African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
317 p., While a great deal of postcolonial criticism has examined how the processes of hybridity, mestizaje, creolization, and syncretism impact African diasporic literature, Oakley employs the heuristic of the "commonplace" to recast our sense of the politics of such literature. Her analysis of commonplace poetics reveals that postcolonial poetic and political moods and aspirations are far more complex than has been admitted. African Atlantic writers summon the utopian potential of Romanticism, which had been stricken by Anglo-European exclusiveness and racial entitlement, and project it as an attain.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
149 p., Examines Marshall's use of the trope of travel within and between the United States and the Caribbean to critique ideologies of development, tourism, and globalization as neo-imperial. This examination of travel in Marshall's To Da-Duh, In Memoriam; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; and Daughters exposes the asymmetrical structures of power that exist between the two regions.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p., Traces a trio of interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy, Indonesian modernism of Pramoedya's Buru quartet, and creole modernism of the Caribbean in Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea.
