Masks Of Difference

Writings about and depictions of 'savage' peoples by conquering races as a form of textual practice.

Black Skin, White Masks is a classic, devastating account of the dehumanising effects of colonisation experienced by black subjects living in a white world. First published in English in 1967, this book provides an unsurpassed study of the psychology of racism using scientific analysis and poetic grace.Franz Fanon identifies a devastating pathology at the heart of Western culture, a denial of difference, that persists to this day. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, his writings speak to all who continue the struggle for political and cultural liberation.With an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.

Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers.The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. As readers will agree, Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain establishes his rightful role as one of the premier novelists and leading critical observers of this century.

WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

David Richards examines historical anthropological discourse--specifically writings about and depictions of "savage" peoples by conquering races--as a form of textual practice. Masks of Difference provides detailed readings of individual representations, both artistic and literary, of colonization, including Florida (1564-90) and Scotland (1814), together with extended surveys. What emerges is a composite picture of anthropological representation as a textual genre in its own right, embracing literature, literary theory and colonial/postcolonial studies.

An examination of the conventions and techniques of the Greek theatre of Menander and subsequent Roman theatre.

Between the Masks articulates a study of representation and the 'politics of place' through a pedagogy of narrative-performing inquiry and a critical reflection on identity. As a resistance to essentialist politics, the text focuses on the identity making/marking role of cultural materials in the recovery of different and overdetermind histories. It proposes a multicultural revision of knowledge that displaces the binarisms of insider/outside rather than simply shifting the margin to the center. By combining perspectives that produce strong readings with a semiotic method of analysis, the essentialist representations of racial, ethnic, sexual, and class biases will be revealed as strategies of power that employ appearance in their seduction. By this method, Brunner suggests a view of reflexive performance that seeks not to legitimate, but to critique, displace, and liberate these illusions of identity. Between the Masks promotes critical teaching that can bring together the literary, the historic, the theoretical, and the sociological. Brunner suggests the combined study of cultural studies and education as a theoretical and pedagogical site which embraces curriculum theory, teacher preparation, and policy. This book marks a move toward intertextual, interdisciplinary study which will help educators modulate the complicated conversations and contexts of todayOs schools.

Examining in detail the dramas of Baraka, Soyinka, Walcott and Shange, this study describes how these black writers are preoccupied with the invention of a postimperial cultural identity. It charts the foundations of an important aesthetic form, the drama of the African diaspora.