century through the early postwar years. These works can be utilized to give historical continuity to any analysis and interpretation of modern Japanese history.Less
This concluding chapter explains that younger scholars are better equipped to handle Japanese language sources than many of the generation that followed the wartime-trained specialists. The Inter-University Center and the considerable improvement in language training at universities may be cited for this development. They also are producing works much more sophisticated, and seen from perspectives that had escaped the older generation. The chapter, however, notes one minor “failing,” which is the apparent lack of interest in the Anglophone literature produced from the mid-nineteenth century through the early postwar years. These works can be utilized to give historical continuity to any analysis and interpretation of modern Japanese history.
