The Postcolonial Aura

The essays in this volume range from questions of cultural self-representation in China to more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in response to contemporary changes. Although the new era of global capitalism calls for the remapping of global relations, such remapping must be informed both by a grasp of contemporary structures of economic, political, and cultural power and by memories of earlier radical visions of society. Without these two conditions, Arif Dirlik argues, the current preoccupation with Eurocentrism, ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism distract from issues of power that dominate global relations and that find expression in murderous ethnic conflicts. Dirlik offers multi-historicalism, which presupposes a historically grounded conception of cultural difference, seeks in different histories alternative visions of human society, and stresses divergent historical trajectories against a future colonized presently by an ideology of capital. Arguing that the operations of capital have brought the question of the local to the fore, he points to indigenism as a source of paradigms of social relations, and relationships to nature, to challenge the voracious developmentalism that undermines local welfare globally.

The essays in this volume range from questions of cultural self-representation in China to more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in response to contemporary changes. Although the new era of global capitalism calls for the remapping of global relations, such remapping must be informed both by a grasp of contemporary structu

The first collection to emphasize the complex interaction between gender and postcoloniality. Most people in the world, from Africa to Asia and beyond, live in the aftermath of colonialism. Their day-to-day lives are defined by their past history as colonized peoples, often in ways that are subtle or hard to define. In Dangerous Liaisons, eminent contributors address the issues raised by the postcolonial condition, considering nationhood, history, gender, and identity from an inter-disciplinary perspective. Among the questions they address are: What are the boundaries of race and ethnicity in a diasporic world? How have women been so effectively excluded from national power? What have been the historical aftermaths of different forms of colonialism? What are the cultural and political consequences of colonial partitions of the nation-state? Representing an essential intervention, Dangerous Liaisons is a crucial guidebook for those concerned with understanding postcoloniality at the moment when it is becoming more and more widely discussed.

Postcolonialism has become one of the most exciting, expanding and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today. Designed especially for those studying the topic for the first time, Beginning Postcolonialism introduces the major areas of concern in a clear, accessible, and organized fashion. It provides an overview of the emergence of postcolonialism as a discipline and closely examines many of its important critical writings.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Romance Studies - Latin American Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Toronto, language: English, abstract: In her essay “Postcolonialism and Latin American literature: the case of Carlos Fuentes“ Nadia Lie describes two different currents of Postcolonialism: the first one is the literature that grew out of colonial experience in Latin America and is considered an answer to the over present literature of the oppressing European literary traditions. The second one is characterized by a set of theoretical concerns and reading strategies. Rather than merely “writing back“, a term introduced by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, this approach suggests that cultural differences are constructed by replacing the strong binary opposition “us“ versus “the other“ with concepts of hybridity, in-betweenness and border thinking (see Lie 2005: 139-140). The early work of Mexican author Carlos Fuentes (*1928) can be seen in an intermediate position between these two concepts. Even though the theme of otherness and opposition is very present in his work, as can be seen in La frontera de cristal (1995) and his early novel Aura (1962), his writing is full of intertextual references that show his appreciation for both European and Latin American literary tradition. As part of the “Boom“ movement in Latin American literature he also uses supernatural and gothic elements that sometimes make it hard or even impossible to distinguish between reality and illusion: According to this aesthetic, unreal things are treated as if realistic and mundane, and mundane things as if unreal. Plots, while often based on real experiences, incorporate strange, fantastic, and legendary elements, mythical peoples, speculative settings, and characters who, while plausible, could also be unreal, and combine the true, the imaginary, and the nonexistent in such a way that they are difficult to separate. (Pope 1996: 229) Fuentes‘ novel Aura is an early example of this tradition. The purpose of this essay will be a postcolonial approach to the novel, showing Fuentes‘ position in the discourse of postcolonial identities and literatures. The argument will be based on notions of time, space and intertextual references that can be found in Aura.

Against the Postcolonial is at once a study of five writers from lands formerly or currently ruled by France (Algeria, Cambodia, Guiana, Madagascar, and Mali) and an interrogation of the relevance of postcolonial theory, criticism and studies to these writers. The authors are necessarily placed against the background of postcolonial studies, but since they have radically different backgrounds, histories, and careers, Serrano argues against the relevance of a homogenizing critical practice most interested in replicating itself.

In recent years, postcolonial theories have emerged as one of the significant paradigms of contemporary academia, affecting disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. These theories address the complex processes if colonialism on culture and society—with repect to both the colonizers and the colonized—to help us understand the colonial experience in its entirety. The contributors to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique present critical syntheses of archaeological and postcolonial studies by examining both Old and New World case studies, and they ask what the ultimate effect of postcolonial theorizing will be on the practice of archaeology in the twenty-first century.

Boasting new extracts from major works in the field, as well as an impressive list of contributors, this second edition of a bestselling Reader is an invaluable introduction to the most seminal texts in post-colonial theory and criticism.