Books in the Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures series

Focusing on the influence of post-structuralist theory on postcolonial theory and vice versa, this study suggests that autobiography constitutes a general philosophical resistance to universal concepts and theories. It relates the theory of autobiography to expressions of new universalisms that rethink and extend norms of experience and knowledge.

This text provides detailed readings of individual poems by women poets whose work has not yet received the sustained critical attention it deserves.

Focusing on ways in which cultural nationalism has influenced, this book presents an analysis of eight leading Sri Lankan writers: Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene, and Punyakante Wijenaike. It interrogates the discourses of territoriality and boundary marking.

Defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. This title contextualizes historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term 'transnational', which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. It aims to rediscover distinctions between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms.

Includes the essays that discuss narrative strategies employed by international writers when dealing with rape and sexual violence, whether in fiction, poetry, memoir or drama. This book incorporates arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish different dimensions of healing.

A study that uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes - the places and people on the other side of the world - from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media.

Revitalizing theoretical concepts associated with feminism, gender studies and cultural studies, this book explores how art history, popular culture, translation studies, psychoanalysis and news media offer productive ways to associate with Arab women's writing that work beyond a limiting socio-historical context.

Analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.

Presents the two important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

Investigates the relation between land and nationalism in South African and Zimbabwean fiction from the 1960s. By employing a range of critical perspectives - cultural materialist, feminist and ecocritical - this book offers fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between literature, politics and the environment in Southern Africa.

Focusing on the work of Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), the iconic 19th-century imperial spy and translator, this study explores the White Man's 'imperial fantasies', and the ways in which the many metropolitan discourses to which Burton contributed drew upon and reinforced an intimate connection between fantasy and power in the space of Empire.

Exploring the work of key writers from across the globe, this work constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian diaspora.

Provides a way out of various deadlocks of feminist theory. This book explores ideas of performativity in literature and language, and negotiates a path between feminist theory's common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism. It argues that by rethinking our understanding of gender, we can equip ourselves to resist racism and totalitarianism.

Looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. This study suggests that the prevalence of 'colonial' languages such as English and Portuguese in 'anticolonial' or 'postcolonial' African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network.

Explores the connections between a secular Indian nation and fiction in English by a number of postcolonial Indian writers of the 1980s and 90s. Examining writers such as Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, and Amitav Ghosh, this book investigates different aspects of postcolonial identity within the secular framework of the Anglophone novel.

Proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence.

With contributions from an international range of leading authorities on literature, history, art and geography, this book discusses the cultural significance of islands.

This book focuses on the cultural politics of magical realism, as exemplified in the fiction of Syl Cheney-Coker, Ben Okri and Kojo Laing and contextualizes their fiction within current debate.

This study surveys 19th- and 20th-century narratives of the West Indies written by white women, English and Creole. It introduces a wealth of relatively unknown material and constitutes a timely interrogation of the supposed homogeneity of Caribbean discourse, especially with regard to "race" and gender.

Presents a study that considers cultural representations of 'brown' people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. This title explores the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes.

This book analyses the ways in which contemporary women writers in the two 'settler' colonies of Australia and South Africa explore notions of self, identity and place in their fiction.

This cutting-edge volume bridges two significant bodies of recent Austen scholarship, one emphasising the issue of gender and one centralising the history of colonialism and slavery.

This collection gathers together a stellar group of contributors offering innovative perspectives on the issues of language and translation in postcolonial studies. In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume identifies a gap in the critical apparatus in postcolonial studies in order to read cultural texts emerging out of multilingual contexts. The role of translation and an awareness of the multilingual spaces in which many postcolonial texts are written are fundamental issues with which postcolonial studies needs to engage in a far more concerted fashion. The essays in this book by contributors from Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Malaysia, Quebec, Ireland, France, Scotland, the US, and Italy outline a pragmatics of language and translation of value to scholars with an interest in the changing forms of literature and culture in our times. Essay topics include: multilingual textual politics; the benefits of multilingual education in postcolonial countries; the language of gender and sexuality in postcolonial literatures; translational cities; postcolonial calligraphy; globalization and the new digital ecology.

In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume identifies a gap in the critical apparatus in postcolonial studies in order to read cultural texts emerging out of multilingual contexts. The role of translation and an awareness of the multilingual spaces in which many postcolonial texts are written are fundamental issues with which postcolonial studies needs to engage in a far more concerted fashion. The essays in this book by contributors from Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Malaysia, Quebec, Ireland, France, Scotland, the US, and Italy outline a pragmatics of language and translation of value to scholars with an interest in the changing forms of literature and culture in our times. Essay topics include: multilingual textual politics; the benefits of multilingual education in postcolonial countries; the language of gender and sexuality in postcolonial literatures; translational cities; postcolonial calligraphy; globalization and the new digital ecology.

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By "locating," the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term "transnational," which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical "locating" implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

Explores the emergence of a post-secular condition of the contemporary world, in which organized, conventional religion has failed politically. This book discusses various Anglophone novels that reflect the multireligious nature of the Indian sub-continent, including such religions and forms of belief as Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity.