Modernism Postcolonialism And Globalism

Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada

Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada

"Paolini is concerned with the connections among postcolonialism, globalization, and modernity, and he offers one of the first detailed statements of those connections to be undertaken in the field of IR. Focusing on the Third World, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, he questions dominant notions of identity and subjectivity in the social sciences."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing on interdisciplinary postcolonial efforts, especially in the social sciences, to deterritorialize categories of identity, culture, and community, Modernism after Postcolonialism dispenses with outdated modernist and postcolonial paradigms to reveal how the anxious, inconclusive comparisons of transnational modernist poetics can call us to imagine new solidarities across bounded territories.

Brian T. May argues that, contrary to widely held assumptions of postcolonial literary criticism, a distinctive subset of postcolonial novels significantly values and scrupulously explores a healthy individuality. These “extravagant” postcolonial works focus less on collective social reality than on the intimate subjectivity of their characters. Their authors, most of whom received some portion of a canonical western education, do not subordinate the ambitions of their fiction to explicit political causes, but they do create a cosmopolitan rhetorical focus suitable to their well-educated, “western trained,” audiences. May pursues this argument by scrutinizing novels composed during the thirty-year post-independence postcolonial era of Anglophone fiction, a period that began with the Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and that ended, many would say, with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 publication of the Rushdie Fatwa. He contends that the postcolonial authors under consideration—Naipaul, Rushdie, Achebe, Rhys, Gordimer, and Coetzee—inherited modernism and refashioned it. His account of their work demonstrates how it reflects and transfigures modernists such as Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Proust, Joyce and Beckett. Tracing the influence of humanistic virtues and the ethical and aesthetic significance of individualism, May demonstrates that these works of “extravagant postcolonialism” are less postcolonial than they are a continuation and evolution of modernism.

An investigation about the way how contemporary post-colonial intertexts take colonialism and euro-modernism to trial.

Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.