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Theorizing The Diaspora, John C. Hawley

English

In his provocative essay on the place of the committed writer in contemporary western society (“Inside the Whale”), George Orwell makes a passing observation about the effects of exile, self-imposed or otherwise, on the scope of a writer’s subject and purpose: “[L]eaving your native land,” he suggests, “[. . .] means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow down his range to the street, the cafJ, the church, the brothel …

Edward Said, John Berger, Jean Mohr: In Search Of An Other Optic, John C. Hawley

English

We have no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubenstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements.
-Said, After the Last Sky ( 17)

This humble epigraph spoken on behalf of the Palestinian people by one of its most visible apologists now serves ironically as his own epitaph, for Edward Said surely has achieved as impressive a position in academia as anyone in the twentieth century, and he now enters the lists of memorable contributors to the human project. One notes that such a sentence, relatively brief as it may be, nonetheless & bristles with the combative …

"Archaic Ambivalence": The Case Of South Africa, John C. Hawley

English

Copyright © 2006 Lexington Books. Reproduced by permission of Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint.

Land, Labor, And Colonial Economics In Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan", Michelle Burnham

English

As long as critics have written about it, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan has been positioned as a counterhistory to William Brad ford's canonical Of Plymouth Plantation. One vein of critical reception has dismissed Morton's text as a flawed literary anomaly, effectively re peating Bradford's own befuddled and anxious response to Morton's aes thetics.1 A smaller but impassioned vein of literary criticism has, in turn, elevated Morton over Bradford on the basis of his egalitarianism, proto environmentalism, or multiculturalism avant la lettre?essentially cele brating Morton as a more laudable expression of individualism and free dom than that represented by the …