Abstract:In Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee appears thoroughly persuaded by those anthropological theories—still emerging at the time of the novel's publication—that were reconceiving hunter-gatherer bands as happier, healthier, better-fed, more leisured, and less socially stratified communities than the permanent settlements of agriculturalists. By depicting Michael as a nutritionally and spiritually satisfied forager upon the karoo and by figuring the labor camps in which he is intermittently confined as epitomes of the Neolithic (and subsequent) grain state, Coetzee endorses those intellectual currents that have now supplanted the optimistic narrative of the Agricultural Revolution with that of the Agricultural Trap. In short, the novel figures the adoption of farming as a hedonic catastrophe for the great mass of humankind. Thus, critics who register their disappointment with the novel's supposed political quietism have failed to grasp the text's longue durée concerns or to realize that Michael refuses to aid the guerillas because their victory would only impose upon him a different version of agro-culture. By the same token, many critics' insistence that Michael is a vaguely allegorical figure offering some unrealizable alternative lifeway is refined into sharper focus by the revelation of his anthropological specificity.
{"title":"Coetzee's Carcer[e]al State: Michael K as Hunter-Gatherer","authors":"C. Baldridge","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Life & Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee appears thoroughly persuaded by those anthropological theories—still emerging at the time of the novel's publication—that were reconceiving hunter-gatherer bands as happier, healthier, better-fed, more leisured, and less socially stratified communities than the permanent settlements of agriculturalists. By depicting Michael as a nutritionally and spiritually satisfied forager upon the karoo and by figuring the labor camps in which he is intermittently confined as epitomes of the Neolithic (and subsequent) grain state, Coetzee endorses those intellectual currents that have now supplanted the optimistic narrative of the Agricultural Revolution with that of the Agricultural Trap. In short, the novel figures the adoption of farming as a hedonic catastrophe for the great mass of humankind. Thus, critics who register their disappointment with the novel's supposed political quietism have failed to grasp the text's longue durée concerns or to realize that Michael refuses to aid the guerillas because their victory would only impose upon him a different version of agro-culture. By the same token, many critics' insistence that Michael is a vaguely allegorical figure offering some unrealizable alternative lifeway is refined into sharper focus by the revelation of his anthropological specificity.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"65 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46678341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés (review)","authors":"Gabriel Bámgbóṣé","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"177 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41597968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
180 significance of Valdés’ editorial vision. Her concluding remarks call for the urgent need to relearn Caribbean “shared histories and cultures” (248) by “reconsidering Haiti in relation to the Hispanic Caribbean from the perspective of the humanities” (251). This form of relearning challenges “the categoric simplification imposed by the academy” (248), bringing critical attention to the complex entanglement of cultural and linguistic borders.
{"title":"Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction by Arundhati Roy (review)","authors":"Maryam Gowralli","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"180 significance of Valdés’ editorial vision. Her concluding remarks call for the urgent need to relearn Caribbean “shared histories and cultures” (248) by “reconsidering Haiti in relation to the Hispanic Caribbean from the perspective of the humanities” (251). This form of relearning challenges “the categoric simplification imposed by the academy” (248), bringing critical attention to the complex entanglement of cultural and linguistic borders.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"180 - 183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45165871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this article, I make the case for Noongar novelist Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (2010) to be seen as an exemplar of Aboriginal-centered literary imaginings of reconciliation based primarily on adherence to traditional Laws rather than the state's limited recognition of native title. The novel decenters settler contact narratives through its depiction of Noongar welcoming protocols, thus affirming pre-colonial Aboriginal sovereignty. Furthermore, I contend that, through the novel's culminating scene in which settlers fail to understand protagonist Bobby Wabalanginy's ceremonial dance, which calls for justice through truth-telling and peace-making, Scott narrativizes the settler nation's inability to understand or accept terms of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation derived from Indigenous cultural and political beliefs. Recognizing That Deadman Dance is not merely historical fiction but a novel about remaking contact draws attention to the all-too-frequently superficial performativity of settler-centric reconciliation politics and calls for narratives that do more than just meditate on settler guilt and complicity.
{"title":"Remaking Contact in That Deadman Dance: Australian Reconciliation Politics, Noongar Welcoming Protocol, and Makarrata","authors":"Travis Franks","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I make the case for Noongar novelist Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (2010) to be seen as an exemplar of Aboriginal-centered literary imaginings of reconciliation based primarily on adherence to traditional Laws rather than the state's limited recognition of native title. The novel decenters settler contact narratives through its depiction of Noongar welcoming protocols, thus affirming pre-colonial Aboriginal sovereignty. Furthermore, I contend that, through the novel's culminating scene in which settlers fail to understand protagonist Bobby Wabalanginy's ceremonial dance, which calls for justice through truth-telling and peace-making, Scott narrativizes the settler nation's inability to understand or accept terms of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation derived from Indigenous cultural and political beliefs. Recognizing That Deadman Dance is not merely historical fiction but a novel about remaking contact draws attention to the all-too-frequently superficial performativity of settler-centric reconciliation politics and calls for narratives that do more than just meditate on settler guilt and complicity.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"122 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44256299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Some of the most celebrated modernist novels, including James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), feature a flâneur. As critics like Pieter Vermeulen and Alexander Hartwiger argue, the protagonist of Teju Cole’s 2011 novel, Open City, also engages in flânerie. Building on these accounts and Walter Benjamin’s analyses of the flâneur, I argue that Cole revamps the flâneur for a contemporary global readership. His central character, Julius, does not simply speak urbanely about city life. Instead, he provides a politically engaged reading of society. Cole invites readers to witness the complex paths of a Nigerian immigrant whose walks function as therapy. Julius walks to forget his brutal past. Because of his trauma, existence as a Nigerian in white spaces, and commentary on peculiarities that a Benjaminian flâneur would not address, Julius cannot be as detached as the classic flâneur. In my analysis of Cole’s revision of the flâneur, I initiate a conversation on how the global reader must recognize and contemplate the anticipated representations of trauma, violence, and exoticism in postcolonial fiction. I show that Cole’s novel suggests a need for a critical postcolonial cosmopolitanism that recognizes the persistence of nationalism and brutality in even the worldliest figures.
{"title":"A Walk to Forget: The Postcolonial Flâneur’s Negating Journey in Teju Cole’s Open City","authors":"Sara Faradji","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Some of the most celebrated modernist novels, including James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), feature a flâneur. As critics like Pieter Vermeulen and Alexander Hartwiger argue, the protagonist of Teju Cole’s 2011 novel, Open City, also engages in flânerie. Building on these accounts and Walter Benjamin’s analyses of the flâneur, I argue that Cole revamps the flâneur for a contemporary global readership. His central character, Julius, does not simply speak urbanely about city life. Instead, he provides a politically engaged reading of society. Cole invites readers to witness the complex paths of a Nigerian immigrant whose walks function as therapy. Julius walks to forget his brutal past. Because of his trauma, existence as a Nigerian in white spaces, and commentary on peculiarities that a Benjaminian flâneur would not address, Julius cannot be as detached as the classic flâneur. In my analysis of Cole’s revision of the flâneur, I initiate a conversation on how the global reader must recognize and contemplate the anticipated representations of trauma, violence, and exoticism in postcolonial fiction. I show that Cole’s novel suggests a need for a critical postcolonial cosmopolitanism that recognizes the persistence of nationalism and brutality in even the worldliest figures.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48033058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay draws on theories of the unconscious and trauma to examine the representation of the barbarian girl in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. While scholars have claimed that the Magistrate’s narrative production and interpretative method act as a form of resistance to the Empire, I offer that the barbarian girl creates models of resistance against imperial oppression in which she becomes the producer of meaning. In my reading of the novel, I foreground the ways in which the barbarian girl escapes and eludes the Magistrate’s attempt to foreclose her narrative within the history of the Empire. In doing so, Coetzee’s text presents the barbarian girl as the basis for an emergent, ethical future, a temporal disruption of Empire, such that her narrative creates the conditions for social change. Rather than Coetzee’s claim that South African literature functions in bondage, Waiting for the Barbarians offers the battleground of the psyche as the space of potential liberation from which a poetics of futurity emerges.
{"title":"Unformed Agency and Narrative Resistance in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians","authors":"M. Lehman","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay draws on theories of the unconscious and trauma to examine the representation of the barbarian girl in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. While scholars have claimed that the Magistrate’s narrative production and interpretative method act as a form of resistance to the Empire, I offer that the barbarian girl creates models of resistance against imperial oppression in which she becomes the producer of meaning. In my reading of the novel, I foreground the ways in which the barbarian girl escapes and eludes the Magistrate’s attempt to foreclose her narrative within the history of the Empire. In doing so, Coetzee’s text presents the barbarian girl as the basis for an emergent, ethical future, a temporal disruption of Empire, such that her narrative creates the conditions for social change. Rather than Coetzee’s claim that South African literature functions in bondage, Waiting for the Barbarians offers the battleground of the psyche as the space of potential liberation from which a poetics of futurity emerges.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"149 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45770303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars by Alla Ivanchikova (review)","authors":"Hong Zeng","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"175 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44708572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy (2009) to argue that Home Boy constitutes a postcolonial response to 9/11, an explicit critique of the ensuing American response and Islamophobia, and a tactical alternative to and implicit critique of Hamid’s novel. The article highlights some problems created by the narrative strategies Hamid uses and shows how Naqvi takes a different approach, in particular by foregoing the temptations of ambiguity and gender stereotyping and highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims from 9/11 and its aftermath. In so doing, the article suggests how critical readers can recognize both the drawbacks of Hamid’s celebrated novel and the alternative possibilities of other strategies that Muslim writers can use to address the problems of neo-Orientalism and global Islamophobia.
{"title":"H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy as a Response to Post-9/11 Islamophobia and as Implicit Critique of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist","authors":"Ambreen Hai","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less well-known novel Home Boy (2009) to argue that Home Boy constitutes a postcolonial response to 9/11, an explicit critique of the ensuing American response and Islamophobia, and a tactical alternative to and implicit critique of Hamid’s novel. The article highlights some problems created by the narrative strategies Hamid uses and shows how Naqvi takes a different approach, in particular by foregoing the temptations of ambiguity and gender stereotyping and highlighting the multiple traumas experienced by Muslims from 9/11 and its aftermath. In so doing, the article suggests how critical readers can recognize both the drawbacks of Hamid’s celebrated novel and the alternative possibilities of other strategies that Muslim writers can use to address the problems of neo-Orientalism and global Islamophobia.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"113 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48135991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:While critics largely attribute the value of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Black Album to its message about the nation, this essay reconsiders the novel’s transatlantic structure and depiction of Prince to understand its relevance for contemporary global cultural politics. Specifically, the essay adopts the capacious reading praxis of worlding to explain the racial and cultural logic that makes an American pop icon a necessary metaphor for South Asian Muslims’ sense of belonging in Britain. Worlding defamiliarizes Prince as commodity and an embodiment of transcendent hybridity, morality, solidarity, or alterity and instead suggests his capacity to consolidate cultural capital, bourgeois class status, and heteronormativity for British Muslim fans. As such, Prince fandom recuperates the novel’s Bildungsroman form by showcasing the possibilities for British Asian Muslim men to carve out a fragile sense of belonging in the nation. The essay’s delineation of British Asia’s imaginative and affective relationship with America charts new connections between postcolonial studies and American studies.
{"title":"“You Got a Thing about Prince?”: Worlding Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album","authors":"Surbhi Malik","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While critics largely attribute the value of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Black Album to its message about the nation, this essay reconsiders the novel’s transatlantic structure and depiction of Prince to understand its relevance for contemporary global cultural politics. Specifically, the essay adopts the capacious reading praxis of worlding to explain the racial and cultural logic that makes an American pop icon a necessary metaphor for South Asian Muslims’ sense of belonging in Britain. Worlding defamiliarizes Prince as commodity and an embodiment of transcendent hybridity, morality, solidarity, or alterity and instead suggests his capacity to consolidate cultural capital, bourgeois class status, and heteronormativity for British Muslim fans. As such, Prince fandom recuperates the novel’s Bildungsroman form by showcasing the possibilities for British Asian Muslim men to carve out a fragile sense of belonging in the nation. The essay’s delineation of British Asia’s imaginative and affective relationship with America charts new connections between postcolonial studies and American studies.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"27 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47684968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby is an intricate and complex work, starting with the book cover. The hardcover edition’s black cloth shows a white rectangle in the centre, framing a black and white collage of four trimmed photographs. On top in the middle is a photograph of a 1930s street scene in Kingston, Jamaica, cut in the shape of the island. Below this scene on the lower right-hand side emerges the sceptical gaze of a young girl in a white dress, socks, and shoes. It is a photograph of the author, Hazel Carby, at the age of two, standing in “a typical London back yard” (100). In the upper section of the collage, on both sides of the street scene, is the portrait of the author’s father, Carl Carby. The collage only reveals his left eye confronting the viewer directly: he looks friendly, bold, and inescapable. Considering position and size, the collage centres on the father’s portrait. Yet this portrait is covered by the daughter on the right, the Kingston street scene in the centre, and an old manuscript on the left. The manuscript, written in English round hand, notes Lilly Carby’s last will, in which the early nineteenth-century relative refers to “his goods and chattel which, of course, included his most valuable property, enslaved people” (Hazel Carby 2021, personal communication). While the black and white colouring, picture frame, and portrait evoke the nostalgia often associated with memorabilia, the collage and content complicate this sentimental reading as the book cover critically assembles personal, historical, and archival documents. Carby’s text moves beyond forms of nostalgia by dispensing with a “yearning for a different time” (Boym xv) while meticulously connecting fragments from past centuries with the present, Jamaica with England, the personal with the historical and the political. Indeed, Imperial Intimacies combines several different, even contradictory genres. On the front-page flap, the publisher, Verso Books, categorises the text as “History/Biography.” This classification is further complicated by a third term that appears in the book title and again in the text, describing it as a “tale” (232). The book thus shifts between story, biography, and history to create a hybrid genre that has provoked questions and comments prior to its publication and after, for instance, from Marisa J. Fuentes (Fuentes 168), Patrick Sullivan (Carby, “Knowing Yourself ”), and Jeffrey Williams (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). In an interview with the philologist Williams, Carby states: “It’s not just a memoir; it’s trying to use memory and history to play off each other” (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). Just as the collage on the book cover is a composition of fragments, Imperial
{"title":"Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby (review)","authors":"Jarula M. I. Wegner","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby is an intricate and complex work, starting with the book cover. The hardcover edition’s black cloth shows a white rectangle in the centre, framing a black and white collage of four trimmed photographs. On top in the middle is a photograph of a 1930s street scene in Kingston, Jamaica, cut in the shape of the island. Below this scene on the lower right-hand side emerges the sceptical gaze of a young girl in a white dress, socks, and shoes. It is a photograph of the author, Hazel Carby, at the age of two, standing in “a typical London back yard” (100). In the upper section of the collage, on both sides of the street scene, is the portrait of the author’s father, Carl Carby. The collage only reveals his left eye confronting the viewer directly: he looks friendly, bold, and inescapable. Considering position and size, the collage centres on the father’s portrait. Yet this portrait is covered by the daughter on the right, the Kingston street scene in the centre, and an old manuscript on the left. The manuscript, written in English round hand, notes Lilly Carby’s last will, in which the early nineteenth-century relative refers to “his goods and chattel which, of course, included his most valuable property, enslaved people” (Hazel Carby 2021, personal communication). While the black and white colouring, picture frame, and portrait evoke the nostalgia often associated with memorabilia, the collage and content complicate this sentimental reading as the book cover critically assembles personal, historical, and archival documents. Carby’s text moves beyond forms of nostalgia by dispensing with a “yearning for a different time” (Boym xv) while meticulously connecting fragments from past centuries with the present, Jamaica with England, the personal with the historical and the political. Indeed, Imperial Intimacies combines several different, even contradictory genres. On the front-page flap, the publisher, Verso Books, categorises the text as “History/Biography.” This classification is further complicated by a third term that appears in the book title and again in the text, describing it as a “tale” (232). The book thus shifts between story, biography, and history to create a hybrid genre that has provoked questions and comments prior to its publication and after, for instance, from Marisa J. Fuentes (Fuentes 168), Patrick Sullivan (Carby, “Knowing Yourself ”), and Jeffrey Williams (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). In an interview with the philologist Williams, Carby states: “It’s not just a memoir; it’s trying to use memory and history to play off each other” (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). Just as the collage on the book cover is a composition of fragments, Imperial","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"178 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46011942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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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