The essays in this volume examine the tensions between two major political and intellectual structures: the global and the postcolonial, charting the ways in which such tensions are constitutive of changing power relations between the individual, the nation-state and global forces. Contributors ask how postcolonialism, with its emphasis on cultural difference and diversity, can respond to the new, neo-imperialist imperatives of globalization. Signalling the discursive grounds for debate is the fissures/fusions title, suggesting alternative categorizations of stereotypes like 'global...

Soyinka's representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer's idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist's intellectual...

Cultural memory involves a community's shared memories, the selection of which is based on current political and social needs. A past that is significant to a national group is re-imagined by generating new meanings that replace earlier certainties and fixed symbols or myths. This creates literary syncretisms with moments of undecidability. The analysis in this book draws on Renate Lachmann's theory of intertextuality to show how novels that blur boundaries without standing in for history are prone to intervene in cultural memory. A brief overview of Aboriginal politics between the 1920s and...

Lewis Nkosi is one of South Africa's foremost writers and critics, and one of the few survivors of the exile generation dating from the Drum era. Up until now, however, no full length study has been done on his work. This is a gap in South African literary history and criticism that this book is intended to fill. Besides his well known earlier works, Nkosi is still very much an active writer as the publication in 2002 of his novel, Underground People, shows, with his latest novel due out in 2005. The timing of Still Beating the Drum, a book which intends to highlight and evaluate his...

Western exploitation of other peoples is inseparable from attitudes and practices relating to other species and the extra-human environment generally. Colonial depredations turn on such terms as 'human', 'savage', 'civilised', 'natural', 'progressive', and on the legitimacies governing apprehension and control of space and landscape. Environmental impacts were reinforced, in patterns of unequal 'exchange', by the transport of animals, plants and peoples throughout the European empires, instigating widespread ecosystem change under unequal power regimes (a harbinger of today's...

Hidden mutualities link the work of major postcolonial writers with Christopher Marlowe's drama of the Faustian pact - the manipulation of the material world in exchange for the soul - written as the 'scientific' world-view was emerging which accompanied the imperial expansion of Europe and has determined the economic and social structures of the colonial and postcolonial world. This fascinating study brings together researches in widely different fields to show how Doctor Faustus reflects a Gnostic / Hermetic tradition marginalized within the dominant European power structures. Rediscovered...

The Infinite Longing for Home is a groundbreaking study of Ben Okri's and K.S. Maniam's literary problematization of 'home' in relation to subjectivity and the nation within and beyond the context of Nigeria and Malaysia. Drawing on Lacan, Zizek, Laclau and Mouffe, and weaving through history, politics, philosophy and literature, this book critically examines the motives and means by which peoples forced to live together in a country love and hate each other, and overlook the truths about themselves, their actions and beliefs. It looks into why some embrace heterogeneity and open-endedness...

Wilson Harris, many times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a British writer of Guyanese origin, one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century, and probably the first to use and interpret the aesthetically fruitful notion of cross-culturalism. Harris's insights into the profound symbiosis between history, culture and artistic expression were initially inspired by his encounters with Amerindians in the Guyanese rainforest interior, where he led many surveying expeditions. These encounters aroused his interest in pre-Columbian peoples, who figure...

The debate over whether religious or secular identities provide the most viable model for a wider national identity has been a continuous feature of Indian politics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Moreover, in the last thirty years the increasingly communal articulation of popular politics and the gradual rise of a constellation of Hindu nationalist parties headed by the BJP has increased the urgency of this debate. While Indian writing in English has fostered a long tradition of political dissent, and has repeatedly questioned ethnocentric, culturally exclusive forms of...

This book is the record of a colloquium held at Churchill College, Cambridge. It pursues lines of discussion radiating out from the core theme of the power of the image (understood in its pictorial, iconic, sensory and verbal senses). Writers, scholars and artists are grouped in pairs representing the two language-cultures (English and French). Central topics covered include the manifold ways in which our readings of pictorial images old and contemporary can bridge cultures, language politics and the politics of culture, the limitless and instructive senses of the concept of the 'word', the...