Literature For Our Times最新文献

{"title":"Asia’s Christian-Latin Nation? Postcolonial Reconfigurations in the Literature of the Philippines","authors":"S. Ney, Ubc English","doi":"10.1163/9789401207393_026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207393_026","url":null,"abstract":"In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Derrida makes the surprising suggestion, reminiscent of Auerbach and the European philological tradition, that what we call literature may only exist because of Christian Latinity’s universalizing thrust. Could there be something Classical and something Christian that persists in the institution, or even in the culture, of literature (or of what Glissant calls “Literature”)? I propose to examine this suggestion with the help of two novels, Cebu by Peter Bacho and Mass for the Death of an Enemy by Renato E. Madrid. \u0000These ambivalent novels evoke a region of the Philippines where Christian Latinity seems to be victorious, but in subtle ways it is undermined. Crucially, it is also translated – from colonizing Spanish, through the Cebuano vernacular of the novels’ characters, and now for us into the English which, oddly, dominates “postcolonial literature.” Is imported Christian Latinity in the end recuperated, or resisted, or both, or neither? And how would the recuperation or resistance of these novels by “postcolonial literature” be affected by the classic Christian patterns – the Pauline/Augustinian divided self in Mass and the participation in Christ’s Passion in Cebu – that preoccupy the novels? \u0000Novels from the Christian Philippines are a perfect place for me to begin testing Derrida’s argument, flowing out of his meditation in “Des Tours de Babel” on Walter Benjamin, that because of the common root of the essence of literary and the sacred, languages (and, I suspect, literatures) are not foreign to one another.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134459639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Native Clearing Revisited: Positioning Philippine Literature","authors":"C. Kanaganayakam","doi":"10.1163/9789401207393_025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207393_025","url":null,"abstract":"English-language postcolonial literary studies has focused largely on parts of the world formerly colonized by England. This panel, however, will deal with the Philippines, a nation whose history of colonial encounter includes both Spain and the US, in order to advance the argument that its literature has much to contribute to the \"arduous conversations\" that characterize postcolonial studies. While the historical trajectory that shapes the identity of the Philippines has much in common with the narrative of other postcolonial nations, the resistance/recuperation model does not fit easily in the Philippines. Even among literary histories and critical studies there is hardly a consensus about a theoretical matrix that would explain the complexities of literary production in the Philippines in the twentieth century. This panel contends that literature from the Philippines grapples with a number of issues in ways that extend the boundaries of postcolonial theory and opens up exciting possibilities for reconfiguring nation, religion, genre, aesthetics, and the very notion of literature.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126289939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Indomania to Indophobia: Thomas De Quincey’s Providential Orientalism","authors":"D. S. Roberts","doi":"10.1163/9789401207393_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207393_007","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas De Quincey’s terrifying oriental nightmares, reported to sensational acclaim in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), have become a touchstone of romantic imperialism in recent studies of the literature of the period (Leask 1991; Barrell 1992 et al). De Quincey’s collocation of “all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions” in the hypnagogic hallucinations that characterized what he called “the pains of opium” seems to anticipate neatly Said’s theory of orientalism, whereby the orient was supplied by the west with “a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere,” the attitudinal basis as he argues for the continuing march of imperialism from the late eighteenth century. Yet, as Thomas Trautmann (1997) has pointed out, orientalist scholarship based in India and led by the influential Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century was extremely enthusiastic about Indian classical antiquity. The early orientalist scholarship posited ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious links between Europe and India, while recognizing the greater antiquity of Indian civilization. This favourable attitude (which Trautmann calls “Indomania”) was overtaken in the nineteenth century by disavowal of that scholarship and repugnance (which he calls “Indophobia”), influenced by utilitarian and evangelical attitudes to colonialism. De Quincey’s lifespan covers this crucial period of change. My paper examines his evangelical upbringing and interest in biblical and orientalist scholarship to suggest his anxious investment in these modes of thinking. I will suggest that the bizarre orientalist fusions of his dreams can be better understood in the context of changing attitudes to the imperialism during the period. An examination of his work provides a far more dynamic understanding of the processes of orientalism than the binary model suggested by Said. The transformation implied from imperial scholarship to governance, I will suggest, is not irrelevant to a world which continues to pull apart on various grounds of race and ethnicity, and reflects on our own role in the academy today.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123083792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imagining Apna Panjab in Cyberspace","authors":"A. Roy, Tba","doi":"10.4018/978-1-59140-575-7.CH071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59140-575-7.CH071","url":null,"abstract":"Through examining the cultural practices of the Punjabi Canadian diaspora, including visual arts like film, and performing genres like music and dance, I shall trace multiple patterns of belonging among the community that characterize its engagement with other Canadian groups while retaining cultural continuity with the Punjabi homeland. I shall link multiple belongings to advancement in travel and communication technologies. Through my disciplinary location in English and personal in Hindu Punjabi, I will fan out to postcolonial and postmodern theory to deconstruct the diaspora as a construct. I suggest that Punjabi diaspora be viewed as an ethno-spatial complexrather than a social form(Area Studies) or a type of consciousness(Diaspora theory). By tracing the shared Punjabi ethno-spatial memory, I argue that disjoining the Sikh path from Punjabi culture can open the way to the critical disengagement of religion from culture in the imagining of Indian religious diasporas around the world.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124841414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“TRADING PLACES IN THE PROMISED LANDS”:INDIAN PILGRIMAGE PARADIGMS IN POSTCOLONIAL TRAVEL NARRATIVES","authors":"D. Lane","doi":"10.1163/9789401207393_017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207393_017","url":null,"abstract":"The paradigms of pilgrimage—and ideas of sacred space—in Hindu Indian culture are numerous and diverse. Described by Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj in Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography, the notion of pilgrimage derives from the Indian expression “t?rtha-y?tr?”: “undertaking journey to river fords.” This idea has been interpreted both literally and metaphorically, where a “t?rtha” is associated with a specific place, and where the distance traveled by the pilgrim also helps him or her to accumulate merit. Some elements of landscape are linked with the self-revelation of Hindu gods, such as rivers, running waters, hot springs, hills, and forests. However, scholars emphasize that the English expression “pilgrimage” is not synonymous with the Indian “t?rtha-y?tr?,” and often a simple view of physical journey to a particular site is imposed by Western travelers. In the Indian concept, the state of mind of the pilgrim is more important than a physical journey, there is no ranking of particular places as necessarily “more sacred” than others, and in some interpretations the whole of India is considered to be sacred. This latter notion, again, is read by Western travelers as requiring a “grand tour” of India—visiting most, if not all the places mentioned in the Indian epics. \u0000 \u0000This paper examines how writers from other former British colonies translate the idea of “t?rtha-y?tr?” through a study of two recent travel narratives: Sylvia Fraser’s The Rope in the Water: A Pilgrimage to India and Sarah MacDonald’s Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure. While the Canadian Fraser appropriates the idea of pilgrimage in her search for “something larger than myself,” the Australian MacDonald resists and parodies that idea. However, her book also reconfirms the notion of India as sacred space: in her chapter “Trading Places in the Promised Lands,” she compares these notions to those in Judaism and Christianity, stating finally that “[i]n India I’ve traveled a soul’s journey…a land that shares its sacred space, seems a spiritual home worth having.” Both texts, then, challenge the ideas of selection and spiritual homeland. To some extent, however, such narratives also adopt the colonialist discourse of exploration narratives, described for instance in Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions and Ryan’s The Cartographic Eye. My paper will therefore raise important questions about the implications of pilgrimage as a site of intersection between these diverse tropes of “t?rtha y?tr?” and exploration.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129202430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Globalization, Transnation and Utopia","authors":"B. Ashcroft","doi":"10.4324/9780203370131-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203370131-7","url":null,"abstract":"The impact of post-colonial theory on globalization discourse has been clear for some time now. The ‘cultural turn’ of globalization studies in the nineties was due almost entirely to the impact of post-colonial analysis. \u0000This paper will propose a way of extending this analysis of global culture in a phenomenon I refer to as ‘the transnation.’ The transnation is not an object in space but a way of addressing the mobility, contingency and variable cultural positions of subjects in an increasingly globalized world. ‘The’ transnation represents a state of inbetweenness not adequately accounted for by the terms ‘diaspora’ ‘migrancy’ or ‘multiculturalism’ but which disrupts the discourse of loss attending those terms. The transnation thus becomes a post-colonial intervention into the debates circulating around the questions of cultural identity, diaspora, language and literature in a global future.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130368288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rebels of Empire: The Human Idiom in Ruskin Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons","authors":"Satish C. Aikant","doi":"10.1163/9789401207393_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207393_008","url":null,"abstract":"Central to India’s struggle for independence was the generation of powerful nationalist forces. The contours of this struggle were broadly defined by the confrontation of these forces with the British colonial power. The 1857 uprising, variously called The Mutiny, or the First war of Independence, though unsuccessful in its immediate objective, set off a chain of events, which culminated in the eventual success of the national liberation movement. However, the meta-narratives of history often ignore the smaller, localized incidents which are nonetheless significant in as much as they deal with the individual lives that were impacted by the violence of the conflict. \u0000 Ruskin Bond’s novella A Flight of Pigeons (1975) set against the backdrop of the catastrophic happenings of 1857, is based on actual historical incidents. While the narrative underlines the relations of dominance in the cross-cultural and political context, it is primarily concerned with the impact of the confrontation on the individual lives removed from a specific demarcation of nationalist identities. The characters are seen to grow beyond racial antipathies, and Bond debunks the racial stereotypes of Orientalism which see Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs as intolerant and bigoted. A new light is thrown on the notions of human associations, as well as on all forms of piety, and possibilities of mutually-enabling acts in the social life of India. \u0000 At the same time, the narrative does not detract from the fact that for the average Englishman or Englishwoman, the empire was a fundamental article of faith and the extension of Pax Britannica was seen unfailingly as the unavoidable commitment and a hallowed objective. This paper attempts to analyze the interplay of human relations witnessed in a crucial period of India’s colonial history.","PeriodicalId":430742,"journal":{"name":"Literature For Our Times","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131014763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}