Reframing Postcolonial Studies

“Reframing Postcolonial Studies addresses the urgent issues that Black Lives Matter has raised with respect to everyday material practices and the frameworks in which our knowledge and cultural heritage are conceptualized and stored. Thebook points urgently to the many ways in which our society must reinvent itself to enable equitable justice for all.”— Robert J.C. Young, Julius Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA “Drawing on urban theory, art history, literary analysis, environmental humanities and linguistics, this book is ambitious and wide-ranging, asking us what it is to live creatively and critically with the residues of colonial appropriation and sedimentation while in open dialogue with the subjects who still live in its wake.” — Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University College London, UK This book constitutes a collective action to examine what foundational concepts, interdisciplinary methodologies, and activist concerns are pivotal for the future of common humanity, as we bear the weight of our postcolonial inheritance in the twenty-first century. Written by scholars of different generations, the chapters interrogate how current intellectual endeavors are in contact with individual and community-based actions outside of the academy. Going beyond the perennial debates on the tension between theory and praxis or on the disparity between activism and scholarship, they examine literary texts, visual artworks, language and immigration policies, public monuments, museum exhibitions, moral dilemmas, and political movements to deepen our contemporary postcolonial action on the edge of conceptual thinking, methodological experimentation, and scholarly activism. Reframing Postcolonial Studies is the first volume whose rationale is formulated in explicitly intergenerational, future-oriented terms.

An issue on new formations, which looks at topics ranging from 'urbicide', multiculturalism and eco-criticism to ideologies of postcolonial studies (including its Francophone dimensions), devolutionary Britain, cricket, counterfactualisms, humanism, humanitarianism, Zionism, and the scandal of Guantanamo Bay.

How does one read the story of Sarah and Hagar, or Jezebel and Rahab today, if one is a woman reader situated in a postcolonial society? This is the question undergirding this work, which considers a selection of biblical texts in which women have significant roles. Employing both a gender and a postcolonial lens, it asks sharp questions both of the interests embedded in the texts themselves and of their impact upon contemporary women readers. Whereas most postcolonial studies have been undertaken from the perspective of the colonized this work reads the texts from the position of a settler descendant, and is an attempt to engage with the disquietening and challenging questions that reading from such a location raises. Letters from early settler women in New Zealand, contemporary fiction, and personal reminiscence become tools for the task, complementing those traditionally employed in critical biblical readings.

Home and exile have become key discussions in discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, identity, and multiculturalism. These discourses can be expected to flourish in the future as an increasing number of multicultural scholars struggle with various kinds of displacements and the meaning of home that is thereby instantiated anew as we experience living in between cultures. This book sits in the intersection between cultural studies and performance studies. It seeks to break theoretical and empirical ground by reframing understandings of home and exile. Popular notions of exile forwarded by transnational and postcolonial scholars position home as a place of return and longing. While we believe that there are many truths in this position, we performatively seek emergent forms of displacement that are demanding new frameworks with which to enact meanings of home and exile. As Third World immigrant scholars in Western academe, we believe our move is vital in order to explore the experiences of persons, such as ourselves, who fall outside the models of displacement that have long constituted émigré writings. We define this move as a performative one because we experiment with different genres and voices to question and reproblematize existing understandings of knowledge frames. The genres we embody include performative writing, dialogue, autoethnography, essay form, personal narrative, and so on. Our goal is to address theories, stories, and pedagogies that speak to our tribulations in negotiating such intellectual displacements. This book can be an ideal supplementary text for courses in cultural studies as every chapter speaks in performative, reflexive, and storied ways to our own struggles to find real and theoretical homes. It will therefore have relevance to many departments in the humanities, including Communication Studies, English, Cultural Studies, Education, Anthropology, Sociology, and Women's Studies. In fact, this book serves the heuristic function of inspiring new research questions and demonstrating how a wide range of theories and research methods can be employed to enact discourses of home and exile.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest scholarship in postcolonial studies, while also considering possible future developments in the field. Original chapters written by a worldwide team of contritbuors are organised into five cross-referenced sections, 'The Imperial Past', 'The Colonial Present', 'Theory and Practice', 'Across the Disciplines', and 'Across the World'. The chapters offer both country-specific and comparative approaches to current issues, offering a wide range of new and interesting perspectives. The Handbook reflects the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies and reiterates its continuing relevance to the study of both the colonial past, in its multiple manifestations, and the contemporary globalized world. Taken together, these essays, the dialogues they pursue, and the editorial comments that surround them constitute nothing less than a blueprint for the future of a much-contested but intellectually vibrant and politically engaged field.

The new essays in this collection examine newer forms of colonialism operating today in an increasingly globalized world. Recognizing the complexities and culpability of postcolonial politics, the contributors fill gaps that exist at theoretical levels of postcolonial studies. By studying film, literature, history and architecture, they arrive at new ideas about immigration, gender, cultural translation, identity and the future. The collection is driven by notions of ethics, an increasingly influential force at the grassroots if not the international level, addressing capitalism and its attendant drawbacks throughout the course of the book.

Das ganze Studium der Anglistik und Amerikanistik in einem Band. Ob englische und amerikanische Literatur, Sprachwissenschaft, Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, Fachdidaktik oder die Analyse von Filmen und kulturellen Phänomenen führende Fachvertreter geben in englischer Sprache einen ausführlichen Überblick über alle relevanten Teildisziplinen. BA- und MA-Studierende finden hier die wichtigsten Grundlagen und Wissensgebiete auf einen Blick. Durch die übersichtliche Darstellung und das Sachregister optimal für das systematische Lernen und zum Nachschlagen geeignet.

Critics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.