Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199217182
- eISBN:
- 9780191712388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217182.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The Introduction pursues the theme of identity by considering the varieties of ‘family’ in the plays. The grounding of civilization is investigated by means of the dichotomy of orality and ...
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The Introduction pursues the theme of identity by considering the varieties of ‘family’ in the plays. The grounding of civilization is investigated by means of the dichotomy of orality and literature, as well as the polarity between Thebes and Athens. To develop this analysis, the profile and potential of Oedipus and Antigone in Western and African philosophical traditions is examined. The book's argument about cultural transmission contends that the African-descended adaptations of Oedipus and Antigone indict colonial culture for the infliction of oedipal violence, while themselves enacting an oedipal bind as they simultaneously embrace and resist those cultures. Above and beyond this bind, the plays offer more benign models of transmission constituted within the African continent and diaspora. The Introduction recasts the arguments of Freud and Bloom by a focus on Fanon, and advocates a specific theoretical re-orientation of reception studies to equip it to do postcolonial analysis.Less
The Introduction pursues the theme of identity by considering the varieties of ‘family’ in the plays. The grounding of civilization is investigated by means of the dichotomy of orality and literature, as well as the polarity between Thebes and Athens. To develop this analysis, the profile and potential of Oedipus and Antigone in Western and African philosophical traditions is examined. The book's argument about cultural transmission contends that the African-descended adaptations of Oedipus and Antigone indict colonial culture for the infliction of oedipal violence, while themselves enacting an oedipal bind as they simultaneously embrace and resist those cultures. Above and beyond this bind, the plays offer more benign models of transmission constituted within the African continent and diaspora. The Introduction recasts the arguments of Freud and Bloom by a focus on Fanon, and advocates a specific theoretical re-orientation of reception studies to equip it to do postcolonial analysis.
Murray Pittock
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232796
- eISBN:
- 9780191716409
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232796.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book addresses the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. It begins by challenging the terms of its own title by asking ‘what is Romanticism’, and ‘what does the term ‘national ...
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This book addresses the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. It begins by challenging the terms of its own title by asking ‘what is Romanticism’, and ‘what does the term ‘national literature’ mean’? It then proceeds to explain and define the answers to these questions, providing certain triggers by the presence of which a national literature can be recognized, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose work chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon, and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.Less
This book addresses the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. It begins by challenging the terms of its own title by asking ‘what is Romanticism’, and ‘what does the term ‘national literature’ mean’? It then proceeds to explain and define the answers to these questions, providing certain triggers by the presence of which a national literature can be recognized, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose work chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon, and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.
Patricia Owens
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199299362
- eISBN:
- 9780191715051
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299362.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations and Politics
This chapter sets out and analyses Arendt's understandings of the basic meanings of politics and war, violence, and power. Her definition of power — a collective capacity that emerges between people ...
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This chapter sets out and analyses Arendt's understandings of the basic meanings of politics and war, violence, and power. Her definition of power — a collective capacity that emerges between people as they act together — is supported through a number of historical examples. Her position on partisan warfare and the uses and limitations of revolutionary violence are contrasted with the important writing on these subjects by Schmitt and Fanon. Arendt shared with Clausewitz a view of war as an act of force whose essence is violent combat. However, political action, though sometimes occurring during wartime, is fundamentally different. Politics is full of conflict. But it is also limited by plurality, the very condition for speech and political action among equals. In contrast to post-structuralist accounts, Arendt maintained that a distinction between politics and war was indeed possible and necessary for there to be politics at all.Less
This chapter sets out and analyses Arendt's understandings of the basic meanings of politics and war, violence, and power. Her definition of power — a collective capacity that emerges between people as they act together — is supported through a number of historical examples. Her position on partisan warfare and the uses and limitations of revolutionary violence are contrasted with the important writing on these subjects by Schmitt and Fanon. Arendt shared with Clausewitz a view of war as an act of force whose essence is violent combat. However, political action, though sometimes occurring during wartime, is fundamentally different. Politics is full of conflict. But it is also limited by plurality, the very condition for speech and political action among equals. In contrast to post-structuralist accounts, Arendt maintained that a distinction between politics and war was indeed possible and necessary for there to be politics at all.
Linnell Secomb
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623679
- eISBN:
- 9780748671854
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623679.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This book introduces historical and contemporary philosophical reflections on love. It brings together philosophy with cultural analysis to provide an account of conventional theories of love as well ...
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This book introduces historical and contemporary philosophical reflections on love. It brings together philosophy with cultural analysis to provide an account of conventional theories of love as well as the controversial reformulations evident in same-sex desire, cross-cultural love and internet romance. Starting with Plato, but focusing especially on contemporary European philosophy, the book introduces figures such as Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida and Fanon. Explaining these philosophical approaches, it also engages with cultural productions — ranging from Sappho to Frankenstein, and from Hiroshima Mon Amour to Desperate Housewives — enabling an exchange between philosophical and cultural theories. Love stories are also central to this interdisciplinary book, revealing the ethical and the political as well as the personal implications of lover's discourses. Embracing both the sentimental and the political, this deconstructive reading discloses the paradoxes, conflicts and intensities of the love relation.Less
This book introduces historical and contemporary philosophical reflections on love. It brings together philosophy with cultural analysis to provide an account of conventional theories of love as well as the controversial reformulations evident in same-sex desire, cross-cultural love and internet romance. Starting with Plato, but focusing especially on contemporary European philosophy, the book introduces figures such as Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Irigaray, Derrida and Fanon. Explaining these philosophical approaches, it also engages with cultural productions — ranging from Sappho to Frankenstein, and from Hiroshima Mon Amour to Desperate Housewives — enabling an exchange between philosophical and cultural theories. Love stories are also central to this interdisciplinary book, revealing the ethical and the political as well as the personal implications of lover's discourses. Embracing both the sentimental and the political, this deconstructive reading discloses the paradoxes, conflicts and intensities of the love relation.
David Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282388
- eISBN:
- 9780823284948
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282388.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of universality, freedom and humanity, and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of aesthetic ...
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Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of universality, freedom and humanity, and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy. It challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies and the lack of attention to aesthetics in critical race theory. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful racial regime of representation whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is an activity that articulates the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: the racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. In its five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the sterotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura, and representation.Less
Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of universality, freedom and humanity, and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy. It challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies and the lack of attention to aesthetics in critical race theory. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful racial regime of representation whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is an activity that articulates the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: the racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. In its five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the sterotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura, and representation.
Rahul Rao
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199560370
- eISBN:
- 9780191721694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560370.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations and Politics
The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently ...
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The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently for the success of national liberation movements. This ambiguous attitude towards nationalism was underpinned by complex spatial imaginaries of threat, in which the freedom of the political communities with which they identified was perceived to be threatened both from outside and within. As anti‐imperialists, they made the case for subaltern nationalism; but an anxiety about the oppressions inherent in nationalist mobilization also led them to a critique of nationalism. Tagore, Said, and Fanon attempted to square this circle by viewing nationalism as a transitory stage through which subaltern resistance must pass to recuperate the identity and sense of self that imperialism had trampled underfoot, but which must then subsume itself in postcolonial universality once this goal had been attained.Less
The chapter describes the protest sensibilities of four writers—James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon—who were fierce critics of nationalism even as they wished fervently for the success of national liberation movements. This ambiguous attitude towards nationalism was underpinned by complex spatial imaginaries of threat, in which the freedom of the political communities with which they identified was perceived to be threatened both from outside and within. As anti‐imperialists, they made the case for subaltern nationalism; but an anxiety about the oppressions inherent in nationalist mobilization also led them to a critique of nationalism. Tagore, Said, and Fanon attempted to square this circle by viewing nationalism as a transitory stage through which subaltern resistance must pass to recuperate the identity and sense of self that imperialism had trampled underfoot, but which must then subsume itself in postcolonial universality once this goal had been attained.
Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Michael Panfilio
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232505
- eISBN:
- 9780823235643
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823232505.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
In dialogue with Afro-Caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For ...
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In dialogue with Afro-Caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For Cassirer, what makes humans unique is that we are symbolizing creatures destined to come into a world through varied symbolic forms; we pluralistically work with and develop these forms as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe. This approach can be used as a powerful challenge to hegemonic modes of study that mistakenly place the Western world at the center of intellectual and political life. Indeed, the book argues that the symbolic dimension of Cassirer's thinking of possibility can be linked to a symbolic dimension in revolution via the ideas of Frantz Fanon, who argued that revolution must be a thoroughgoing cultural process, in which what is at stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a new humanity and bring into being a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity.Less
In dialogue with Afro-Caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For Cassirer, what makes humans unique is that we are symbolizing creatures destined to come into a world through varied symbolic forms; we pluralistically work with and develop these forms as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe. This approach can be used as a powerful challenge to hegemonic modes of study that mistakenly place the Western world at the center of intellectual and political life. Indeed, the book argues that the symbolic dimension of Cassirer's thinking of possibility can be linked to a symbolic dimension in revolution via the ideas of Frantz Fanon, who argued that revolution must be a thoroughgoing cultural process, in which what is at stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a new humanity and bring into being a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity.
Kohn Margaret and McBride Keally
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195399578
- eISBN:
- 9780199894437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195399578.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics
This chapter argues that our understanding of revolution can be enhanced by examining twentieth-century movements for independence. These movements wanted to do more than just replace foreign rulers ...
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This chapter argues that our understanding of revolution can be enhanced by examining twentieth-century movements for independence. These movements wanted to do more than just replace foreign rulers with indigenous elites who would ensure the smooth functioning of existing forms of exploitation. Reconfiguring Confucian ideas about virtue, Ho Chi Minh saw revolution as a process of self-cultivation and transformation for both leaders and citizens. Frantz Fanon has a similar emphasis upon the libratory aspects of struggle, but becomes trepidatious about the manipulation of the masses by nationalist leaders. How can we understand democratic revolutions of independence that did not create governments with democratic accountability? This chapter starts to unpeel the difficulties of establishing democracy in postcolonial regimes.Less
This chapter argues that our understanding of revolution can be enhanced by examining twentieth-century movements for independence. These movements wanted to do more than just replace foreign rulers with indigenous elites who would ensure the smooth functioning of existing forms of exploitation. Reconfiguring Confucian ideas about virtue, Ho Chi Minh saw revolution as a process of self-cultivation and transformation for both leaders and citizens. Frantz Fanon has a similar emphasis upon the libratory aspects of struggle, but becomes trepidatious about the manipulation of the masses by nationalist leaders. How can we understand democratic revolutions of independence that did not create governments with democratic accountability? This chapter starts to unpeel the difficulties of establishing democracy in postcolonial regimes.
Jennifer Radden (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195149531
- eISBN:
- 9780199870943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195149531.003.0019
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
This chapter discusses three attempts to theorize the philosophical and cultural issues relevant to raciation in psychiatry: the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and E. V. Wolfenstein. It also ...
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This chapter discusses three attempts to theorize the philosophical and cultural issues relevant to raciation in psychiatry: the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and E. V. Wolfenstein. It also discusses the development of a view that can build on the strengths of previous work and enable forward movement. It argues that the problems of the relations among inner and outer oppression and victim status cannot be understood unless the relation between individual and collectivity is encompassed within a perspective that is beyond psychoanalytic Marxism, for the latter construes individual and social praxis as two separate planes of liberatory praxis.Less
This chapter discusses three attempts to theorize the philosophical and cultural issues relevant to raciation in psychiatry: the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and E. V. Wolfenstein. It also discusses the development of a view that can build on the strengths of previous work and enable forward movement. It argues that the problems of the relations among inner and outer oppression and victim status cannot be understood unless the relation between individual and collectivity is encompassed within a perspective that is beyond psychoanalytic Marxism, for the latter construes individual and social praxis as two separate planes of liberatory praxis.
Patrick Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199587957
- eISBN:
- 9780191723292
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587957.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It ...
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This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It argues that Coetzee presents political modernity as a divided moral legacy made up of two distinctively different interpretations of the ideal of equal recognition—the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference. The chapter explores the different claims each form of politics tends to make upon literary expression with reference to a wide range of intellectuals—including Habermas, Charles Taylor, John Gray, Sartre, Fanon, and the South African Students' Organization (SASO). It relates Coetzee's approach to an alternative line of thinking about both culture and politics, which departs from the different forms of the politics of recognition by instead seeking to defend an anti‐foundational understanding of the good community.Less
This chapter contextualizes Coetzee's fiction by placing it in relation to late twentieth‐century debates on the nature of a good community, and on the relationship between culture and politics. It argues that Coetzee presents political modernity as a divided moral legacy made up of two distinctively different interpretations of the ideal of equal recognition—the politics of equal dignity and the politics of difference. The chapter explores the different claims each form of politics tends to make upon literary expression with reference to a wide range of intellectuals—including Habermas, Charles Taylor, John Gray, Sartre, Fanon, and the South African Students' Organization (SASO). It relates Coetzee's approach to an alternative line of thinking about both culture and politics, which departs from the different forms of the politics of recognition by instead seeking to defend an anti‐foundational understanding of the good community.
Ben Etherington
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781503602366
- eISBN:
- 9781503604094
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503602366.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book comprehensively redefines literary primitivism, arguing that it was an aesthetic project formed in reaction to the high point of imperialist expansion at the start of the twentieth century. ...
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This book comprehensively redefines literary primitivism, arguing that it was an aesthetic project formed in reaction to the high point of imperialist expansion at the start of the twentieth century. As those spaces in which “primitive” forms of existence were imagined to be possible were either directly colonized or otherwise forcibly integrated into a geographically totalized capitalist world-system, so dissenting writers responded by trying to reawaken primitive experience by means of literary practice. This thesis breaks with the orthodox understanding of primitivism as a transhistorical tendency according to which the “civilized” idealize the “primitive,” something that is usually thought to correspond to a binary of the “West” and its “Others.” Adopting the “point of view of totality,” Literary Primitivism argues that it was artists from peripheral societies who most energetically pursued primitivism’s project of immediacy as it was they who most keenly felt the loss of unalienated social worlds. The major debates are reviewed concerning primitivism and the thinkers, artists, and concept--including expressionism, modernism, surrealism, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Luxemburg, the writers of négritude, Carl Einstein, the Frankfurt School, and Alain Locke. In close studies of the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay the book identifies a morphology of literary primitivism that centers on the literary activation of the primitive remnant. Along the way, the book reassesses the politics of primitivism, especially with regard to its decolonial horizon, and the prospects for understanding literary primitivism as an event of world literature.Less
This book comprehensively redefines literary primitivism, arguing that it was an aesthetic project formed in reaction to the high point of imperialist expansion at the start of the twentieth century. As those spaces in which “primitive” forms of existence were imagined to be possible were either directly colonized or otherwise forcibly integrated into a geographically totalized capitalist world-system, so dissenting writers responded by trying to reawaken primitive experience by means of literary practice. This thesis breaks with the orthodox understanding of primitivism as a transhistorical tendency according to which the “civilized” idealize the “primitive,” something that is usually thought to correspond to a binary of the “West” and its “Others.” Adopting the “point of view of totality,” Literary Primitivism argues that it was artists from peripheral societies who most energetically pursued primitivism’s project of immediacy as it was they who most keenly felt the loss of unalienated social worlds. The major debates are reviewed concerning primitivism and the thinkers, artists, and concept--including expressionism, modernism, surrealism, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Luxemburg, the writers of négritude, Carl Einstein, the Frankfurt School, and Alain Locke. In close studies of the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay the book identifies a morphology of literary primitivism that centers on the literary activation of the primitive remnant. Along the way, the book reassesses the politics of primitivism, especially with regard to its decolonial horizon, and the prospects for understanding literary primitivism as an event of world literature.
David Johnson
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183150
- eISBN:
- 9780191673955
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183150.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Israel Gollancz's lavish collection commemorating the tercentenary of William Shakespeare's death, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, includes homage with words of praise written by Solomon Plaatje, a ...
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Israel Gollancz's lavish collection commemorating the tercentenary of William Shakespeare's death, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, includes homage with words of praise written by Solomon Plaatje, a black South African in London at the time petitioning the British government to intervene in South Africa against racist legislation passed by the Union government. Plaatje's position in both political and cultural terms was complicated, and this chapter reflects on how he negotiated his relationship with the British state and with Shakespeare. It examines Shakespeare in his 1916 form, surveying both the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebrations in England and the Cape Colony, and Shakespeare's deployment in the education system of the Cape in 1916. In addition, the chapter focuses on how different thinkers, like Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx, have tried to make sense of Plaatje's relation with Shakespeare.Less
Israel Gollancz's lavish collection commemorating the tercentenary of William Shakespeare's death, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, includes homage with words of praise written by Solomon Plaatje, a black South African in London at the time petitioning the British government to intervene in South Africa against racist legislation passed by the Union government. Plaatje's position in both political and cultural terms was complicated, and this chapter reflects on how he negotiated his relationship with the British state and with Shakespeare. It examines Shakespeare in his 1916 form, surveying both the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebrations in England and the Cape Colony, and Shakespeare's deployment in the education system of the Cape in 1916. In addition, the chapter focuses on how different thinkers, like Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx, have tried to make sense of Plaatje's relation with Shakespeare.
Azzedine Haddour
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780719075230
- eISBN:
- 9781526146779
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526140814
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference raises a host of crucial questions regarding the relevance of Fanon today: in today’s world, where violence and terror have gone global, what ...
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Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference raises a host of crucial questions regarding the relevance of Fanon today: in today’s world, where violence and terror have gone global, what conclusions might we draw from Fanon’s work? Should we keep on blaming Fanon for the colonial violence, which he internalized and struggled against, and overlook the fact that the very Manichaeism that previously governed the economy of colonial societies is now generating violence and terror on a global scale? Has the new humanism which he inaugurates in the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth turned out to be nothing but a vain plea? What grounds for optimism does he allow us, if any? What is to be salvaged from his ethics and politics in this age of globalization? Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference offers a new reading of Fanon’s work, challenging many of the reconstructions of Fanon in critical and postcolonial theory and in cultural studies and probing a host of crucial issues: the intersectionality of gender and colonial politics; the biopolitics of colonialism; Marxism and decolonization; tradition, translation and humanism. Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference underscores the ethical dimension of Fanon’s work by focusing on his project of decolonization and humanism.Less
Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference raises a host of crucial questions regarding the relevance of Fanon today: in today’s world, where violence and terror have gone global, what conclusions might we draw from Fanon’s work? Should we keep on blaming Fanon for the colonial violence, which he internalized and struggled against, and overlook the fact that the very Manichaeism that previously governed the economy of colonial societies is now generating violence and terror on a global scale? Has the new humanism which he inaugurates in the concluding section of The Wretched of the Earth turned out to be nothing but a vain plea? What grounds for optimism does he allow us, if any? What is to be salvaged from his ethics and politics in this age of globalization? Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference offers a new reading of Fanon’s work, challenging many of the reconstructions of Fanon in critical and postcolonial theory and in cultural studies and probing a host of crucial issues: the intersectionality of gender and colonial politics; the biopolitics of colonialism; Marxism and decolonization; tradition, translation and humanism. Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference underscores the ethical dimension of Fanon’s work by focusing on his project of decolonization and humanism.
Joseph Drexler-Dreis
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823281886
- eISBN:
- 9780823286003
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823281886.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of ...
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This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.Less
This book raises the question of what it means to engage in theological reflection in an authentic way in the present context of global coloniality. In response to the historical manifestations of the coloniality of power on the levels of being, knowledge, and eschatology, it searches for a decolonized image of salvation that can unsettle historical structures of coloniality. The book starts by analyzing modern/colonial structures that shape the present context and the ways Christian theology is entangled in these structures. I then argues that the theological work of Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino points to the theoretical possibility of a theology that contests the patterns of domination that continue after political decolonization. Using the work of Ellacuría and Sobrino, it turns to the ways Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin responded to colonial modernity by exposing idols and revealing illusionary notions of stasis in light of alternative commitments to orientations of decolonial love. This decolonial love, and the ways it is historicized in praxis, is perceived as violent from the perspective of Western modernity. This book argues that the orientations of decolonial from which Fanon and Baldwin operate break open cracks in Western modernity and make salvation present in history. Decolonial love thus becomes theologically pedagogic—that is, it provides a source from which to make theological claims. Decolonial love offers one way of doing theology and one way of shaping the content of a decolonized image of salvation.
John Thieme
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199595006
- eISBN:
- 9780191731464
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595006.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, African History: BCE to 500CE
Post‐Bernal debates about the extent to which classical Greek culture was informed by Afroasiatic elements are interestingly mirrored in revisionist accounts of the genealogies of Caribbean cultures. ...
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Post‐Bernal debates about the extent to which classical Greek culture was informed by Afroasiatic elements are interestingly mirrored in revisionist accounts of the genealogies of Caribbean cultures. While Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris are the best‐known Anglophone Caribbean writers to have engaged with Homer and classical civilization, Denis Williams’ Other Leopards (1963), the finest novel about the Caribbean encounter with Africa to have appeared to date, is arguably the text that most fully excavates the intersection of African and European elements in the Caribbean psyche. Set in a “Sudanic” country, the novel suggests an alternative provenance for the North African strands in the “roots of classical civilization”. It problematizes originary conceptions of cultures, moving towards a view of Caribbean and North African identity that has much in common with Black Athena, through its unearthing of submerged sub‐Saharan African cultural traces in both the landscape and its ambivalent Guyanese protagonist's psyche.Less
Post‐Bernal debates about the extent to which classical Greek culture was informed by Afroasiatic elements are interestingly mirrored in revisionist accounts of the genealogies of Caribbean cultures. While Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris are the best‐known Anglophone Caribbean writers to have engaged with Homer and classical civilization, Denis Williams’ Other Leopards (1963), the finest novel about the Caribbean encounter with Africa to have appeared to date, is arguably the text that most fully excavates the intersection of African and European elements in the Caribbean psyche. Set in a “Sudanic” country, the novel suggests an alternative provenance for the North African strands in the “roots of classical civilization”. It problematizes originary conceptions of cultures, moving towards a view of Caribbean and North African identity that has much in common with Black Athena, through its unearthing of submerged sub‐Saharan African cultural traces in both the landscape and its ambivalent Guyanese protagonist's psyche.
Elleke Boehmer
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198184454
- eISBN:
- 9780191714085
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184454.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By ...
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This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that ‘a colonized people is not alone’, the book significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.Less
This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that ‘a colonized people is not alone’, the book significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.
J. Daniel Elam
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823289790
- eISBN:
- 9780823297221
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823289790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead ...
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World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.Less
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.
Anthony P. Maingot
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061061
- eISBN:
- 9780813051345
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061061.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
Without specific reference to Haiti, two theories of regional ideology were widely held and circulated throughout the Caribbean: those of the Martinican Frantz Fanon on one hand ans those of the New ...
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Without specific reference to Haiti, two theories of regional ideology were widely held and circulated throughout the Caribbean: those of the Martinican Frantz Fanon on one hand ans those of the New World Group on the other. Both dealt with Marxist ideologies and race. Fanon, in his Algerian War of Liberation phase, argued that only by “liberating violence” against the white colonist could the colonial colored man be freed from his complexes. As a psychiatrist, Fanon had diagnosed an inferiority complex in the colonial, a phenomenon he compared to wearing a white mask over a black skin. The New World Group argued that only with the total elimination of the plantation system and the white elite which governed it could the islands begin the process of develoment. Both theories have proven mistaken.Less
Without specific reference to Haiti, two theories of regional ideology were widely held and circulated throughout the Caribbean: those of the Martinican Frantz Fanon on one hand ans those of the New World Group on the other. Both dealt with Marxist ideologies and race. Fanon, in his Algerian War of Liberation phase, argued that only by “liberating violence” against the white colonist could the colonial colored man be freed from his complexes. As a psychiatrist, Fanon had diagnosed an inferiority complex in the colonial, a phenomenon he compared to wearing a white mask over a black skin. The New World Group argued that only with the total elimination of the plantation system and the white elite which governed it could the islands begin the process of develoment. Both theories have proven mistaken.
Isaac Ariail Reed
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226689319
- eISBN:
- 9780226689593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226689593.003.0009
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This chapter places the historical interpretations and sociological analytic on power of the previous chapters within the project of critical theory. Beginning with an interpretation of a satirical ...
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This chapter places the historical interpretations and sociological analytic on power of the previous chapters within the project of critical theory. Beginning with an interpretation of a satirical play published about the Whiskey Rebellion in the newspapers of the early American republic, it then moves to think about the King's Two Bodies broadly as a recurrent format of fantasy—according to which the leader (King, Queen, Emperor) contains the political community as a whole. Transitions to modernity occur when sociopolitical movements creatively destroy the King's Two Bodies as a working background for doing politics. This perspective is then placed in relationship to other ways of conceptualizing modernity: as capitalism, disenchantment, differentiation, deliberative democracy, or the triumph of the biopolitical. Theories of contramodernity are also considered. In contrast to these, if modernity is the creative destruction of the King's Two bodies, then critique begins from a different starting point—the negative space left by the absence of the King, the reformulation of sacred and profane in modern political culture, and the continuation of myth into modern politics. Modernity reveals itself as a reconfiguration of bodies, politics, and authorship, whose contours provide both peril and possibility in the pursuit of life without the King.Less
This chapter places the historical interpretations and sociological analytic on power of the previous chapters within the project of critical theory. Beginning with an interpretation of a satirical play published about the Whiskey Rebellion in the newspapers of the early American republic, it then moves to think about the King's Two Bodies broadly as a recurrent format of fantasy—according to which the leader (King, Queen, Emperor) contains the political community as a whole. Transitions to modernity occur when sociopolitical movements creatively destroy the King's Two Bodies as a working background for doing politics. This perspective is then placed in relationship to other ways of conceptualizing modernity: as capitalism, disenchantment, differentiation, deliberative democracy, or the triumph of the biopolitical. Theories of contramodernity are also considered. In contrast to these, if modernity is the creative destruction of the King's Two bodies, then critique begins from a different starting point—the negative space left by the absence of the King, the reformulation of sacred and profane in modern political culture, and the continuation of myth into modern politics. Modernity reveals itself as a reconfiguration of bodies, politics, and authorship, whose contours provide both peril and possibility in the pursuit of life without the King.
Robert Bernasconi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231147750
- eISBN:
- 9780231519670
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231147750.003.0012
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the ...
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This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the critical philosophy of race. Black Skin, White Masks is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The chapter explores what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications, as well as his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. It also traces the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” together with his effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom.Less
This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the critical philosophy of race. Black Skin, White Masks is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The chapter explores what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications, as well as his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. It also traces the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” together with his effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom.
