Ex Centric Writing

The concern with identity and belonging, with place/dis-placement is a major feature of postcolonial literature and the theme of alienation cannot but be “topical” in the literatures of the countries that have experienced the cultural shock and bereavement, and the physical and psychic trauma of colonial invasion. The purpose of this volume is to qualify the difference one is faced with when a postcolonial ex-centric text is addressed, by collecting essays concerned with writers from Southern Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and Asian diaspora(s). While giving contextual specifics their due, it shows how the theme of alienation, when perceived through the anamorphic lens of madness, is magnified and charged with an excruciatingly questioning and destabilizing power, laying bare political as well as existential and moral urges. From the ex-centric, broadly exilic position, it is the ideology and practice of colonialism that demand to be rubricated as psychopathology. More broadly, as these essays highlight, in fiction the mad character’s ex-centric vision is a continuous warning against the temptation to believe in those discourses that pass themselves off as reflecting the given, “natural”, order of things.

“Plunges the reader into a tour de force across radically divergent artistic responses to Mediterranean migration.” —Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Ex-Centric Migrations examines cinematic, literary, and musical representations of migrants and migratory trends in the western Mediterranean. Focusing primarily on clandestine sea-crossings, Hakim Abderrezak shows that despite labor and linguistic ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) no longer systematically target France as a destination, but instead aspire toward other European countries, notably Spain and Italy. In addition, the author investigates other migratory patterns that entail the repatriation of émigrés. His analysis reveals that the films, novels, and songs of Mediterranean artists run contrary to mass media coverage and conservative political discourse, bringing a nuanced vision and expert analysis to the sensationalism and biased reportage of such events as the Mediterranean maritime tragedies. “Ex-Centric Migrations is crucial reading for scholars and students of contemporary Maghrebi, French, and Spanish literatures and cultures. It breaks new ground by encompassing the literature, film, and music of ‘return migration’ and examining the trajectories of Maghrebi migration outside France.” —H-France “Hakim Abderrezak convincingly illustrates how politically committed artistic practices serve to humanize the challenges of human migration, and in the process dramatically improves our understanding of the complex cultural, economic, political, and social realities that shape 21st-century existence.” —Dominic Thomas, author of Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in Anglophone texts, apart from the scholarship devoted to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of “madness” across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate the norms that have been used to categorize art from the region, as well as the boundaries between notions of rationality, transcendence and insanity across cultures.

“Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries” adds a voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths. The articles collected in this volume bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.

In an era of increased mobility and globalisation, a fast growing body of writing originates from authors who live in-between languages and cultures. In response to this challenge, transnational perspective offers a new approach to the growing body of cultural texts with an emphasis on experiences of migration, transculturation, bilingualism and (cultural) translation. The introductory analysis and the fifteen essays in this collection critically interrogate complex relations between transnational and translation studies, bringing to this dialogue a much needed gender perspective. Divided into three parts (From Transnational to Translational; Reading Across Borders and Transnational in Translation), they address a range of issues relevant for this debate, from theoretical problems to practical questions of literary criticism and translation, understood as an act of cultural interpretation. The volume mostly deals with contemporary literary and cultural production, but also with classical texts and modernist literature. Its particular quality is a strong (although not exclusive) focus on Central and East European literatures, and more generally on women writers. Its interdisciplinary, transnational and intercultural perspective makes it relevant across disciplinary boundaries, from literary and translation studies to gender studies, cultural studies and migration studies.

Les arrels del realisme màgic en els escrits de Borges i altres autors d'Amèrica Llatina han estat àmpliament reconeguts i ben documentades produint una sèrie d'estudis crítics, molts dels quals figuren en la bibliografia d'aquest treball. Dins d'aquest marc, aquest llibre presenta als lectors una varietat d'escriptores de grups ètnics, conegudes i menys conegudes, i les col·loca en un context literari en el que es tracten tant a nivell individual com a escriptores així com a nivell col·lectiu com a part d'un moviment artístic més ampli. Aquest llibre és el resultat del treball realitzat a les universitats de Sheffield i la de València i representa una valuosa investigació i una important contribució als estudis literaris.

In the beginning, cinema was an encounter between humans, images and machine technology, revealing a stream of staccato gestures, micrographic worlds, and landscapes seen from above and below. In this sense, cinema's potency was its ability to bring other, non-human modes of being into view, to forge an encounter between multiple realities that nonetheless co-exist. Yet the story of cinema became (through its institutionalization) one in which the human swiftly assumed centrality through the literary crafting of story, character and the expression of interiority. Ex-centric Cinema takes an archaeological approach to the study of cinema through the writings of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, arguing that whilst we have a century-long tradition of cinema, the possibility of what cinema may have become is not lost, but co-exists in the present as an unexcavated potential. The term given to this history is ex-centric cinema, describing a centre-less moving image culture where animals, children, ghosts and machines are privileged vectors, where film is always an incomplete project, and where audiences are a coming community of ephemeral connections and links. Discussing such filmmakers as Harun Farocki, the Lumiere Brothers, Guy Debord and Wong Kar-wai, Janet Harbord draws connections with Agamben to propose a radically different way of thinking about cinema.