Domestic Intersections In Contemporary Migration Fiction

Homing the Metropole presents a new approach to diasporic fiction that reorients postcolonial readings of migration away from processes of displacement and rupture towards those of placement and homemaking. While notions of home have frequently been associated with essentialist understandings of nation and race, an uncritical investment in tropes of homelessness can prove equally hegemonic. By synthesising postcolonial and intersectional feminist theory, this work establishes the migrant domestic space as a central location of resistance, countering notions of the private sphere as static, uncreative and apolitical. Through close readings of fiction emerging from the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, it reassesses our conception of home in light of contemporary realities of globalisation and forced migration, providing a valuable critique of the celebration of unfixed subject positions that has been a central tenet of postcolonial studies.

This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.

This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women’s fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts. Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

This book sheds light on the translations of renowned semiotician, essayist, and author Ilan Stavans, elucidating the ways in which they exemplify the migrant experience and translation as the interactions of living and writing in intercultural and interlinguistic spaces. While much has been written on Stavans’ work as a writer, there has been little to date on his work as a translator, subversive in their translations of Western classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet into Spanglish. In Stavans’ experiences as a writer and translator between languages and cultures, Vidal locates the ways in which writers and translators who have experienced migratory crises, marginalization, and exclusion adopt a hybrid, polydirectional, and multivocal approach to language seen as a threat to the status quo. The volume highlights how the case of Ilan Stavans uncovers unique insights into how migrant writers’ nonstandard use of language creates worlds predicated on deterritorialization and in-between spaces which more accurately reflect the nuances of the lived experiences of migrants. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, literary translation, and Latinx literature.

This book reflects on the "literary" in literature. Less ideologically construed, more affirmative of literary attachment, the study adopts a style of intimacy – its "tough love" – in a correlation between the creative work and the critical act. Instead of configuring literary works to "state-of-the-nation" issues – the usual approach to literature from South Africa – the chapters keep alive a space for conversation, whether accented inwards to locality or outwards to the Anglophone world: the world to which literature in South Africa continues to belong, albeit as a "problem child". A postcolony that is not quite a postcolony, South Africa is richly but frustratingly textured between Africa and the West, or the South and the North. Its literature – hovering on the cusp of its locality and its global reach – raises peculiar questions of reader reception, epistemological and aesthetic frame, and archival use. Are the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee local writers or global writers? Is the novel or the short story the more appropriate form at the edges of metropolitan cultures? Given language, race, and culture contestation, how do we recover Bushman expression for contemporary use? How to consider the aesthetic appeal of two contemporaneous works, one in English the other in isiXhosa, the one indebted to Bloomsbury modernism the other to African custom? How does Douglas Livingstone attach the Third World to the First World in both science and poetry? What has a "born free" novelist, Kopano Matlwa, got to do with the Bard of Avon? In a time of theorisation, is it permissible for Lewis Nkosi to embody literary criticism in an autobiographical journey? How to read the rupturing event – the statue of Rhodes must fall – through a literary sensibility? Alert to the influence of critique, the study is equally alert to the "limits of critique". Reflecting on several writers, works, and events that do not feature in current publications, On Literary Attachment in South Africa releases literature to speak to us today, within the contours of its originating energy.

In this monograph Theodor Adorno’s philosophy engages with postcolonial texts and authors that emerge out of situations of political extremity – apartheid South Africa, war-torn Sri Lanka, Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the Greek military junta. This book is ground-breaking in two key ways: first, it argues that Adorno can speak to texts with which he is not historically associated; and second, it uses Adorno’s theory to unlock the liberatory potential of authors or novels traditionally understood to be "apolitical". While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world, the book also showcases Adorno’s unique reading of the literary text both in terms of its innate historical content and formal aesthetic attributes. Such a reading refuses to read postcolonial texts exclusively as political documents, a problematic (but changing) tendency within postcolonial studies. In short, the book operates as a two-way conversation asking: "What can Adorno’s concepts give to certain literary texts?" but also reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our conventional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This book is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

This book examines representations of violence across the postcolonial world—from the Americas to Australia—in novels, short stories, plays, and films. The chapters move from what appear to be interpersonal instances of violence to communal conflicts such as civil war, showing how these acts of violence are specifically rooted in colonial forms of abuse and oppression but constantly move and morph. Taking its cue from theories in such fields as postcolonial, violence, gender, and trauma studies, the book thus shows that violence is slippery in form, but also fluid in nature, so that one must trace its movement across time and space to understand even a single instance of it. When analysing such forms and trajectories of violence in postcolonial creative writing and films, the contributors critically examine the ethical issues involved in narrating abuse, depicting violated bodies, and presenting romanticized resolutions that may conceal other forms of violence.