Pub Date : 2023-09-20DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2248552
Siwei Wang
ABSTRACTThrough a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.KEYWORDS: Oceanic studiesAfrica–China relationsGlobal South studiesYvonne OwuorKenyan literatureIndo-Pacific waters Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. See, for example, Charne Lavery (Citation2017). This article also aims to bring together the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds, and explores how bridging the two oceans might complicate our understanding of south–south solidarity. However, by contrast, Lavery analyses more how the south writes back to the north.2. Africa’s oceanic tie with the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world, in the form of transatlantic slavery or indentured servitude, is well documented in Atlantic studies and Indian Ocean studies. For a discussion of how literatures represent the South Seas (Nanyang) in East Asian studies, see Brian Bernards (Citation2015).3. Karen Laura Thornber’s (Citation2016) study highlights travel of people and ideas between Africa and China from the 8th century to the present, but hardly mentions the ocean space that enables these journeys. Thornber also notes that the transportation of slaves and labourers between Africa and China during European imperialism is a rarely discussed topic (703), a research gap that justifies a hydro-critical reading of Afro–Chinese relations. (Re)visiting those interactions from the Indo-Pacific waters might help salvage minor (hi)stories that remain illegible to the terrestrial mind.4. Unless otherwise noted, translations of French and Chinese texts in this article are my own.5. After defaulting on its loans in late 2017, the Sri Lankan government negotiated with China and “handed over the [Hambantota] port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years” (Abi-Habib Citation2018). East African countries like Djibouti have mounting debts with China and are faced with similar situations (Gopaldas Citation2018).6. This article refers to a different oce
{"title":"The aqueous form and the Afro–Sino encounter in Yvonne Owuor’s <i>The Dragonfly Sea</i>","authors":"Siwei Wang","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2248552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2248552","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThrough a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.KEYWORDS: Oceanic studiesAfrica–China relationsGlobal South studiesYvonne OwuorKenyan literatureIndo-Pacific waters Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. See, for example, Charne Lavery (Citation2017). This article also aims to bring together the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds, and explores how bridging the two oceans might complicate our understanding of south–south solidarity. However, by contrast, Lavery analyses more how the south writes back to the north.2. Africa’s oceanic tie with the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world, in the form of transatlantic slavery or indentured servitude, is well documented in Atlantic studies and Indian Ocean studies. For a discussion of how literatures represent the South Seas (Nanyang) in East Asian studies, see Brian Bernards (Citation2015).3. Karen Laura Thornber’s (Citation2016) study highlights travel of people and ideas between Africa and China from the 8th century to the present, but hardly mentions the ocean space that enables these journeys. Thornber also notes that the transportation of slaves and labourers between Africa and China during European imperialism is a rarely discussed topic (703), a research gap that justifies a hydro-critical reading of Afro–Chinese relations. (Re)visiting those interactions from the Indo-Pacific waters might help salvage minor (hi)stories that remain illegible to the terrestrial mind.4. Unless otherwise noted, translations of French and Chinese texts in this article are my own.5. After defaulting on its loans in late 2017, the Sri Lankan government negotiated with China and “handed over the [Hambantota] port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years” (Abi-Habib Citation2018). East African countries like Djibouti have mounting debts with China and are faced with similar situations (Gopaldas Citation2018).6. This article refers to a different oce","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136313122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-06DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2244698
Nicole Pepperell
Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmo-politan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.
{"title":"“To dream of a wildness distant from ourselves”: Capitalism, colonialism, and the Robinsonade","authors":"Nicole Pepperell","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2244698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2244698","url":null,"abstract":"Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmo-politan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60513815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-21DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204
John Hutnyk
ABSTRACT Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.
{"title":"Robinson Crusoe: After the island","authors":"John Hutnyk","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2244204","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41709438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2238138
Sara Casco-solís
ABSTRACT Canadian writer Lawrence Hill's 2015 novel The Illegal provides deep insights into the legal and social restrictions imposed on refugees in their host countries, which often exacerbate their vulnerability. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorizing about the interconnection between vulnerability and agency and recent resilience thinking, this article explores Hill’s literary rendition of how the refugees’ material conditions of vulnerability may trigger forms of agency that result in resilience-building, social integration, and more self-aware and just societies. By examining the interconnection between tropes of vulnerability and resilience in The Illegal, this article posits that Hill’s elaborations on notions of resilience partake in a new post-trauma aesthetics that goes beyond the notions of victimization and inarticulateness – the main focus of trauma theory – to envision new mechanisms for the agency and empowerment of the vulnerable.
{"title":"Building resilience in Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal","authors":"Sara Casco-solís","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2238138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2238138","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Canadian writer Lawrence Hill's 2015 novel The Illegal provides deep insights into the legal and social restrictions imposed on refugees in their host countries, which often exacerbate their vulnerability. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorizing about the interconnection between vulnerability and agency and recent resilience thinking, this article explores Hill’s literary rendition of how the refugees’ material conditions of vulnerability may trigger forms of agency that result in resilience-building, social integration, and more self-aware and just societies. By examining the interconnection between tropes of vulnerability and resilience in The Illegal, this article posits that Hill’s elaborations on notions of resilience partake in a new post-trauma aesthetics that goes beyond the notions of victimization and inarticulateness – the main focus of trauma theory – to envision new mechanisms for the agency and empowerment of the vulnerable.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42826189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2233056
Pauline Amy de la Bretèque
ABSTRACT This article examines the place of food and cooking in Caribbean women’s postcolonial writings, and concentrates on the works of two women authors of Caribbean origins: Jean Rhys and Olive Senior. It explores how the representations of cooking and culinary traditions help us to rethink the process of creolization from a feminine perspective. Creolization is a process of cultural encounter and mixing that is central to the understanding of Caribbean identities. However, the theories of creolization have often omitted the role that women play in this process. This article focuses on cooking, an activity usually conceived as feminine and shows how it participates in the opposition to the continuation of racial, social, and sexual domination resulting from colonization. It demonstrates how the two selected authors tackle the topic of cooking, and how they rehabilitate this activity as an art and as a key element in the transmission of creolized cultures.
{"title":"The flavours of mixing: Postcolonial literary representations of cooking as a feminine mode of creolization","authors":"Pauline Amy de la Bretèque","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2233056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2233056","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the place of food and cooking in Caribbean women’s postcolonial writings, and concentrates on the works of two women authors of Caribbean origins: Jean Rhys and Olive Senior. It explores how the representations of cooking and culinary traditions help us to rethink the process of creolization from a feminine perspective. Creolization is a process of cultural encounter and mixing that is central to the understanding of Caribbean identities. However, the theories of creolization have often omitted the role that women play in this process. This article focuses on cooking, an activity usually conceived as feminine and shows how it participates in the opposition to the continuation of racial, social, and sexual domination resulting from colonization. It demonstrates how the two selected authors tackle the topic of cooking, and how they rehabilitate this activity as an art and as a key element in the transmission of creolized cultures.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48670979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2235097
Lava Asaad
ABSTRACT Saleem Haddad’s debut novel, Guapa, has been celebrated for its depiction of queerness in the Middle East. The novel goes beyond exploring alternative sexualities in a reaction to the overtly predominant heterosexuality of the region. This article traces how Haddad draws on the upheavals that erupted during the Arab Spring. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of transversality that is intended to offset the rise of tribalism and heightened nationalist sentiments, the article applies the concept to the main character, Rasa, who strives to negotiate between his queerness and political zeal to build a more egalitarian society that functions beyond notions of Arabism and anti-western attitudes. The argument shows how the novel moves beyond an imagined sense of national affiliation to embrace a much wider spectrum of minoritized identities that are not coerced into a homogeneous form nor influenced by the pull of history, religion, and gender normativity.
{"title":"“We’re all some sort of shaath”: Convergence and transversality of minorities in Saleem Haddad’s Guapa","authors":"Lava Asaad","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2235097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2235097","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Saleem Haddad’s debut novel, Guapa, has been celebrated for its depiction of queerness in the Middle East. The novel goes beyond exploring alternative sexualities in a reaction to the overtly predominant heterosexuality of the region. This article traces how Haddad draws on the upheavals that erupted during the Arab Spring. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of transversality that is intended to offset the rise of tribalism and heightened nationalist sentiments, the article applies the concept to the main character, Rasa, who strives to negotiate between his queerness and political zeal to build a more egalitarian society that functions beyond notions of Arabism and anti-western attitudes. The argument shows how the novel moves beyond an imagined sense of national affiliation to embrace a much wider spectrum of minoritized identities that are not coerced into a homogeneous form nor influenced by the pull of history, religion, and gender normativity.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42370225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-08DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2232130
Claire Reddleman
ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.
{"title":"Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: REFUGIO by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks","authors":"Claire Reddleman","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2232130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2232130","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49571165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-03DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2238982
Sanjeev Vishwakarma
{"title":"Representations of precarity in South Asian literature in English","authors":"Sanjeev Vishwakarma","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2238982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2238982","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48205466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-02DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2238996
Lawdenmarc Decamora
{"title":"At Dalton’s Bar, surrounded by alaala","authors":"Lawdenmarc Decamora","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2238996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2238996","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48221621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2023.2236338
Hans-Georg Erney
ABSTRACT This article reads the work of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, an activist and spoken-word poet who, as a British Muslim woman and postcolonial critic, is uniquely placed to articulate postcolonial concerns such as the mental colonization caused by colonial languages and the epistemic violence of colonial discourses. Further, an analysis of the author’s subject position demonstrates how Manzoor-Khan’s work vividly illustrates the predicament of the subaltern fighting to be heard. Her didactic metapoetry translates familiar postcolonial concerns into the 21st century by constituting a hybrid form between poetry and academic discourse, by introducing the vocabulary of postcolonial theory into the casual language of spoken-word poetry, and by employing rhetorical strategies that problematize the relationship between poet and audience as well as the rhetorical burden of producing “humanising” poetry. By analysing how she maintains a tense relationship with her audience, the article complicates what may be misunderstood as straightforward political poetry.
{"title":"Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s Postcolonial Banter and the paradoxes of spoken-word poetry","authors":"Hans-Georg Erney","doi":"10.1080/17449855.2023.2236338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2236338","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article reads the work of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, an activist and spoken-word poet who, as a British Muslim woman and postcolonial critic, is uniquely placed to articulate postcolonial concerns such as the mental colonization caused by colonial languages and the epistemic violence of colonial discourses. Further, an analysis of the author’s subject position demonstrates how Manzoor-Khan’s work vividly illustrates the predicament of the subaltern fighting to be heard. Her didactic metapoetry translates familiar postcolonial concerns into the 21st century by constituting a hybrid form between poetry and academic discourse, by introducing the vocabulary of postcolonial theory into the casual language of spoken-word poetry, and by employing rhetorical strategies that problematize the relationship between poet and audience as well as the rhetorical burden of producing “humanising” poetry. By analysing how she maintains a tense relationship with her audience, the article complicates what may be misunderstood as straightforward political poetry.","PeriodicalId":44946,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Postcolonial Writing","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48434923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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