Sam Durrant – författare

A cross-cultural analysis of the work of Coetzee, Harris and Morrison, demonstrating that the fundamental task of postcolonial narrative is the work of mourning.Sam Durrant's powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud's opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness.Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness.Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities—ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks—register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity.