... (Quillahuaman, 2023, p. 68) 24 In Rocío's experience, the sense of inferiority is visible due to the treatment her family and others receive, and even though she is a child, she senses how they are unjustifiably mistreated. This racist and xenophobic bureaucratic system is a result of the long standing belief in a pure European identity that is threatened when others are displaced into its territory, resulting, as proposed by Paul Jay (2021), in an undeniable necessity to question the universality and purity of traditional Western concepts. ...
This paper examines how the representations of female
experiences in Marrón, a transnational Life Writing text written by
Rocío Quillahuaman, challenge a hegemonic European identity.
This European identity was forged after centuries of cultural
productions, especially narratives, that vouched for its superiority.
In our globalized world today, transnational subjects, who
mobilize for varied reasons, face discriminatory legislations and
unfair bureaucratic procedures based on their backgrounds and
affiliations. Although identities may benefit a sense of belonging
and camaraderie that are part of living in societal structures, the
fact that a hegemonic European identity has been used to
discriminate needs to be contested. To accomplish this
contestation, the research’s method encompasses a close reading
of the text with a thematic deductive analytic approach to bring
forth the importance that transnational narratives, especially those
written by Brown women, have in the new modes of identity
construction. Through the representations of female transnational
experiences, which I referred to as: 1) the monolingual
transnational female subject, 2) the displaced transnational female
subject, and 3) the unrepresented transnational female subject, this
paper argues in favor of a fluid transnational identity construction
that is context dependent and malleable through one’s lifetime and
physical (dis)placement.
... У своїй нещодавно опублікованій монографії Пол Джей розуміє транснаціональну літературу як «різновид літератури, що виникає в конкретний історичний момент, пов'язаний спільним набором тем, які можна ідентифікувати, і складається з текстів, що об'єднані використанням подібних літературних прийомів, особливо добре пристосованих для їх дослідження» [7, c. 2]. Варто також додати, що Пол Джей формулює два підходи до тлумачення «транснаціональної літератури»: перший передбачає розгляд транснаціональної літератури як моделі літературознавства, яка розглядає всю літературу як мобільну в потенційно глобальному масштабі, за другим -це сучасна форма, пов'язана з певним набором історичних сил [7]. ...
This article focuses on the life writing narratives of diasporic writers in Europe, such as the Italian writer of Somali descent Igiaba Scego, who, through her writing and public role, manages to create powerful interventions on issues of belonging, diversity, and creativity, contributing to a renewed understanding of gender knowledge and cultures of equalities in localized as well as global contexts. This article focuses on her role as a writer as well as a postcolonial intellectual, as she is not just a spokesperson for her community, nor simply a promotor of universal values, but someone who straddles complex positionalities in their location in imperial–colonial orders. We align ourselves with the notion of postcolonial intellectuals as those who speak truth to power on issues of cultural integration and gender equalities). In her autobiographical work titled La mia casa è dove sono, published in 2010, Scego draws a subjective map of different places inhabited by her family: Somalia, Italy, and Great Britain, contributing to the understanding of unbelonging and transnationalism through topics of migration, biculturalism, gender, race, and identity.
The historical novel can be said to represent one of the most popular narrative genres written in the north-western Iberian language of Galician. How this has played out for women writers who engage with feminist activism merits particular attention, in a demonstration of the key contributions of minority-language writing by women to global debates. Teresa Moure’s Herba moura (2005) and Eva Moreda’s A Veiga é como un tempo distinto (2011) stand as well-known and widely circulating examples of Galician-language women’s historical fiction that reflect distinct ways in which the intersection between gender and social class plays out in transnational narrative. Drawing from feminist scholarship and working-class women’s literary studies, this chapter considers how these two popular Galician-language historical novels reinscribe working-class women’s subjectivities back into historical narrative across the boundaries of time and space, signalling and reimagining overlooked acts of resistance to interlocking forms of oppression by women in service roles. The analysis contrasts Teresa Moure’s depiction of Hélène Jans, a seventeenth-century Dutch maid and botanist who is based on the real-life mistress of philosopher René Descartes, with Eva Moreda’s fictionalised character Elisa, a Galician-Asturian emigrant to London in the ‘Swinging Sixties’ who becomes active in trade unions and the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Free link here: https://rdcu.be/eiKxI
The article contains a proposal to interpret the work and legend of Marek Hłasko in the transnational context of social and cultural changes in Europe and the world of the mid-1950s. The starting point is the commonly perceived and established in colloquial phraseology similarity of the Polish writer's image to the myth of James Dean and of his works to the literature of the British Young Angry Men. This allows us to ask about the relationship between the characters' class affiliation and consciousness and their image of masculinity, the new model of family life presented, and the role of the author’s tragic death in shaping the artistic legend. What constitutes the methodological framework of the analysis, is the concept of transnational research (transnational turn in literary studies), focusing on the analysis of intercultural connections and flows, while the historical, literary and cultural background is provided by the idea of Cold War culture as a transnational community of experience, which makes it possible to perceive and explain the fact of cultural analogies, similarities and convergences on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The conclusion of the article is that, seen in a transnational context, Hłasko's work and biography represent the most characteristic features and themes of Cold War culture: the experience of the Iron Curtain and migration, the bipolarity of the world, the fear of nuclear conflict, the expansion of popular culture.
Mostly ignored in studies of nineteenth-century women writers, Annie Vivanti (1866–1942) was anything but a minor figure in the Italian fin-de-siècle literary panorama. During her forty-year career, she published enormously successful novels, as well as poetry, short stories, plays, political writing, and a travelogue. Vivanti’s artistic persona was shaped by her multicultural upbringing she skillfully used to beguile and capture multiple readerships. Her mixed heritage also enabled her to maneuver among various political commitments, including Irish independence and Italian imperialism. As a practitioner of fictional autobiography, Vivanti blurred the line between truth and fiction, challenging readers to distinguish author from narrator and/or characters. As a stylist, she crafted her own feminized idiom which contested patriarchal paradigms. As a woman, she asserted her legitimacy as a female artist with full control of her authorship.
Two Chinese trans memoirs, Jin Xing’s Shanghai Tango (2007) and Lei Ming’s Life Beyond My Body (2016), present different possibilities of transnationality and transnormativity within the Chinese context of the pre-Covid-19 era. While both memoirs follow a Western structure of traditional trans memoirs, their embracing of Marxist and nationalist rhetoric or Christian concepts of the body present a significant departure from the traditional Western model. Jin is able to achieve the Chinese version of transnormativity approved by the Chinese state and live as an openly trans person who disavows politics; Lei remains ‘stealth’ and finds solace in a Christian discourse of androgyny. The texts are influenced by Western ideals of transness and medical transition, as well as neoliberal capitalism and Western religion, and are framed and formatted in English by Western editors and for Western readers. The iterations of transtopia that Lei and Jin find at the end of their narratives, however, are rooted in a sense of belonging to China.
Novelists that specialize in Young Adult (YA) literature are bringing classic books into the twenty-first century. Using comparisons of linguistic patterns, plots, and social representations in certain contexts, this research examines a few classic literary works and their updated equivalents. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Sara Benincasa updated version of the novel are the two selected works for comparison. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is compared to Seth Grahame-Smith's adaptation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In keeping with the study's main objective of examining and debating women's rights, roles, and limitations across the specified historical periods, the books chosen were chosen with feminist themes in mind. The purpose of the research is to pinpoint differences that provide light on why younger readers find these modern remakes more appealing. Keywords: Classics, Modern, Remake, Literature, Feminism, Women, Comparison.
Транснаціональність і транскультурність, які останніми десятиліттями привертають дедалі більшу увагу наукової спільноти, стали невід’ємною частиною новітньої літератури. Деколонізація та глобалізація, а також зумовлені ними мобільність і міграція стали тригерами розмивання етнічних, національних та культурних кордонів, що знайшло своє втілення і в літературознавстві. Транснаціональний поворот, який спостерігається в літературі з 90-х років XX ст., показує, що розуміння літературних творів в національних рамках більше не відповідає сучасній дійсності, а самі нації, культури та ідентичності характеризуються умовністю, фрагментарністю та гібридністю. І хоча розгляд транснаціональності зосереджується здебільшого на ліро-епічних творах, його прояви спостерігаються також в драматургії і театрі. У цій статті розглядається вплив Бертольта Брехта на сучасний транснаціональний і/або транскультурний театр. Зазначено, що оприявнення транснаціональних елементів у творчості драматурга відбувається як на рівні його п’єс, так і постановок. Зокрема, залучені Б. Брехтом ефекти очуження задля зображення дивного, чужого і незвичайного у власному "Я" мають вагомий вплив на становлення транснаціонального театру. Ще одним проявом транснаціонального є відхід драматурга від ідеї закритих націй і культур на користь відкритим, умовним і плинним. Важливий аспект становлять також інтертекстуальні референції його п’єс, які є художніми інтерпретаційними моделями відомих творів минулого і таким чином уможливлюють їхнє буття крізь простір і час. Зосереджуючись на процесах очуження, епічний театр Б. Брехта показує гібридність і фрагментарність не лише культур і націй, але й ідентичностей, чим спонукає читачів та глядачів до пошуку дивного в собі. Водночас теми і проблеми, які піднімаються в його п’єсах і постановках, не обмежуються локальними чи національними контекстами, а носять транснаціональний характер.
Il presente articolo intende indagare e comparare le modalità attraverso le quali Édouard Glissant e Salman Rushdie pensano e rappresentano la mondialità nelle proprie opere. In un primo momento verranno analizzati i percorsi intellettuali dei due autori, caratterizzati dalla ricerca di un “terzo-spazio” (oltre la dicotomia centro-periferia) all’interno del campo transnazionale della letteratura. In seguito, si inseriranno le loro riflessioni teoriche nel più ampio dibattito su World Literature e Littérature-monde. Infine, compareremo le loro concezioni del realismo, caratterizzate da uno stretto legame tra il locale transculturale (India e Antille) e il tout-monde creolizzato.
This article offers a re-reading of James Joyce’s “Eveline” as a transnational story. The concept of the transnational is brought into conversation with motherhood studies, more precisely, with the notion of the ‘mother-daughter dyad’ (Hirsch). The key here is to explore the formal and narratological clues that Joyce uses to convey religiously inflected inheritances of the maternal, inner splits, patterns of repression and matrophobic reflexes. Joyce partly maps Eveline’s psyche by engaging the reader in a set of delicate auditory exercises and, thereby, offers an indirect re-writing of the Orpheus myth. This article shows how the short story has been conceived as a sort of soundbox and demonstrates that Stephen Clingman’s conceptualisation of the transnational through ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ patterns of identity can be productively applied in the exploration of literary representations of mother-daughter relations as well.
"Some Theoretical Shortcomings in Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020. This paper is an analysis of some of the concepts (posthuman, capitalist realism, transnational) used in Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020, pointing out the way in which the author borrows some terms from current global debates and uses them as labels, without their theoretical backgrounds and foundation. This echoes another misunderstanding in Romanian literary studies, that of the term postmodernism, which is, Clinci argues, another example of self-colonization. Keywords: postmodernism, posthumanism, self-colonization, Romanian literature, capitalist realism"
This introductory essay for a special issue of the Journal of Transatlantic Studies on transnational transatlantic relations begins by providing a brief overview of the emergence of the transnational approach in the humanities and social sciences before tracking the development of the ‘transnational turn’ when applied to transatlantic studies in the fields of History and Literature. It goes on to consider the tendency of historical studies employing a transnational approach to focus on ‘ordinary people’, rather than ‘elites’, and suggests that when directed at the transatlantic region a transnational approach has the potential to bridge this divide. The introduction finishes with a brief overview of the articles included in the special issue.
The novels of W. G. Sebald, Vladimir Vertlib, Alexei Makushinsky, and many other contemporary writers around the world challenge both readers and researchers. These authors tend to have a (trans)migrant background and establish their texts at the intersection of many cultural codes, languages, and sign systems. Literary translingualism and multimodality from particular stylistic techniques are becoming dominant writing strategies for an entire corpus of outstanding fictional texts for which previous analytical approaches become irrelevant. This is new literature that needs to be addressed and discussed in a new way. This article hypothesizes that in such no- vels, a new – transitive – discursive practice is taking shape. The article presents the concept of transitive literary discourse and reveals some of its common features based on the three translingual novels. These are “Austerlitz” (2001) by W. G. Sebald (Germany – UK), “Way Stations” (1999) by Vladimir Vertlib (Russia – Austria), and “Steamship to Argentina” (2014) by Alexei Makushinsky (Russia – Germany). The authors of the article combine the me- thods of discourse analysis, historical and theoretical poetics. Mikhail Bakhtin’s works on the aesthetics of verbal creativity provide the methodological basis of the study. The intellectual toolkit of the transnational and visual methodological turns is also engaged. The study reflects a set of topical issues of modern literary theory aimed at understanding the language of literature and art at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (the era of globalization). Transitive literary texts actualize the problem of the language of description, methodology and analysis technique of a new literary discourse.
Today’s world is changing rapidly, and writers are sensitive to these dynamics in their work. This article examines the principle of movement in the poetics of two modern novels: Steamship to Argentina (2014) by the Russian-German writer Alexei Makushinsky and Runaways (2007) by Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. As the literary analysis demonstrates, the principle of movement is a constitutive element of the artistic whole of these novels. It defines the image of the character, plot, spatial and temporal coordinates, and figurative dimension. The very titles—Steamship to Argentina and Runaways—are metaphorical and esthetically significant. To reflect this significance, the authors of this article offer an alternative translation of the title of Olga Tokarczuk's novel. When published in English, it was titled Flights. However, Runaways is semantically closer to the original Polish Bieguni and, as the article demonstrates, correlates more strongly with the semantic level of the text. Drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's ideas on the historical poetics of the novel, this study concludes that the poetics of Steamship to Argentina and Runaways is a form of representation of the new picture of the world, dynamic and transitional. This new literary world is recreated through the mobile chronotope and translingualism.
Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.
Peer reviewed article. In our rapidly globalising world, cultures, as well as societies and identities, tend to be more fluid, less irreducibly different and less 'territorially fixed' than in the past (Schulze-Engler 2007, p. 27). Especially now, when cosmopolitan issues and pluralistic sensibilities - driven by transnational and transcommunal experiences - tend to become more relevant. It is within this emerging social context that a new generation of mobile writers, on the move across cultural and national boundaries, has started expressing a "transcultural" sensibility and mode of being, fostered by "the process of self-distancing, self-estrangement, and self criticism of one's own cultural identities and assumptions" (Epstein 1999, p. 307). In this paper, I argue that the main element that distinguishes these early 'transcultural writers' from their precursors and/or 'cousin species' (migrant/exile/diasporic/postcolonial writers) - albeit all belonging to the wider 'genus' of 'the literature of mobility' - is their relaxed, neonomadic attitude when facing issues linked to identity, nationality, rootlessness and dislocation. An attitude that reflects itself also in their creative outputs, which can already be inscribed within the realm of transcultural literature, a literature able to transcend the borders of a single culture in its choice of topic, vision and scope, thus contributing to promote a wider global literary perspective (Pettersson 2006).
In this essay we attempt to map out a conceptual framework for analyzing a cluster of related practices subsumed under the broad banner of "cross-cultural theatre." For the purposes of our discussion, cross-cultural theatre encompasses resources at the level of narrative content, performance aesthetics, production processes, and/or reception by an interpretive community.
This essay suggests, first of all, that the power of transnational studies lies in its fundamentally dialectical approach, and, secondly, that this approach opens the way to a fresh consideration of the human subject of history. In the kind of transnational studies highlighted here, the focus is less strictly on the movements of people and capital across national borders and more on the implicitly other-oriented interactions between and among nations, making them mutually contingent phenomena, a situation which in turn entails intersubjective and intertextual events and calls for a fresh philosophy of the subject. Doyle draws on the thinking of Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Louis Althusser to explore one such possible "transnational philosophy." The second half of the essay pursues the idea that literature offers a micro-world of the dialectics of both transnational history and existential intersubjectivity. Doyle interprets Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative in relation to each other as well as in relation to transnational Atlantic history. Such readings model a method for transnational literary studies, one grounded in philosophy as well as history.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This essay reflects on the disciplinary trajectory of a course that I have taught both in foreign languages and literatures and in ethnic studies on the theme of migration in Hispanic Caribbean theatre. Crossing disciplinary borders sharpens our understanding of how theatrical performance has registered the complex social, economic, and political networks that connect the Hispanic Caribbean to the United States. Moreover, I argue that the viewing of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican theatre through a diasporic and transnational lens helps explain in part its marginalization in Latin American theatre studies, a field still dominated by national frames of reference. Exploring interdisciplinary approaches to teaching Latin American theatre not only resists the “border control” exerted by institutional units and academic disciplines but also helps redefine the field and spotlight its unique contributions to social scientific and humanistic inquiry.
The six theatre scholars who have contributed to this special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film seek to account for the global scale of nineteenthcentury performance by establishing transnational frameworks for theatre studies, a field still often defined in terms of national
traditions. For much of the long nineteenth century, performance was global and global culture depended as much on performance as on literature in print. The essays collected here demonstrate that ceaseless mobility across national borders helped to define the experience of writing for, performing
in and going to the theatre throughout the nineteenth century. These essays also add a significant dimension to the burgeoning scholarly literature on global theatre by emphasising intersections between performance, print and other media and by documenting and analysing the practices of transnational
adaptation and remediation across international lines that were ubiquitous in a pre-copyright age. They demonstrate that nineteenth-century theatre may have been as crucial as poetry or the novel to creating the borderless global world whose value is so often hotly debated today.
We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.
The turn to postcolonial approaches, inaugurated by Peter Hulme, Ania Loomba, and others in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has hugely invigorated the field of English Renaissance drama, giving us an increasingly complex picture of the role that the theater played as England, and later Great Britain, embarked on its commercial and imperial expansion. The interest in England’s relations with the lands and peoples that lay beyond its borders has led to a range of fascinating work on race, empire, and economics, among other topics.1
After a brief excursus to the New World, exemplified by the signal work of Peter Hulme and of Stephen Greenblatt on The Tempest, the field has focused on the representation of Mediterranean exchanges on the early modern stage.2 In particular, critics have explored how the theater managed the threat of religious difference and the seductiveness of the Muslim world.3 These studies have offered important correctives to the bald “application” of Said’s Orientalism to the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on the discrepancies between England’s lack of power in the period and its imaginative responses to that lack. The theater thus appears as a key space for compensatory fantasies, in which England functioned as the center of power and the cultural norm. Moreover, given its inherent performativity, the stage served to investigate the malleability of identity when faced with the possibility of conversion, the dreaded and yet enticing moment of “turning Turk.” Conversely, the dramatic resistance to such enticements could serve to stage a core of Englishness around which to consolidate a national identity. The recent work of such critics as Benedict Robinson, Valerie Forman, Cyrus Mulready, and Jane Degenhardt profitably explores how dramatic form refracts the complexities of an expanding world, one in which England was often all too aware of its marginality.4 By introducing such neglected genres as the romance (in its larger, non-Shakespearean sense) and the tragicomedy into the discussion, these critics combine the study of form with a finely grained historicism.
The postcolonial paradigm has also served to interrogate the category of the nation as it is abundantly rehearsed on the early modern stage. The national is no longer a given: instead, critics have stressed the constructedness of both England and English, exploring the representation of the “archipelagic” elements that made up Great Britain, the often vexed development of the English language, and the effort required to distinguish England from both imperial models and rivals.5 The recuperation of England’s early experience of empire in Ireland, with all its attendant violence, has been particularly important in this regard, going well beyond English drama to offer new readings of Spenser and of Gaelic texts and culture.6
Yet despite these geographic and conceptual expansions, the field of early modern drama as a whole has remained strikingly monolingual, steadfastly focused on English texts. It may be that our national preoccupations endure precisely because the field has expanded so much in other dimensions: scholars who must master a variety of discourses, complex historical contexts, and a whole range of specialized knowledges in order to produce the historicist, cultural-studies work that is now standard in the field may find it challenging also to familiarize themselves with literature in other contemporary traditions. There is also, as Jonathan Burton and Walter Cohen have both pointed out, a reluctance on the part of critics to use translations when they do not have the linguistic skills to access texts in the original.7 The unfortunate result of this reticence is a continued focus on English-language texts, even when critics themselves recognize that the problems they are tackling would be better addressed by considering a wider corpus. We are always surprised anew by the cosmopolitanism of early modern texts and subjects, no matter how many times we have encountered it; only a broader critical scope, similarly unfettered by national boundaries, can truly do it justice.
Yet national habits die hard. Scholars trained to consider literature as a national phenomenon or to study an English-language heritage are unlikely to look further afield. In particular, the unabated pressure for graduate students to prove their mettle in the field by tackling...
As a "modern" institution shaped equally by European influences and indigenous circumstances, urban theatre first appeared in the colonial Indian cities of Calcutta and Bombay (now Kolkata and Mumbai) in the mid-nineteenth century, and has developed since independence into a complex, multilingual, national and postcolonial formation. However, to create "modern Indian theatre" as a field of study, or to define the qualities of modernity that might differentiate it from other periods in theatre history, has been a demanding critical task, because of anomalies in Western as well as Indian approaches to the subject and the problematization of the very idea of modernity in relation to Indian theatre and performance. Where Indian theatre is concerned, scholars and critics in the West have had a decided predilection for premodern cultural forms whose significant histories lie between 200 and 1700 ce, and that consequently predate the cultural interfusions of colonial and postcolonial modernity and modernization. From the late-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, Orientalist criticism privileged classical Sanskrit literature over the postclassical vernacular traditions, and gave drama a preeminent position among Sanskrit genres, making Indian theatre virtually synonymous with the poetically exquisite "national theatre of the Hindus" exemplified by Kalidasa. In the later twentieth century, classical textuality as embodied in Sanskrit drama has ceased to be the primary locus of Indian theatre studies in the West, and the interest among anthropologists, historians of religion, area-studies scholars, and interculturalists has shifted to genres of premodern or nonmodern performance, such as Raslila, Ramlila, Kathakali and Nautanki. These new disciplinary perspectives are not concerned with theatre as a commercial urban institution, but with the place of performance within the ritualistic, religious, or social life of particular communities; concurrently, the artistic involvement with traditional Indian performance genres on the part of playwright-directors like Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, and Richard Schechner has had a transformative effect on Western intercultural theory and practice. Modern and contemporary urban Indian theatres, however, continue to be largely excluded from the circuits of Western scholarship and performance.
In Indian theatre criticism, modernity and the modern have proved to be problematic for other reasons. Even if we consider only the criticism written and published in English since the 1920s (which represents a small fraction of the total body of Indian criticism on drama, theatre, and performance), until quite recently, there has been no clear historicization or periodization of the modern, and very little discursive engagement with the paradoxes and ambivalences of Indian modernity across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The field of criticism has consisted mainly of "nationalist" theatre histories that seek to establish the antiquity, unity, and continuity of Indian theatre and performance traditions through broad chronological overviews, studies that focus on theatre in a single language and region, and collections that present "Indian theatre" as the simple sum of descriptive histories covering fourteen or sixteen major modern languages. All three models elide the historically unprecedented nature of the mid-nineteenth-century "modern revolution" in urban theatre, its unpredictable evolution under colonial and postcolonial conditions, and the connections it has generated across theatrically vital languages and regions over a century and a half. A fourth, overtly decolonizing strain in post-independence theory and criticism has characterized Westernized conventions of representation in urban theatre (especially the proscenium stage) as damaging colonialist legacies that must be countered through a return to pre-colonial, indigenous traditions of performance. Within these discursive polarities, definitions of theatrical modernity are usually under- or over-determined: they denote either a hazy set of qualities with uncertain historical coordinates or practices that must be placed under ideological erasure, because of their manifest links to colonialism.
Against this backdrop, the titles under review represent significant advances in the theoretical, historical, and interpretive "siting" of theatrical modernity, both in itself and in relation to premodern performance traditions. Complicating the earlier distinctions between Indian and Western criticism, they point to the consolidation of modern Indian theatre studies as a scholarly field and mark a decisive movement away from Orientalist legacies in the West, as well as the modes of descriptive, polemical, and journalistic criticism that had prevailed in India for most of the twentieth century. All four volumes also...
:This essay traces the history, current state, and potential future of comparative literature. The great expansions have coincided with aspirations for international understanding. The term first emerged after the Napoleonic wars. The field soared in the late 19th century, became a discipline after the Second World War, and experienced its most vigorous growth (of departments and programs) in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.Comparative literature has always worried its supporters as well as its skeptics. At the same time it has experienced a constant crisis within. In each episode it has responded by enlarging its purview and self-definition. Thus in the late 20th century it transcended the European literatures that had long been its bedrock to embrace East-West literary and cultural relations in ever-broader outward orbits, encompassing eventually first Edward Said's orientalism, then Homi Bhabha's deconstructivist postcolonialism, and finally Gayatri Spivak's eclecticism. The models that served during the extended pax americana seem poorly suited to terrorism, war, and globalization. Supranationalism cannot be lightly readjusted to fit transnationalism. But comparative literature can and will survive, so long as balances persist between theory and practice, so long as interdisciplinarity does not come at the cost of disciplinarity, and so long as the indivisible relationships uniting humanism, humanities, and humaneness are not forgotten. While comparative literature retains its emphases on language-training and critical skills, and while it satisfies desires of students to transcend boundaries culturally, interpretatively, and otherwise, it will not only always remain alive but even often thrive.
Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
How shall cosmopolitanism be conceived in relation to globalization, capitalism, and modernity? The geopolitical imaginary nourished by the term and processes of globalization lays claim to the homogeneity of the planet from above--economically, politically, and culturally. The term cosmopolitanism is, instead, used as a counter to globalization, although not necessarily in the sense of globalization from below. Globalization from below invokes, rather, the reactions to globalization from those populations and geohistorical areas of the planet that suffer the consequences of the global economy. There are, then, local histories that plan and project global designs and others that have to live with them. Cosmopolitanism is not easily aligned to either side of globalization, although the term implies a global project. How shall we understand cosmopolitanism in relation to these alternatives? Let's assume then that globalization is a set of designs to manage the world while cosmopolitanism is a set of projects toward planetary conviviality. The first global design of the modern world was Christianity, a cause and a consequence of the incorporation of the Americas into the global vision of an orbis christianus. It preceded the civilizing mission, the intent to civilize the world under the model of the modern European nation-states. The global design of Christianity was part (End Page 721) of the European Renaissance and was constitutive of modernity and of its darker side, coloniality. The global design of the civilizing mission was part of the European Enlightenment and of a new configuration of modernity/coloniality. The cosmopolitan project corresponding to Christianity's global design was mainly articulated by Francisco de Vitoria at the University of Salamanca while the civilizing global design was mainly articulated by Immanuel Kant at the University of Königsberg. In other words, cosmopolitan projects, albeit with significant differences, have been at work during both moments of modernity. The first was a religious project; the second was secular. Both, however, were linked to coloniality and to the emergence of the modern/colonial world. Coloniality, in other words, is the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility. The colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, consolidated an idea of the West: a geopolitical image that exhibits chronological movement. Three overlapping macronarratives emerge from this image. In the first narrative, the West originates temporally in Greece and moves northwest of the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. In the second narrative, the West is defined by the modern world that originated with the Renaissance and with the expansion of capitalism through the Atlantic commercial circuit. In the third narrative, Western modernity is located in Northern Europe, where it bears the distinctive trademark of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. While the first narrative emphasizes the geographical marker West as the keyword of its ideological formation, the second and third link the West more strongly with modernity. Coloniality as the constitutive side of modernity emerges from these latter two narratives, which, in consequence, link cosmopolitanism intrinsically to coloniality. By this I do not mean that it is improper to conceive and analyze cosmopolitan projects beyond these parameters, as Sheldon Pollock does in this issue of Public Culture. I am stating simply that I will look at cosmopolitan projects within the scope of the modern/colonial world--that is, located chronologically in the 1500s and spatially in the northwest Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. While it is possible to imagine a history that, like Hegel's, begins with the origin of humanity, it is also possible to tell stories with different beginnings, which is no less arbitrary than to proclaim the beginning with the origin of humanity or of Western civilization. The crucial point is not when
The Thing Around Your Neck
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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
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The Old Drift: A Novel
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The House of Broken Angels
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The Divine Comedy, trans
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The Epic of Gilgamesh
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Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
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Oculus: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf
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Flights,' a Novel That Never Settles Down
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Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies
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Colonization in Reverse
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When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
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The Account: Avar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación
- Álvar Cabeza De Vaca
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- James Kirkwood
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