You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The first book devoted exclusively to the poetry and literary aesthetics of one of Native America's most accomplished writers, this collection of essays brings together detailed critical analyses of single texts and individual poetry collections from diverse theoretical perspectives, along with comparative discussions of Vizenor's related works. Contributors discuss Vizenor's philosophy of poetic expression, his innovations in diverse poetic genres, and the dynamic interrelationships between Vizenor's poetry and his prose writings. Throughout his poetic career Vizenor has returned to common tropes, themes, and structures. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish clearly his work in poetry from his prose, fiction, and drama. The essays gathered in this collection offer powerful evidence of the continuing influence of Anishinaabe dream songs and the haiku form in Vizenor's novels, stories, and theoretical essays; this influence is most obvious at the level of grammatical structure and imagistic composition but can also be discerned in terms of themes and issues to which Vizenor continues to return.
The essays in this collection celebrate the signal achievement of Dieter Riemenschneider in helping found and consolidate the study of postcolonial anglophone literatures in Germany and Europe. As well as poems, a short story, drawings of the Indian scene (the first, and abiding, focus of this scholar’s work), and ‘letters’ of reminiscence (one quite grave), there are revealing contributions of a literary-historical nature on the establishment of anglophone (especially African) literatures as an academic discipline within Germany, the UK, and Northern Europe generally, as well as a group of searching reflections on such topics of postcolonial import as globalization and the applicabili...
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to »cultural integrity« and »immigrant inassimilability,« revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment.
Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems', this collection of essays seeks to explore the tropes, issues and themes that characterise this emerge...
This interdisciplinary study examines the still vivid phenomenon of the most controversial psychiatric diagnosis in the United States: multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. This syndrome comprehends the occurrence of two or more distinct identities that take control of a person's behavior paired with an inexplicable memory loss. Synthesizing the fields of psychiatry and the dynamics of the disorder with its influential representation in American fiction, the study researches how psychiatry and fiction mutually shaped a mysterious syndrome and how this reciprocal process created a genre fiction of its own that persists until today in a very distinct self-referential mode.
Drawing on a rich lineage of anti-discriminatory scholarship, art, and activism, Locating African European Studies engages with contemporary and historical African European formations, positionalities, politics, and cultural productions in Europe. Locating African European Studies reflects on the meanings, objectives, and contours of this field. Twenty-six activists, academics, and artists cover a wide range of topics, engaging with processes of affiliation, discrimination, and resistance. They negotiate the methodological foundations of the field, explore different meanings and politics of ‘African’ and ‘European’, and investigate African European representations in literature, film...
Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts reflects that critiques of ideological formations occur within intersecting social, political, and cultural configurations where each position is in itself ‘ideological’ – and subject to asymmetrical power relations. Postcolonialism has become an object of critique as ideology, but postcolonial studies’ highly diversified engagement with ideology remains a strong focus that exceeds Ideologiekritik. Fourteen contributors from North America, Africa, and Europe focus (I) on the complex relation between postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, and conceptualizations of ideology, (II) on ideological formations that manifest themselves in very specific postcolonial contexts, highlighting the potential continuities between colonial and postcolonial ideology, and (III) on further expanding and complicating the nexus of postcolonial ideology, from veiling as both ideological practice and individual resistance to home as ideological construct; from palimpsestic readings of colonial photography to aesthetics as ideology.
Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisci...
We are living in times when populism, war and climate change are all sources of anxiety caused by overlapping crises. Anxiety is a phenomenon that is not just reflected everywhere around us but is also increasingly manifesting itself in contemporary drama: particularly in the last five to ten years many new British dramas and theatre productions have given a stage to anxiety. Given this central role of anxiety, the aim of this study is to outline the interplay of theatre and anxiety on both a thematic and aesthetic level. It argues that a strand of contemporary theatre that combines topics of social, ecological, technological and pandemic importance with investigations into the philosophical...
This special issue of Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics explores the various functions of metaphor in life writing. Looking at a range of autobiographical subgenres (pathography, disability narratives, memoirs of migration, autofiction) and different kinds of metaphors, the contributions seek to ‘map’ the possibilities of metaphor for narratively framing an individual life and for constructing notions of selfhood.