The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English

Abstract

The past century has witnessed the extraordinary flowering of fiction, poetry and drama from countries previously colonised by Britain, an output which has changed the map of English literature. This introduction, from a leading figure in the field, explores a wide range of Anglophone post-colonial writing from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland and Britain. Lyn Innes compares the ways in which authors shape communal identities and interrogate the values and representations of peoples in newly independent nations. Placing its emphasis on literary rather than theoretical texts, this book offers detailed discussion of many internationally renowned authors, including James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Les Murray and Derek Walcott. It also includes historical surveys of the main countries discussed, a glossary, and biographical notes on major authors. Lyn Innes provides a rich and subtle guide to a vast array of authors and texts from a wide range of sites.

Forging a New Nation: A Study of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

“…Innes has remarked: "James Joyce reacts to the monolithic Celtic identity endorsed by the Gaelic League and the Celtic Revival by foregrounding a Jewish Irishman of Hungarian descent as his central protagonist, and including also Italian and Anglo-Irish characters and an array of European and American references" (162). [6] Joyce"s repudiation of the arbitrary concept of the nation state gets validated through the Daedalus myth which prologues and epilogues the narrative. Daedalus and Icarus always symbolize the urge to escape from the labyrinths of imprisonment which in this fictional context epitomizes the idea of confinement and narrowness of the modern nation state.…”

“…In Imagined Communities Anderson demonstrated with much subtlety and originality that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions such as language or race or culture or religion. They had been in Europe and every where else in the world, imagined into existence (6). He argued that the historical experience of nationalism in Western Europe, in the Americas and in Russia had supplied for all subsequent nationalisms a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they liked.…”

“…Partha Chatterjee observes that "anti colonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains -the material and the spiritual" (6). The material is the "outside" domain of the economy of state-craft, of science and of technology.…”

“…"If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this its true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power" (6). Chatterjee says that the dynamics of this historical project is missed when the story of nationalism begins with the contest for political power.…”

(Ence)nação teatral: A representação do feminino em The Countess Cathleen, de William Yeats

“…Como "mídia" de maior envergadura do que o texto impresso, o teatro era ovacionado como instrumental no processo de descolonização, enquanto tribuna de expressão nacional(ista), por lideranças políticas como Arthur Griffith (1902), que apontou o Irish National Theatre como "um poderoso agente na construção de uma nação" (p. 2), e o Sinn Féinn, que o enalteceu como "a maior força nacionalizadora de que temos posse" (apud DEAN, 2010, p. 61). Tal seria o contributo do drama no processo de descolonização do imaginário que a Irlanda, primeira colônia inglesa a obter independência, inspiraria outras a também se valerem do drama em seus projetos de emancipação, tais como a Austrália, onde Louis Esson, à semelhança dos irlandeses, criou um teatro nacional; a Nigéria, onde escritores como Wole Soyinka se interessaram, a partir dos irlandeses, pela relação entre teatro e nacionalismo; e o Caribe, onde Derek Walcott se inspirou em Synge (INNES, 2007).…”