Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology

ISBN-13: 9780415397971 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 224 str.

Walter Goebel;Saskia Schabio;Walter Goebel

Opis

Exploring one of the hottest topics in humanities at the moment – diaspora – this controversial volume challenges prominent theoretical frameworks of Paul Gilroy to redefine and expand ideas of Black Atlantic.

Debates about the ‘Black Atlantic’ have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual African-American focus of the field, presenting fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to:

• redefine and expand ideas of Black Atlantic
• challenge unified concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective
• question fashionable concepts of the transnational by returning to the local and the national
• offer new approaches to cross-cultural mechanisms of exchange
• explore utopian uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere.

Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements  Introduction  Negotiating African Modernities  The Presence of the Past in Peripheral Modernities.  Black Modernity, Nationalism and Transnationalism: The Challenge of Black South African Poetry.  Failure to Connect – Resistant Modernities at National Crossroads: Solomon Plaatje and Mohandas Gandhi.  Township Modernism  Caribbean (in)Versions of Modernity.  Ulysses and the Shape-Shifter: Caribbean Modernity in Pauline Melville’s Writings.  V.S. Naipaul: The Limitations of Transnationalism and Technological Progress.  Colonial Creations of the West  The Technology of Publicity in the Atlantic Semi-Peripheries: Benjamin Franklin, Modernity, and the Nigerian Slave Trade.  Spectrality’s Secret Sharers: Occultism as (Post)Colonial Affect.  Peripheral Interpretations of Technology.  Transitionality at Home and Abroad: Some Examples from India and its Virtual Diaspora.  Technologies in Hanif Kureishi’s ‘The Body’.  Travels in Technotopia: Modernization and Technology in Postcolonial Utopian and Dystopian Writing

O autorze

Walter Goebel, Saskia Schabio