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Diaspora is an ancient term that gained broad new significance in the twentieth century. At its simplest, diaspora refers to the geographic dispersion of a people from a common originary space to other sites. It pulls together ideas of people, movement, memory, and home, but also troubles them. In this volume, established and newer scholars provide fresh explorations of diaspora for twenty-first century literary studies. The volume re-examines major diaspora origin stories, theorizes diaspora through its conceptual intimacies and entanglements, and analyzes literary and visual-cultural texts to reimagine the genres, genders, and genealogies of diaspora. Literary mappings move across Africa, the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Pacific Islands, and through Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Gulf, and Indian waters. Chapters reflect on diaspora as a key concept for migration, postcolonial, global comparative race, environmental, gender, and queer studies. The volume is thus an accessible and provocative account of diaspora as a vital resource for literary studies in a bordered world.
Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage is a pioneering collection of commissioned critical essays on the work of the highly relevant Canadian writer. With four acclaimed novels and scattered short fictions, the Lebanese-born Hage has become a formidable literary force. The volume is an attempt to situate his fiction not only in the context of Lebanese diasporic writing, but that of trans-geographical literature, as well as to emphasize his progressive dissociation from the realist paradigm. The goal is also to correct an imbalance of critical attention by refocusing on Hage’s more recent, equally challenging work. The richness of Hage’s fiction is attested to by the diversity of thematic concerns and critical approaches. The volume reflects the worldwide range of Canada-oriented research, and places European perspectives alongside North American and Lebanese ones. Significantly, it features an original essay authored by Hage’s literary peer, Madeleine Thien. Contributors: F. Elizabeth Dahab, André Forget, Kyle Gamble, Syrine Hout, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, Krzysztof Majer, Lisa Marchi, Judit Molnár, Alex Ramon, Rita Sakr, Dima Samaha, Madeleine Thien, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
This book revisits the American canon of novels, memoirs, and films about the war in Vietnam, in order to reassess critically the centrality of the discourse of American victimization in the country’s imagination of the conflict, and to trace the strategies of representation that establish American soldiers and veterans as the most significant victims of the war. By investigating in detail the imagery of the Vietnamese landscape recreated by American authors and directors, the volume explores the proposition that Vietnam has been turned into an American myth, demonstrating that the process resulted in a dehistoricization and mystification of the conflict that obscured its historical and political realities. Against this background, representations of the war’s victims—Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers—are then considered in light of their ideological meanings and uses. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate how, in a relation of power, the question of victimhood can become ideologized, transforming into both a discourse and a strategy of representation—and in doing so, to demythologize something of the "Vietnam" of American cultural narrative.
No Better Home? brings together a unique combination of voices to question whether or not Canada is the best home that Jews have ever had.
The volume convenes English- and French-speaking Canadianists who share a broad reflection on issues of exclusion and inclusion in Canadian contexts. It is through historical, but also linguistic, cultural and literary perspectives that we can unveil and learn more about the particular instances of inclusion and exclusion. The volume offers a kaleidoscopic view of Canadian history, politics, literature, and culture. The collected essays provide a discussion on a number of contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literary works, the evaluation of Canadian language policy, the reflection upon the literary canon as well as challenges of literary translation in a bilingual country, the distinctness of Black Lives Matter Canada, and, last but not the least, the historical status of New France.
This book is the first to bring together analyses of the full range of post-war testimony given by survivors of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando were slave labourers in the gas chambers and crematoria, forced to process and dispose of the bodies of those who were murdered. They have been central to a number of key topics in post-war debates about the Shoah: collaboration, moral compromise and survival, resistance, representation, and the possibility of bearing witness. Their testimony however has mostly met with a reluctance to engage in depth with it. Moving from testimonies produced within the event, the Scrolls of Auschwitz and the Sonderkommando photographs, to testimonies given at trials and for video archives, and to the paintings of David Olère and the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, this book demonstrates the importance of their witnessing in the post-war memory of the Holocaust, and provides vital new insights into the questions of representation, memory, gender, and the Shoah.
The Funambulists brings together the diverse poetry collections of six contemporary Arab diasporic women poets. Spanning multiple languages and regions, this volume illuminates the distinct artistic voice of each poet, yet also highlights the aesthetic and political relevance that unites their work. Marchi explores the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, a celebrated American poet of Palestinian descent; Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet living in Edmonton, Canada, who writes in Arabic; Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese poet who lives in Quebec and has adopted French as her language; Maram al-Massri, a Syrian poet writing in Arabic and living in France; Suheir Hammad, an American poet of Palestinian origin; and Mi...
Kanade, di Goldene Medine offers a broad study of its field, with equal attention to English- and French-language materials and contexts. The volume’s essays highlight the fundamental link between the culture and life of Canadian Jews and their Polish roots. This focus brings Yiddish to the fore, in essays focusing on the history of Canadian Yiddish literature, and the relevance of the language for contemporary Canadian Chasidic communities. However, essays in this volume also highlight the writings of contemporary authors, working both in French and English. Thus, the collection explores culture at the borderlands of three languages, with an eye for the link between New Worlds and Old. Ka...
In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando—the “special squads,” composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these “Scrolls of Auschwitz,” which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp’s liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
An eye-opening, unapologetic explanation of what "racial profiling" is in modern-day America: systematic targeting of communities and placing of suspicion on populations, on the basis of not only ethnicity but also certain places that are linked to the social identity of that group. In 21st-century, post–civil rights era America, "race" has become complex and intersectional. It is no longer simply a matter of color—black versus white—contends author D. Marvin Jones, but equally a matter of space or "geographies of fear," which he defines as spaces in which different groups are particularly vulnerable to stereotyping by law enforcement: blacks in the urban ghetto, Mexicans at the functi...