In the 19th and early 20th Centuries, at the same time that white creoles were “imagining” and reifying a nation called Brazil, Africans in Brazil and along the Lower Guinea coast were “imagining” ...and sustaining a nation of a sortunimagined by Benedict Anderson. And it is with no sense of irony—and with no demand for correction—that these Africans and their descendants in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion still speak of their trans-Atlantic communities as nations. I respect this parlance throughout the book not becauseIregard it as the appropriate analytic category—in some ways, “denomination” would be
Para Inglês Ver Matory, J. Lorand
Black Atlantic Religion,
02/2009
Book Chapter
Not only ditties, like Pedrito’s, but also clichés reveal social history. The Brazilian expressionpara inglês ver(for the English to see) describes acts of subterfuge and self-camouflage—presenting a ...facade to outsiders and dominant parties who might respond with contempt or punishment if they knew the truth. One story reports that the expression originated during the 19th century, after the British outlawed the maritime slave trade to Brazil in 1830 and slave traders developed means of camouflaging the slave ships to avoid capture by the British navy. The false appearance of an innocent maritime commerce was “for the English
Ford investigates the role of humor in Ebenezer Cook's poems "The Sot-Weed Factor" in the process of imagining America as a community separate from motherland of Britain. The humor of "The Sot-Weed ...Factor" is useful in a colonial, and growing nationalist, discourse because it draws a line between members of the imagined community and outsiders. It allows both its English and colonial audiences to see the separation of the Old World from the New and allows the colonists to laugh together to see themselves as Americans.
Imagined communities Rituparna Roy
South Asian Partition Fiction in English,
06/2010
Book Chapter
Odprti dostop
The title of Amitav Ghosh’s novelThe Shadow Lines¹ is reminiscent of the title of Joseph Conrad’sThe Shadow-Line², but it is clear enough that Ghosh did not draw upon Conrad’s book while writing his ...defining and most popular piece of fiction to date. His sources lay elsewhere, and they could not have been more divergent. As acknowledged by the author himself, there were two principal inspirations behindThe Shadow Lines, one political and the other literary, of which the first shaped its content, and the other determined its form. These were the 1984 Delhi riots following the assassination of
Examining the literary traditions and movements that have shaped the Spanish-language Caribbean novel and privileging discourses of cultural and national/regional identities, this article addresses ...the textual interruptions of such imagined communities. For that effect, the argument posits the multitude as a rhetorical device—a metaphorical axis—that brings to the foreground non-discursive elements, in particular the trans-historic, fugitive, and non-linear elements of the myth rooted in Afro-Caribbean histories and ontologies. The multitude—a model of resistance against global structures of power—emerges in these novels as a non-representational, elusive, political subject unsettling arrangements of colonial/imperial difference within hegemonic cultural paradigms grounded on mestizaje, and its derivates. The novels here examined rearrange racial/ethnic and sexual difference beyond totalizing cultural fictions, while reconfiguring forms of cultural practice and political organization around coming communities.
Kidnapped Narratives Jenson, Deborah
Beyond the Slave Narrative,
02/2011
Book Chapter
What does it augur when kidnappings are part of the primal scene of postcolonial nation-building? in this chapter, I explore the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the African diasporan colonial ...encounter with the conditions of literary culture. I argue that the Middle passage, as a founding history of forced migration, was strikingly revisited in the liminal and urgent representations of kidnappings in the families of toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe during the Haitian revolution and independence. The chapter begins with a text that is perhaps the closest thing to a French slave narrative in the Haitian revolutionary tradition: the narrative
Nationalism has once more appeared on the agenda of world affairs. Almost every day, state leaders and political analysts in Western countries declare that with ‘the collapse of communism’ (that is ...the term they use; what they mean is presumably the collapse of Soviet socialism), the principal danger to world peace is now posed by the resurgence of nationalism in different parts of the world. Since in this day and age a phenomenon has first to be recognized as a ‘problem’ before it can claim the attention of people whose business it is to decide what should concern the public,
In the series finale ofGilmore Girls, town selectman Taylor Doose states—in a nausea-provoking analogy that goes into excruciating detail—that Stars Hollow has “birthed” Rory Gilmore and is now ...sending the young woman on her way into the world, just as we, the viewers, must let go of our girls.¹ Disturbing though Taylor’s analogy might be for many viewers, it is an apt one. Stars Hollowhasfunctioned as a womblike environment for Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Rory, one that has sustained yet also sheltered the series’ protagonists for several years. Raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and giving
