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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa
Returning To East Africa Via India: On M. G. Vassanji’S And Home Was Kariakoo, Shizen Ozawa
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article “Returning to East Africa via India,” Shizen Ozawa examines how M. G. Vassanji further develops his diasporic aesthetics in his latest travel book/ memoir And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa (2014) from two perspectives. First, the essay explores some possible influences of his earlier travelogue A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008). It seems partly because of his deepening relationship with his land of ancestral origin that in And, Vassanji emphasizes the cross-continental connections between East Africa and India more strongly than in his earlier works. Especially, he characterizes the very presence of …
Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo
Revisiting "Home" In Ghanaian Poetry: Awoonor, Anyidoho And Adzei, Gabriel Edzordzi Agbozo
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The idea of “home” is a significant occurrence in postcolonial literature, as it connects to other ideas as identity, nationhood, and culture. This paper discusses “home” in Ghanaian poetry focusing on three well-regarded poets: Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, and Mawuli Adzei. These poets come from the Ewe ethnic group, and engage with the Pan-African project in both their scholarly and creative expressions. Drawing on John Berger, Sara Dessen, and Ewe thought on the afterlife, this paper suggests two major types of “home” in the works of these three poets: the physical, and the metaphysical. Physical “home” refer to the Wheta …
Recovering The Archive And Finding Forgiveness In Park’S The Truth Commissioner, Aleksandra Hajduczek
Recovering The Archive And Finding Forgiveness In Park’S The Truth Commissioner, Aleksandra Hajduczek
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article “Recovering the Archive and Finding Forgiveness in Park’s The Truth Commissioner,” the author utilizes Jacque Derrida's theories about the function of archivization and the “impossible madness” of pure forgiveness to examine how these issues are addressed in post peace process Troubles fiction, focusing specifically on David Park's 2008 novel The Truth Commissioner. Park's text provides a particularly relevant example of the tension that Derrida outlines between the need for an unconditional, pure, and "hyperbolic" forgiveness and the conditional, judicial forgiveness that he associates with the truth recovery process.
Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim
Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …
Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy
Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Valerie Kennedy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, “Changez/Cengiz's Changing Beliefs in The Reluctant Fundamentalist” Valerie Kennedy analyzes the interrelation of individual subjectivity and global capitalism and the conflict between two belief systems in Mohsin Hamid’s novel. These are, first, a neoliberal system that sees individuals as rationally self-interested, mobile, economic units, and, second, a system based on a humanist definition of individuals as defined by nation, family, and tradition. Changez, the novel’s protagonist, initially endorses the first, but later rejects it for the second, due to his growing awareness of the impact on Pakistan of American geopolitics after 9/11. The essay also examines …
Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco
Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …
Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany
Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.
Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan
Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …
Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided for the introduction.
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.