V. S. Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third-World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural ...relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul’s travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. In successive chapters he explores the relation between multi-cultural identity and the rhetorical conventions of exile; the imperial undertow in travel writing as a genre; the tensions between ethnographic and autobiographical modes of authority; and the magnetic pull of the Conradian tradition in figuring the third World. In the penultimate chapter, Nixon analyses the importance of the discourse of primitivism as a means of abrogating Third World experiences of historical change and, in particular, of minimalizing the role of indigenous resistance. Finally, with reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.
Exploring travellers’ tales of wonder in contemporary literature, this study challenges a sensibility of disenchantment with travel. It reassesses travel writing as an aesthetically and ethically ...innovative form in contemporary international literature, and demonstrates the crucial role of wonder in the travel narratives of writers such as Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, and W.G. Sebald. Their ‘travellers’ tales of wonder’ are read as a challenge to the hubris of thinking the world too well known, and an invitation to encounter the world – including its most troubling histories – with a sense of wonder.
Challenging the popular view that Naipaul is a literary mediator between First and Third World experience in the post-colonial era, this study argues that his work articulates a set of values that ...perpetuates political interests that have their origin in the Imperial age.
In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire—Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie—have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity ...left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar—a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity—and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.
<!CDATA
In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well ...received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors.
These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant.
Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.
>
In this fascinating analysis, Roger Célestin examines the concept of exoticism from a historical and literary perspective. Through close readings of works by Montaigne, Diderot, Flaubert, Barthes, ...and Naipaul, Célestin examines the way these writers have challenged representations of cultural identity in their time.
From his reporting on Islamic true believers to his descriptions of the postcolonial world, V. S. Naipaul has been a controversial figure in contemporary letters. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul ...has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference -- and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding "strangers." In this book, Dagmar Barnouw explores the sophisticated strategies and experimentations that Naipaul employs in his cultural critique and in his enterprise of learning about and documenting the enduring strangeness of this world.
Satire plays a prominent and often controversial role in postcolonial fiction. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel offers the first study of this topic, employing the insights of postcolonial ...comparative theories to revisit Western formulations of "satire" and the "satiric."
Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant ...themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.
