Maria Boletsi
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804782760
- eISBN:
- 9780804785372
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804782760.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” ...
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Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.Less
Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which “civilization” fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others “barbarians.” Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. The book recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.
Vilashini Cooppan
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804754903
- eISBN:
- 9780804772501
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804754903.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This book tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood as superseding national borders, the book ...
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This book tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood as superseding national borders, the book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics. Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, it explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen; the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.Less
This book tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood as superseding national borders, the book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics. Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, it explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen; the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.
