While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of ...autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.
This powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. ...Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view.
Benita Parry is Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
"It's about Indigenous literatures and underscores their significance to Indigenous peoples in the realm of the political, the creative, and the intellectual. It challenges readers to examine their ...assumptions about Indigenous literatures and at the same time asserts the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the transformative power of story."--
The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern ...territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empire.
This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology’s concept of ...culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront, George Eliot, and others as "metropolitan autoethnographies" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects.
England's land borders with Scotland and Wales, together with the narrow channels separating the British mainland from Ireland and the Continent, were the focus of acute, if intermittent, unease ...during the early modern period. This book analyses works by not only Shakespeare but also his contemporaries to argue that many of the plays of Shakespeare's central period, from the second tetralogy to Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, engage with the idea of England's borders.
By addressing these and other intriguing questions, Kevin Hutchings highlights significant intersections between Green Romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how contemporary understandings ...of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world. Revealing an innovative dialogue between British, African, and Native American writers of the Romantic period, this book will be of interest to anyone wishing to consider the interconnected histories of transatlantic colonial relations and environmental thought.
The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated hundreds of Herero and ...Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the metaphor of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists.
This book is an essay in cultural psychology. By examining the ways the ways in which emotion and talk about emotions reinforce cultural norms, it aims to understand the interplay between the ...emotions and the ethics of the Roman upper classes in late Republic and early Empire. The questions it addresses include the following: How (in the Roman view) is virtuous behavior shaped by the emotions? How do various Roman forms of fear, dismay, indignation, and revulsion support or constrain ethically significant behavior? How do the domains of these emotions — what they are “about” — intersect, overlap, or complement each other? How does their intersection create an economy of displeasure that aims to shape society in constructive ways? And, since the Romans’ language of emotions is not our own, how can we answer any of these questions without imposing upon the Romans our own notions of what a given emotion is? To approach these questions, the book explores the Roman counterparts to “modesty” and “shame” (verecundia, pudor), “disgust” (fastidium), “envy” (invidia), and “regret” (paenitentia) by considering the array of narratives or “scripts” to which each emotion term can refer.
