ASNEL Papers – serie

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly establishes empire as welcoming resistance and affirmation, introducing post-empire imaginaries as figurations that connect the archives and repertoires of colonial nostalgia, postcolonial critique, post-imperial dreaming.

The notion of the postcolonial metropolis has gained prominence in the last two decades both within and beyond postcolonial studies. Disciplines such as sociology and urban studies, however, have tended to focus on the economic inequalities, class disparities, and other structural and formative aspects of the postcolonial metropolises that are specific to Western conceptions of the city at large. It is only recently that the depiction of postcolonial metropolises has been addressed in the writings of Suketu Mehta, Chris Abani, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Zakes Mda, among others. Most of these works probe the urban specifics and physical and cultural topographies of postcolonial cities while highlighting their agential capacity to defy, appropriate, and abrogate the superimposition of theories of Western modernity and urbanism. These ASNEL Papers are all concerned with the idea of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis from various disciplinary viewpoints, as drawn from a great range of cityscapes (spread out over five continents). The essays explore, on the one hand, ideas of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation, and, on the other, the possibility of transforming, reinventing and reconfigurating the ‘postcolonial condition’ in and through literary texts and visual narratives.In this context, the volume covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and thematic approaches to postcolonial and metropolitan topographies and their depictions in writings from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, and greater Asia, as well as the UK, addressing issues such as modernity and market economies but also caste, class, and social and linguistic aspects. At the same time, they reflect on the postcolonial metropolis and postcolonialism in the metropolis by concentrating on an urban imaginary which turns on notions of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation – as the continuing ‘postcolonial’ condition.

This second collection, complementing ASNEL Papers 9.1, covers a similar range of writers, topics, themes and issues, all focusing on present-day transcultural issues and their historical antecedents.Topics treated: Preparing for post-apartheid in South African fiction; Maori culture and the New Historicism; Danish-New Zealand acculturation; linguistic approaches to ‘void’; women’s overcoming in Southern African writing; new post-apartheid approaches to literary studies; Afrikanerdom; postmodern psychoanalytic interpretations of Indian religion and identity; transcultural identity in the encounter with London: Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani; hypertextual postmodernism; fictionalized multiculturalism and female madness in Australian fiction; myopia and double vision in colonial Australia; Native-American fiction and poetry; Chinese-Canadian and Japanese-Canadian multiculturalism; the postcolonial city; African-American identity and postcolonial Africa; Johannesburg as locus of literary and dramatic creativity; theatre before and after apartheid; the black experience in England.Writers discussed: Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah.Contributions by Ken Arvidson; Thomas Brückner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppé; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Kušnír; Chantal Kwast–Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O’Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stéphanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Rønning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schröder; Joseph Swann; André Viola; Christine Vogt–William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold.Creative writing by Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol.

This collection has one central theoretical focus, viz. stock-taking essays on the present and future status of postcolonialism, transculturalism, nationalism, and globalization. These are complemented by ‘special’ angles of entry (e.g. ‘dharmic ethics’) and by considerations of the global impress of technology (African literary studies and the Internet). Further essays have a focus on literary-cultural studies in Australia (the South Asian experience) and New Zealand (ecopoetics; a Central European émigrée perspective on the nation; the unravelling of literary nationalism; transplantation and the trope of translation). The thematic umbrella, finally, covers studies of such topics as translation and interculturalism (the transcendental in Australian and Indian fiction; African Shakespeares; Canadian narrative and First-Nations story templates); anglophone / francophone relations (the writing and rewriting of crime fiction in Africa and the USA; utopian fiction in Quebec); and syncretism in post-apartheid South African theatre. Some of the authors treated in detail are: Janet Frame; Kapka Kassabova; Elizabeth Knox; Annamarie Jagose; Denys Trussell; David Malouf; Patrick White; Yasmine Gooneratne; Raja Rao; Robert Kroetsch; Thomas King; Chester Himes; Julius Nyerere; Ayi Kwei Armah; Léopold Sédar Senghor; Simon Njami; Abourahman Waberi; Lueen Conning; Nuruddin Farah; Athol Fugard; Frantz Fanon; Julia Kristeva; Shakespeare. The collection is rounded off by creative writing (prose, poetry, and drama) by Bernard Cohen, Jan Kemp, Vincent O’Sullivan, Andrew Sant, and Sujay Sood.

While the world seems to be getting ever smaller and globalization has become the ubiquitous buzz-word, regionalism and fragmentation also abound. This might be due to the fact that, far from being the alleged production of cultural homogeneity, the global is constantly re-defined and altered through the local. This tension, pervading much of contemporary culture, has an obvious special relevance for the new varieties of English and the literature published in English world-wide. Postcolonial literatures exist at the interface of English as a hegemonic medium and its many national, regional and local competitors that transform it in the new English literatures. Thus any exploration of a globalization of cultures has to take into account the fact that culture is a complex field characterized by hybridization, plurality, and difference. But while global or transnational cultures may allow for a new cosmopolitanism that produces ever-changing, fluid identities, they do not give rise to an egalitarian ‘global village’ – an asymmetry between centre and periphery remains largely intact, albeit along new parameters.The essays collected in this volume offer readings of literary, theoretical, and filmic texts from the postcolonial world. These texts are read as attempts to articulate the global with the local from a perspective of immersion in the actual diversity of life-worlds, focusing on such issues as consumption, identity-politics, and modes of affiliation. In this sense, they are global fragments: locally refractured figurations of an experience of world-wide interconnectedness.

What is most strikingly new about the transcultural is its sudden ubiquity. Following in the wake of previous concepts in cultural and literary studies such as creolization, hybridity, and syncretism, and signalling a family relationship to terms such as transnationality, translocality, and transmigration, ‘transcultural’ terminology has unobtrusively but powerfully edged its way into contemporary theoretical and critical discourse. The four sections of this volume denote major areas where ‘transcultural’ questions and problematics have come to the fore: theories of culture and literature that have sought to account for the complexity of culture in a world increasingly characterized by globalization, transnationalization, and interdependence; realities of individual and collective life-worlds shaped by the ubiquity of phenomena and experiences relating to transnational connections and the blurring of cultural boundaries; fictions in literature and other media that explore these realities, negotiate the fuzzy edges of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ cultures, and participate in the creation of transnational public spheres as well as transcultural imaginations and memories; and, finally, pedagogy and didactics, where earlier models of teaching ‘other’ cultures are faced with the challenge of coming to terms with cultural complexity both in what is being taught and in the people it is taught to, and where ‘target cultures’ have become elusive. The idea of ‘locating’ culture and literature exclusively in the context of ethnicities or nations is rapidly losing plausibility throughout an ‘English-speaking world’ that has long since been multi- rather than monolingual. Exploring the prospects and contours of ‘Transcultural English Studies’ thus reflects a set of common challenges and predicaments that in recent years have increasingly moved centre stage not only in the New Literatures in English, but also in British and American studies.

Perhaps more than in any other period in modern history, our globalized present is characterized by a constant interaction of, and exposure to, different peoples, regions, ways of life, traditions, languages, and cultures. Cross-boundary communication today comes in various shapes: as mutual exchange, open dialogue, enforced process, misunderstanding, or even violent conflict. In this situation, ‘translation’ has become an inevitable requirement in order to ease the flow of disinterested and unbiased cultural communication. The contributors to this collection approach the subject of the ‘translation of cultures’ from various angles. Translation refers, of course, to the rendering of texts from one language into another and the shift between languages under precolonial (retelling/transcreation), colonial (domestication), and postcolonial (multilingual trafficking) conditions. It is also concerned with the (in-)adequacy of the Western translation concept of equivalence, the problem of the (un)translatability of cultures, and new postcolonial approaches (representation through translation). Translation here is used as a broader term covering the interaction of cultures, the transfer of cultural experience, the concern with cultural borders, the articulation of liminal experience, and intercultural understanding.

Verbal imagery and visual images as well as the intricate relationships between verbal and visual representations have long shaped the imagination and the practice of intercultural relationships. The contributions to this volume take a fresh look at the ideology of form, especially the gendered and racial implications of the gaze and the voice in various media and intermedial transformations. Analyses of how culturally specific forms of visual and verbal expression are individually understood and manipulated complement reflections on the potential and limitations of representation. The juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers explores the gap between them as a space beyond cultural boundaries.Topics treated include: Caliban; English satirical iconotexts; Oriental travel writing and illustration; expatriate description and picturesque illustration of Edinburgh; ethnographic film; African studio photography; South African cartoons; imagery, ekphrasis, and race in South African art and fiction; face and visuality, representation and memory in Asian fiction; Bollywood; Asian historical film; Asian-British pop music; Australian landscape in painting and fiction; indigenous children’s fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the USA; Canadian photography; Native Americans in film.Writers and artists discussed include: Philip Kwame Apagya; the Asian Dub Foundation; Breyten Breytenbach; Richard Burton; Peter Carey; Gurinder Chadha; Daniel Chodowiecki; J.M. Coetzee; Ashutosh Gowariker; Patricia Grace; W. Greatbatch; Hogarth; Francis K. Honny; Jim Jarmusch; Robyn Kahukiwa; Seydou Keita; Thomas King; Vladyana Krykorka; Alfred Kubin; Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak; Kathleen and Michael Lacapa; László Lakner; George Littlechild; Ken Lum; Franz Marc; Zakes Mda; Ketan Mehta; M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam); Timothy Mo; William Kent Monkman; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; John Hamilton Mortimer; Sidney Nolan; Jean Rouch; Salman Rushdie; William Shakespeare; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Van Camp; Zapiro.

The sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations develop and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformations within the last decades. This book traces the accelerating emergence of cultural crossovers and overlaps in a global perspective and through a variety of disciplinary approaches. It starts from the premise that after the ‘spatial turn’ human action and cultural representations can no longer be grasped as firmly located in or clearly demarcated by territorial entities. The collection of essays investigates postcolonial articulations of various genres and media in their spatiality and locatedness while envisaging acts of location as dynamic cultural processes. It explores the ways in which critical spatial thinking can be made productive: Testing the uses and limitations of ‘translocation’ as an open exploratory model for a critically spatialized postcolonial studies, it covers a wide range of cultural expressions from the anglophone world and beyond – literature, film, TV, photography and other forms of visual art, philosophy, historical memory, and tourism.The extensive introductory chapter charts various facets of spatial thinking from a variety of disciplines, and critically discusses their implications for postcolonial studies. The contributors’ essays range from theoretical interventions into the critical routines of postcolonial criticism to case studies of specific cultural texts, objects, and events reflecting temporal and spatial, material and intellectual, physical and spiritual mobility. What emerges is a fascinating survey of the multiple directions postcolonial translocations can take in the future.This book is aimed at students and scholars of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, transnational studies, globalisation studies, critical space studies, urban studies, film studies, media studies, art history, philosophy, history, and anthropology.Contributors: Diana Brydon, Lars Eckstein, Paloma Fresno-Calleja, Lucia Krämer, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Martinek, Sandra Meyer, Therese-M. Meyer, Marga Munkelt, Lynda Ng, Claudia Perner, Katharina Rennhak, Gundo Rial y Costas, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, Silke Stroh, Kathy-Ann Tan, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Jessica Voges, Roland Walter, Dirk Wiemann.