S9/10 Fiction of Migration/ Contemporary Literature Flashcards
What is important to consider when reading postcolonial literature?
- Whose cultural capital (Bourdieu)?
- Problematic structures: the neo-imperialist implications of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on, and largely catering to, the West’, an industry mainly ar;culated in English, depending on publishing houses in London and New York, offering ‘translated’ products for metropolitan consumers, and
privileging ‘a handful of famous writers - Negotiating shifing and overlapping identities and their tensions
The problem with ‘english’ Literature
- Increasing mobility, multicultural backgrounds of authors
- ‘Englishness‘ of English literature has become harder to define
- Was Sam Selvon an English writer because he lived and wrote based some of his writings in England? Or was he
Trinidadian from having been born and educated there? - See also: Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Timothy Mo, Leila Aboulela
What are examples of not native english authors’ works?
- Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956): modified Trinidadian dialect
of English - Doris Lessing, In Pursuit of the English (1960): the English as a myth, impossible to define and know, an island minority persecuted for “their cooking, their heating arrangements, their love-making, their behaviour abroad and their manners at home” (7)
- Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003): narrator Nazeen, Bangladeshi housewife, experiences of racialised discourses of English society
- Leila Aboulela, Minaret (2005): narrator Najwa, Sudanese woman, alienating experiences in London, finding consolation in Islamic community and faith
- Zadie Smith, NW (2012): cosmopolitanism and ethnic diversity of London, globalised world present in London
- David Mitchell, Ghostwri+en (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004): global / cosmopolitan novels, set around the globe; Britain no longer has an imperial connection
What are characteristics of a novel of migration?
- Migration as one of the oldest topoi in literary history!
- Since 1990s focus of critical interest; at the same time: writers’ redefinition of themselves as ‘migrants’ rather than ‘exiles’
- Experience of migration and related themes, e.g. rootlessness, displacement, nostalgia, identity formation
What is migrant literature?
written by migrants about their experiences
What is Migration literature?
written by migrant and non-migrant authors; authorial background of lesser, if at all, importance
What is Migration literature now focussing on?
- First particularly strong in Black and Asian British Fiction
- Now also focusing on temporary work migrants, refugees, asylum seekers
- Increasingly becoming a topic for authors without migration experiences of their own
Can migration novels be adequately studied from the perspective of postcolonial
theoretical perspectives?
- Perhaps too narrow in their focus on identity, hybridity, and racism
- Need to combine postcolonial concerns with other theoretical paradigms, e.g. focus on narrative and aesthetic parameters, genre, cultural memory
What is Transculturalism?
- Global perspective: cultures are not self-enclosed, discrete entities but
part of a globalised, ethnically diverse network of agents, institutions,
media products - Focus also on space: transnational spaces as relatively stable ties and
connections in networks between states and nations
How are Globalisation and Postcolonialism linked?
Two approaches:
(1) Globalisation as postnational, contemporary phenomenon linked to
postmodernity vs. postcolonialism as modern phenomenon, linked to idea
of nation-state and regarding globalisation as a threat
(2) No historical break between globalisation and postcolonialism;
rather, two phenomena of a historical continuum and postcolonialism and processes of decolonization as part of long history of globalization
which of the two approaches regarding globaisation and postcolonialism ist better?
(2) is more productive! Processual, open, fluid
–> Useful distinction to differentiate between approaches – are they more
postcolonial or more global?
What are the types of cosmopolitanism?
- philosophical cosmopolitanism
- situated/ actual existing cosmopolitanism
- Aesthetic cosmopolitanism
What is philosophical cosmopolitanism?
- a state of mind or attitude; ethical
dimension - Literature as playing key role in negotiating, expressing this kind of
cosmopolitanism
What is situated/actual existing cosmopolitanism?
- Linked to individual places, persons, identities
- Danger: subsuming this kind of cosmopolitanism under Britishness
What is aesthetic cosmopolitanism?
- Countering limitations of national(ist) discourses in view of aesthetic
productions - Rather, stressing the productive intersections and interplays
(of/between global dimensions of art and national cultures)
what are problems with aesthetic cosmopolitanism?
- Implicit class, gender, and Eurocentric biases
- Western-centred and neoliberal agenda
- Links between cosmopolitanism and global capitalism à elite phenomenon
What is the content of Homi Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” (1996)
- AlternaCve term: “vernacular cosmopolitanism”
- Redefining the dominant discourses on cosmopolitanism and their Western-centredness
- Focus on crucial role of the local, on difference; on marginality and its power to transform dominant discourses of collective identity
- Marginal groups (Bhabha’s “victims of modernity”), such as refugees,
migrants, exiles, have the power to ‘vernacularize’, that is, to perform
‘action at a distance’, open up dialogues in between –> transformative
power to change collective identities
What are examples of migration novels?
- barnes, England, England (1998)
- Guo, A concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007)
- Selasi, Ghana Must Go (2013)
- Selasi, Bye-Bye Barbar (2005)
- Dasgupta, Tokyo cancelled
What is Tokyo cancelled from Dasgupta about?
- Airport setting; anonymity, coming and going, place of transit
- Thirteen stories, set in large cities –> globalised world London, New Delhi, Frankfurt, New York, Lagos, Istanbul, Tokyo, Paris, and Buenos Aires.
- Power of story-telling
- Fairy tales for our time? Magical realism
- Frame narrative tradition: Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, The
Decameron
What is Postmodernism?
- Reaction against modernism –> everything has already been done
- Intertextuality –> every text is
related to many other texts - Pastiche –> ‘pasting’ together of
texts - Irony, scepticism, playfulness
- Metafiction
What is Metafiction?
- violation of narrative levels, –> intrusions in the narra,ve to comment
on the writing - involvement of the author with the fictional characters
- directly addressing the reader
- ques,oning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter
reality. - Reference to literary styles and conventions
- Historiographic metafic,on (Linda Hutcheon) –> drawing attention to
fictionality of history
What are examples of metafiction?
Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767)
- “To such however as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice than that they skip over the remaining part of this chapter; for I declare before-hand, ‘tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.”
Italo Calvino: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979)
- “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler”
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant‘s Woman (1969)
-“ I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination”
What is contemporary Poetry?
- most often written in free verse (unrhymed lines)
-lines follow the natural rhythms of the language and not the strict five stresses per line in iambic pentameter - written in language that is accessible to the common reader.
who are contemporary authors/poets?
Jay Bernard - The red and yellow nothing
Hera Lindsay Bird - Pamper me to hell & back
Hollie McNish - slugs and other things i ve been told to hate
Margaret Atwood - The moment
