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- Helen Tiffin has degrees in humanities and science from Australia and Canada, and was formerly a professor of English... moreHelen Tiffin has degrees in humanities and science from Australia and Canada, and was formerly a professor of English at the Universities of Queensland and Tasmania. She also held a senior Canada Research Chair in English and postcolonial studies at Queen's University, Canada. She is currently a research fellow in animal studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and literary theory, the representation of animals in scientific and literary works, and environmental history and the preservation of biodiversity. She is currently working on the philosophical and practical clashes between environmental conservationists and animal welfare proponents, and on problems with traditional conservation measures in an era of climate change. She has published numerous articles on postcolonial literatures and literary theory, animal representation, and, with Bill Ashcroft and Gareth Griffiths, three books on postcolonial subjects. She authored Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2006) with Graham Huggan, and her most recent publication, with Robert Cribb and Helen Gilbert, is Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (2015). She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.edit
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This chapter is by Sandra Williams and Helen Tiffin, offering individualv accounts of the damage done to a unique and iconic Australian Environment - the Great Barrier Reef. It is intended as a joint reflection on perceptions of local... more
This chapter is by Sandra Williams and Helen Tiffin, offering individualv accounts of the damage done to a unique and iconic Australian Environment - the Great Barrier Reef. It is intended as a joint reflection on perceptions of local and, by extension, global phenomena of environmental devastation, transcending scholarly analysis. The individual viewpoints are presented in one chapter.
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We have learned little, it would seem, since either Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and its exposure of the results of our chemical warfare on other species, (and its inevitable repercussions for ourselves), or from the environmental... more
We have learned little, it would seem, since either Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and its exposure of the results of our chemical warfare on other species, (and its inevitable repercussions for ourselves), or from the environmental histories of so-called aliens whether deliberately or inadvertently introduced. We still seek that return to a "pristine" precolonial Australia, an anti-evolutionary "purity" of line now ethically unthinkable were it to be re-applied to humans. And we have not yet absorbed the notion that the impact of climate change will most certainly mix ecologies and genetic strains, and make us, in the end, grateful for almost all extra-human life that manages to survive us.
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As so many of the world's extra-human habitats are lost to so-called "development", "productivity", and the pandemic pressures of human overpopulation, protection of wilderness areas, (for example in National Parks), and the animals and... more
As so many of the world's extra-human habitats are lost to so-called "development", "productivity", and the pandemic pressures of human overpopulation, protection of wilderness areas, (for example in National Parks), and the animals and plants they have retained, is of primary importance. But even where conservation areas can be legislatively set aside from human encroachment, their ongoing protection and maintenance still raise numerous problems. Protecting species which cannot be confined within Park boundaries, or determining the most appropriate protection measures can be confined within Park boundaries, or determining the most appropriate protection measures can be contentious. While the attempt to maintain biodiversity is a worthy goal, what are the most appropriate strategies in an era of radical climate change? While ecosystem categories such as "aliens", "invasives", "natives", "endemics", may seem to offer philosophical and practical bases, evolution is itself a continuous process, rendering such categories both protean and often inappropriate. Moreover, the philosophies of ecosystem conservation and animal welfare are increasingly at odds, making proponents of extra-human preservation, antagonists, rather than the allies they might ideally be. The paper discusses two examples of such philosophical and practical entanglements: protecting native Australian East Coast bats (flying-foxes), and an experimental move to eradicate rats from Lord Howe Island by chemical carpet bombing.
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BROADLY DEFINED, the Congo region of Africa might be considered a territory of the European or Western imagination. The ‘boundaries’ drawn by European treaty in the nineteenth century were products of European politics and European... more
BROADLY DEFINED, the Congo region of Africa might be considered a territory of the European or Western imagination. The ‘boundaries’ drawn by European treaty in the nineteenth century were products of European politics and European greed.1 They had nothing to do with any knowledge of the territory being carved up by Europe’s rulers, nor with the Congolese peoples themselves. But the area had been, and would continue to be, a place of European imagination in another sense: a ground upon which Western writers, many of whom had never set foot on the African continent at all, conducted often heated debates about conditions there.
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While the right of humans to occupy land is usually taken for granted (except for internecine human competition), conflict over the remainder often arises between those who champion the interests or rights of individual animals and... more
While the right of humans to occupy land is usually taken for granted (except for internecine human competition), conflict over the remainder often arises between those who champion the interests or rights of individual animals and environmental proponents who regard animals as indispensable ecosystem components or as disruptive and destructive exotics.
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Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin's Postcolonial Ecocriticism is a compelling study of the ways in which the critical agendas of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism can mutually inform and energize each other. Their objective, as per their... more
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin's Postcolonial Ecocriticism is a compelling study of the ways in which the critical agendas of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism can mutually inform and energize each other. Their objective, as per their introduction, is to bring together the fields of postcolonialism and ecocriticism by examining how the creative tensions between the two fields and their critical methodologies are mutually enlightening. They describe postcolonial ecocriticism as performing what they call an ‘advocacy’ function that makes explicit forms of human and non-human exploitation.
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... As a less cohesive discipline (both conceptually and methodologically), “English” in general and postcolonial studies in particular have yet to resituate environmental concerns at the very centre of their disciplinary inquiries.... more
... As a less cohesive discipline (both conceptually and methodologically),
“English” in general and postcolonial studies in particular have yet to
resituate environmental concerns at the very centre of their disciplinary
inquiries. Nevertheless, for postcolonial studies, examination of this interface between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is pertinent and increasingly urgent.
Postcolonialism’s concerns with conquest and colonization; with race; with
the imposition (and, more rarely, ‘exchange’) of cultural knowledge; its
investment in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and of conceptions of
and relations between native and invader are also the central concerns of
animal and environmental studies. ...
“English” in general and postcolonial studies in particular have yet to
resituate environmental concerns at the very centre of their disciplinary
inquiries. Nevertheless, for postcolonial studies, examination of this interface between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is pertinent and increasingly urgent.
Postcolonialism’s concerns with conquest and colonization; with race; with
the imposition (and, more rarely, ‘exchange’) of cultural knowledge; its
investment in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and of conceptions of
and relations between native and invader are also the central concerns of
animal and environmental studies. ...
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Such images of the octopus (or giant squid) capturing us remain potent, particularly in Western cultures, persisting into the present century in films such as Pirates of the Caribbean and its epigones. In these popular cinematic images,... more
Such images of the octopus (or giant squid) capturing us remain potent, particularly in Western cultures, persisting into the present century in films such as Pirates of the Caribbean and its epigones. In these popular cinematic images, writhing tentacles still threaten to capture and sink us, dragging us down to the depths of 'Davy Jones Locker'; but octopus and giant squid can also appear as part-human part-octopoid crosses, thus suggesting both a repelling distance from ourselves, and troublingly, some similarities. Through such images we attempt, paradoxically to domesticate ancient fears while repeating and thus reinforcing them, exemplifying the very contradictory attitudes we hold and practices we pursue in relation to Cephalopods.
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Notwithstanding scientific and philosophical denials of the possibilities of animal speech, most human societies are familiar with speaking animals in a variety of written and oral genres, but most of these, whether or not they are... more
Notwithstanding scientific and philosophical denials of the possibilities of animal speech, most human societies are familiar with speaking animals in a variety of written and oral genres, but most of these, whether or not they are anthropomorphic, have certainly been anthropocentric, and such representations of animal speech have generally been generically specific and thus circumscribed. Science, as the dominant paradigm of our times and authoritative arbiter of knowledge about animals, represents animal behaviour, motivation, and communication within particular disciplinary parameters. Behavioural science may "translate" gestures and sounds for us, but never represents animals as speaking objects.
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Neither Jean Rhys' 'Unfinished Autobiography', Smile Please, nor Elise Aylen's The Night of the Lord fits neatly into these paradigmatic post-colonial patterns even though the journeys they inscribe are also generated out of... more
Neither Jean Rhys' 'Unfinished Autobiography', Smile Please, nor Elise Aylen's The Night of the Lord fits neatly into these paradigmatic post-colonial patterns even though the journeys they inscribe are also generated out of colonial/postcolonial circumstances. Both authors thematise the journey and the significance of writing in relation to journeying, and both base their accounts on earlier journals each wrote. Rhys' 'passage to England' is both literal and figurative; and although she spent most of her adult life there after a childhood in Dominica, her autobiographical and imaginative writings reveal her alienation from both white English society and, (to her sorrow), that of black Creoles in Dominica. Rhys' writing about England and the Caribbean, however, like the classic settler-colonial journey of indigenisation, facilitates her life-long desire to identify with the black Caribbean rather than her 'ancestral' England. By contrast, Elise Aylen uses an account of a journey-in this case a pilgrimage, not to the imperial centre, but to another British ex-colony, India-to identify with India rather than with her country of birth, Canada.
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If attitudes to the destruction of sharks have changed, the image of the death-defying beach-loving Aussie has not. But just as, in Australia, conservation of endangered sharks, such as the grey nurse, is being increasingly accepted, so... more
If attitudes to the destruction of sharks have changed, the image of the death-defying beach-loving Aussie has not. But just as, in Australia, conservation of endangered sharks, such as the grey nurse, is being increasingly accepted, so the overseas image of Australia as a continent surrounded by 'jaws' may itself be weakening. In Dean Crawford's 2008 cultural history of the shark and shark images, Australia barely rates a mention. While like the Tasmanian tiger, the image may outlive the species...
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... scientific knowledge rarely influences our expectations of sharks in the ways in which it can inform our perceptions of, for instance, wombats or lions. Given that the actual danger to humans from shark attack is miniscule (on average... more
... scientific knowledge rarely influences our expectations of sharks in the ways in which it can inform our perceptions of, for instance, wombats or lions. Given that the actual danger to humans from shark attack is miniscule (on average nine fatalities per year worldwide), it is clear that it is the shark's symbolic freight, rather than its real depredations on humans, which most strongly influences popular imagery, (re)contributing in turn to the (re)formation of popular perceptions. What lies behind this psycho-cultural complex of shark images, metaphors and symbols thus demands investigation if public attitudes are to be challenged in the interests of conservation of sharks (and the ecosystems of which they are an intrinsic and essential part) ...
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Although anatomically, physiologically and even socially, we 'share' so much with pigs, we raise them in increasingly appalling conditions for the purpose of killing them and experimenting on them so that, whether by ingestion or by... more
Although anatomically, physiologically and even socially, we 'share' so much with pigs, we raise them in increasingly appalling conditions for the purpose of killing them and experimenting on them so that, whether by ingestion or by surgery, we can take them into our fleshy substance. Although the ultimate 'cannibalistic' horrors of European explorers - the imperfect sight of a cut of meat being roasted on the fire or the 'grisly remains' hanging in a string basket from the roof of a dark 'native' hut - are now believed more often to have been pig rather than long, the Western obsession with its apparently 'cannibal' others still facilitated the torture, killing and enslavement of these apparently 'savage' flesh eaters.
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In spite of this perception of the nation, however, the precise historical roots of European nationalism and nation-formation are discernible in interactions between developments in the settler colonies and revolutionary movements in... more
In spite of this perception of the nation, however, the precise historical roots of European nationalism and nation-formation are discernible in interactions between developments in the settler colonies and revolutionary movements in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. But so naturalised have these relatively recent 'primary' affiliations become that we are prepared to die for our countries and to accept affinity with individuals we have never seen nor will ever see, and who occupy 'land spaces' we regard as 'ours' but on which we may never actually set foot. Thus our imagined community of 'nation' remains an extremely powerful one, just as in earlier centuries the concept of a united Christendom had been. And even under the current pressures of 'globalisation', the nation still affects its members in a powerful way while continuing to underpin economic, political, social and cultural relations across the globe.
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In this essay, I wish to focus on the ways in which a number of Caribbean writers at the intersection of Caribbean nature and culture are obliged by these tangled perceptions of the Caribbean in order to fully encounter and represent... more
In this essay, I wish to focus on the ways in which a number of Caribbean writers at the intersection of Caribbean nature and culture are obliged by these tangled perceptions of the Caribbean in order to fully encounter and represent their own place. Caribbean tropical landscapes are 'always already' imbricated with that normative or temperate ideal, most usually in the hierarchized order that colonial relations imply. Moreover, the Caribbean was often perceived as richly but degeneratively tropical, frightening, fecund, even pathological; and, through colonialist interpellation, it became exoticized for its own inhabitants by the dominant European visions.
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'White men read books; we hunt for heads instead' is an intriguing remark reportedly made by an Iban warrior to the English administrator, adventurer and diplomat, Spenser St. John. The Iban's remark is cryptic but resonant. Relationships... more
'White men read books; we hunt for heads instead' is an intriguing remark reportedly made by an Iban warrior to the English administrator, adventurer and diplomat, Spenser St. John. The Iban's remark is cryptic but resonant. Relationships between Britain (or Europe) and Borneo, between 'books' and 'heads' - both literal and figurative - have long and fascinating histories from at least the 16th century. In this paper, however, I concentrate on different modalities of 'head-trading' in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
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This paper focuses on one particular aspect of that education - literary education - and its ambivalent application and reception in colonial/postcolonial contexts. At a time when not only literature but all Arts/Humanities scholars in... more
This paper focuses on one particular aspect of that education - literary education - and its ambivalent application and reception in colonial/postcolonial contexts. At a time when not only literature but all Arts/Humanities scholars in Australia are being pressured to 'produce real results' (usually understood as 'make money'), it is instructive to look back to a time when some of the most important political and educational 'results' - both good and bad - were seen to be a direct product of literary education throughout Britain's Empire
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Although they are often difficult to sustain, distinctions do exist between voluntary mass migrations and diasporic displacements. In the West, at least, the term 'diaspora' is increasingly employed to describe significantly large groups... more
Although they are often difficult to sustain, distinctions do exist between voluntary mass migrations and diasporic displacements. In the West, at least, the term 'diaspora' is increasingly employed to describe significantly large groups of people now established in countries or regions away from their ancestral homelands. The traditional meaning of 'diaspora' however, recognises its Biblical application to the dispersal of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity and evokes an exiling and scattering of people under duress, thereby conjuring not simply migration from an original homeland, but some form of captivity. Within the histories of the territories of the former British Empire, the experience of tropical Africans captured and transported across the Atlantic in chains to labour on 'New World' plantations best fits this traditional pattern; and it has been West Indian artists, writers and musicians (not least the late Bob Marley) who have drawn extensively on the Jewish comparison, singing, as a famous lyric expresses it, 'King Alpha's song is a strange land'.
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Borneo had had a reputation for the 'exotic' as far back as the 1600s. Many of its 'meanings' had already been fixed as European stereotypes well before any first-hand British accounts were available. Because Borneo offered the travel... more
Borneo had had a reputation for the 'exotic' as far back as the 1600s. Many of its 'meanings' had already been fixed as European stereotypes well before any first-hand British accounts were available. Because Borneo offered the travel writer such a plethora of exotic subject matter, my concentration here must be on the treatment of one particular trope only, that of head-hunting. In ways which are both similar to, yet significantly different from, the trope of cannibalism, head-hunting could (and can) become a limit marker between self and Other, the civilized and the savage, Britain and Borneo. In these works, it is often the locus of interesting tensions and negotiations between (in Célestin's terms) home, the world of the Other, and the authorial subject.
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Firstly, I want to establish the importance of animals and the question of the species boundary in 'othering' and racism. Secondly, I offer three (not mutually exclusive) kinds of political (and/or) popular objections that have been... more
Firstly, I want to establish the importance of animals and the question of the species boundary in 'othering' and racism. Secondly, I offer three (not mutually exclusive) kinds of political (and/or) popular objections that have been raisted against considering animals and speciesism - that is, some of the political difficulties involved in pursuing this topic in post-colonial contexts. Thirdly, I focus on the question of representation, and the ways in which two post-colonial writers from Canada and Australia have tackled the issue of the species boundary and speciesism. I am concerned with both the animal and animalistic, that is, with actual animals and the Western human symbolic economies within which they are more or less forced to more or less exits.
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Sharks are certainly megafauna, but they are rarely regarded as charasmatic. Humans are often in awe of them, having an admirationn for their speed, power, and, in their own environments, their apparent invincibility. But more usually,... more
Sharks are certainly megafauna, but they are rarely regarded as charasmatic. Humans are often in awe of them, having an admirationn for their speed, power, and, in their own environments, their apparent invincibility. But more usually, sharks are vilified and condemned, few voices are raised against routine torture of sharks by sailors, fishermen and others, and little protest against such widespread practices as amputating fins and throwing the live sharks back into the sea to die of blood loss, drowning, or attack by other sharks and fish. While the threatened extinction of, for instance, the great whites has necessarily garnered some public support for their particular protection, even this legislation is vulnerable, threatened by each 'attack' on humans.
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The teaching of literature and the teaching of hygiene (both in the British Isles and abroad) have interestingly imbricated histories, and both share technologies of literary learning which have their roots in religious teaching: Learning... more
The teaching of literature and the teaching of hygiene (both in the British Isles and abroad) have interestingly imbricated histories, and both share technologies of literary learning which have their roots in religious teaching: Learning by heart, the taking into the body of the (foreign) text, and the appending of questions to the text, were catechistical devices which reinforced absorption of the material and its correct interpretation. By the late nineteenth century then, both 'catechisms' of literature and hygiene were (like Christianity, with which both were in various ways associated) foundational to the British colonising project.
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In Images in Print, 1988, a study of bias and prejudice in Caribbean textbooks, Ruby King and Mike Morrissey note that, although some of the countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have been independent for twenty-five years, many aspects... more
In Images in Print, 1988, a study of bias and prejudice in Caribbean textbooks, Ruby King and Mike Morrissey note that, although some of the countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have been independent for twenty-five years, many aspects of colonialism persist in ideas about education as reflected in syllabi and curricula, textbook choices and contents. Their study, and more general ones such as Philip Altbach’s “Education and Neocolonialism,” 1971, direct our attention to the potency of a colonialist history of education in the Caribbean, to its interactions with popular culture, specifically the relationship between oral and “literate” cultures, and to the entire history of publishing both about and in the area. In short, the importance of educational and literary models for understanding contemporary Caribbean literature and literary history is inescapable.
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The Sign of Four rationalized, reordered and recoded through narrative the complexities of familial (Empire) betrayal in the events and figurations of nineteenth-century India. Set like Doyle's novel in the Andaman Islands, India, and... more
The Sign of Four rationalized, reordered and recoded through narrative the complexities of familial (Empire) betrayal in the events and figurations of nineteenth-century India. Set like Doyle's novel in the Andaman Islands, India, and London, Lee Langley's work is also focally about betrayal, Empire and family. Superficially, too, it is a 'boys own' adventure, its protagonist James Oakley. But by focusing on the psychology of this Englishman born in the Andamans, Langley unmasks the strategic narrative inversions and slippages in Doyle's work, using those tropes of the (spectral) woman, the Andaman 'savage,' and their figural alliance through disappearance to lay bare the fabric of nineteenth-century Empire narrative.
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The Twyborn Affair is an intricately intersexual and allusive work, one which draws on sources as disparate as Byzantine and Greek histories (as A.P. Riemer and John Coates have shown), Brahmin ritual and Australian 'bush' traditions.... more
The Twyborn Affair is an intricately intersexual and allusive work, one which draws on sources as disparate as Byzantine and Greek histories (as A.P. Riemer and John Coates have shown), Brahmin ritual and Australian 'bush' traditions. Clearly it also draws on White's personal experience and national allegiances and preferences. ... And in a letter to Stephen Murray-Smith he refers to a portrait of Herbert Dyce Murphy, gentleman transvestite, as the initial impetus for the novel (453). But the Twyborn Affair is also structured through and against the famous Tichborne Affair of the second half of the nineteenth century; a legal case (or rather cases) which captured public imagination in both Britain and Australia for over two decades.
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With the possible exception of V. S. Naipaul's Mr Biswas, no other character in West Indian fiction is as well-known and well loved as Sam Selvon's Moses Aloetta. Moses is the central figure in three of Selvon's novels, and his adventures... more
With the possible exception of V. S. Naipaul's Mr Biswas, no other character in West Indian fiction is as well-known and well loved as Sam Selvon's Moses Aloetta. Moses is the central figure in three of Selvon's novels, and his adventures in London and Trinidad span a crucial thirty years of contemporary West Indian migration to Britain. The Lonely Londoners (1956) details the fortunes (and misfortunes) of Moses and his fellow West Indians in the metropolis in the early years of West Indian mass migration. By the time of Moses Ascending (1975) generational 'indigenisation' of West Indians in Britain, independence, and Black Power movements had altered the London scene. West Indians had gained an often uneasy foothold in 'the motherland' and Moses is now the owner of his own house, though (not untypically) his fortunes suffer a reversal at the end. Moses Migrating (1983) builds on this contemporary relation between a more 'indigenised' generation of West Indians and their 'ancestral' island homelands, and like many of his contemporaries and their British-born progeny, Moses returns to Trinidad for Carnival.
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I have deliberately invoked the formulation of the traditional British murder mystery in the title of this paper. But the problem to be addressed in this context is both 'who dunnit?' and 'who is it?' - or to borrow the title of a... more
I have deliberately invoked the formulation of the traditional British murder mystery in the title of this paper. But the problem to be addressed in this context is both 'who dunnit?' and 'who is it?' - or to borrow the title of a collection of critical articles on Australian women writers, 'who is she?' Who is this settler-invader Jane Doe in her over-inscribed post-colonial room? For Australian and Canadian women writers, notions of identity and opposition are inevitably connected, and this complex I wish to address through a consideration of Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra by the River and Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic. My more general area of address is the ways in which opposition and identity work in these novels - and in other post-colonial text - through inscription and reinscription.
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Teaching post-colonial literary theory has at least two purposes: to historicize and theorize literary teaching generally and English literature and post-colonial literatures in particular; and secondly, on the basis of such theorization... more
Teaching post-colonial literary theory has at least two purposes: to historicize and theorize literary teaching generally and English literature and post-colonial literatures in particular; and secondly, on the basis of such theorization and contextualization to influence the ongoing process of decolonization at the interface with contemporary forms of neo-colonialism, specifically those which are effected and maintained through representation. The teaching of post-colonial literatures and literary theory will not save the world, reverse historical injustices, or stop contemporary atrocities; it will not radically reconfigure inequalities or marginalizations. But through an understanding of the ways in which oppression operates and has operated in and through representationn, we can hope to eventually educate our own populations in a greater critical and interrogative awareness of its processes. Understanding the force of representation in international capitalism will not provide a mechanism to halt its march, but an awareness of forms of oppression and the part played by representation may in the end lead to changed perspectives, and thus to altered priorities.
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In Images of Print (1988) Ruby King and Mike Morrissey note that although some countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have been independent for twenty-five years, many aspects of colonialism persist in general ideas about education in... more
In Images of Print (1988) Ruby King and Mike Morrissey note that although some countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have been independent for twenty-five years, many aspects of colonialism persist in general ideas about education in syllabuses and curricula, and in text-book choices and contents. Their study, and more general ones such as Philip G. Altbach's 'Education and Neocolonialism' (1971), direct attention to the potency of colonialist histories of education not just in the Caribbean but across all post-colonized cultures; to the interactions between oral and 'literate' cultures; and to the entire history of publishing and distribution both in and about colonized and formerly colonized cultures.
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In this paper I want to trace the possibilities of escape from the texts and images of Western imperialism through four works, two symptomatic of the route taken by post-colonial white settler writers (Jean Rhys and Randolph Stow), and... more
In this paper I want to trace the possibilities of escape from the texts and images of Western imperialism through four works, two symptomatic of the route taken by post-colonial white settler writers (Jean Rhys and Randolph Stow), and two symptomatic of that pursued by black or indigenous writers (Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber). But I should say at the outset that this sort of division - black/white, alien/indigenous is precisely the one these four texts set out to destabilise, and its erosion in the course of each text, points the way from imperialist imageries towards transformative ones.
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Works like "Again the Antilles" through Voyage in the Dark to "The Day They Burned the Books" and "Rapunzel, Rapunzel" demonstrate that, whatever the recuperation undertaken in her last novel, Rhys had always understood the radical... more
Works like "Again the Antilles" through Voyage in the Dark to "The Day They Burned the Books" and "Rapunzel, Rapunzel" demonstrate that, whatever the recuperation undertaken in her last novel, Rhys had always understood the radical importance of text, of the English book in the capture and control of colonial worlds. And she had understood as well the crucial importance, to textual and political decolonization, of resistance to those texts and their colonial readings.
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Gradually Indian populations imported to work in the sugar estates became populations in permanent ancestral exile, suffering the psychic dislocation and disruption inevitably a part of the experience of transplantation. In both cases,... more
Gradually Indian populations imported to work in the sugar estates became populations in permanent ancestral exile, suffering the psychic dislocation and disruption inevitably a part of the experience of transplantation. In both cases, too, Indians were taken to tropical islands and to places culturally and linguistically dominated by Britain, but where another race - in the case of Fiji an indigenous people, in the case of Trinidad a kidnapped and imported population of African descent - was numerically in the majority. One would perhaps expect that such comparable experiences might produce in the literature similar emphases, concerns, and even patterns of imagery, and this is to some extent true. Dislocation and disorientation have in both areas predisposed writers toward treatment of the fragmentation of the psyche, emphasis on a sense of abandonment, dislocation, and dereliction, the imagery of shipwreck and imprisonment. Indo-Fijian and Indo-Trinidadian writing also share with colonial and postcolonial writing generally a number of specific colonial concerns, and the experience of indenture, like that of convictism in Australia, has frequently attracted the transferred metaphor of slavery.
But historical dissimilarities and differences in the new environments are also important, as a very brief (and oversimplified) summary indicates.
But historical dissimilarities and differences in the new environments are also important, as a very brief (and oversimplified) summary indicates.
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I want now to distinguish between the different kinds of post-colonial response to this complex discursive field offered by Harris and Achebe. In doing so I will draw on their own direct comments on Heart of Darkness as well as on the... more
I want now to distinguish between the different kinds of post-colonial response to this complex discursive field offered by Harris and Achebe. In doing so I will draw on their own direct comments on Heart of Darkness as well as on the counter-discursive strategies they employ in those of their novels which 'respond' to Conrad's work.
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No attempt at characterizing the national literary tradition of Australia, or indeed of any other post-colonial territory, can ignore its genesis in Anglo-European colonialism. But to describe that post-colonial literature in filiastic... more
No attempt at characterizing the national literary tradition of Australia, or indeed of any other post-colonial territory, can ignore its genesis in Anglo-European colonialism. But to describe that post-colonial literature in filiastic terms - to invoke, implicitly or explicitly, such metaphores as 'parent and child', 'stream and tributary, 'trunk and branches' - is to misconceive the relationship of the literatures and to collude in a continuing colonialism. Such metaphors not only imply a chronological and qualitative pre-eminence for the products of European culture, but also that its epistemology is normative and universally valid. Post-colonial literature comprehended, defined and evaluated by Anglo-European expectations and criteria remains a passive and subjected discourse.
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But while all this has been occurring in post-colonial writing and publishing, and in criticism and theory, the teaching of post-colonial literatures as a coherent field, and hence a recognition of the relationship between university... more
But while all this has been occurring in post-colonial writing and publishing, and in criticism and theory, the teaching of post-colonial literatures as a coherent field, and hence a recognition of the relationship between university curricula and post-colonial literary studies, has lagged behind. While most universities and colleges in the former regions of the Commonwealth now teach at least one course in their own regional or national literature, they rarely teach in any others.
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The post-European or post-colonial rewriting of the European narratives of quest, discovery, settlement, imperial enterprise and colonial 'development' inevitably involves a dialectical relationship between European ontology and... more
The post-European or post-colonial rewriting of the European narratives of quest, discovery, settlement, imperial enterprise and colonial 'development' inevitably involves a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemologies and an impulse to create or recreate an independent local identity. But constructing or reconstructing such alternative (alter/native) narratives can only occur as a dynamic interaction between European hegemonic systems and peripheral subversion of them; there is no possibility of a return to or a rediscovery of a pre-colonial cultural purity, nor the possibility of the manufacture of national or regional formations independent of their implication in the European historical enterprise. Hence it has been the project of post-colonial writing to re-enter, from its 'peripheral' position between, and thus within, two worlds, to interrogate and deconstruct European discourse and discursive strategies; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in non-European environments.
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While Australians and Canadians are inescapably aware of the imperial-colonial nexus that is their genesis, and are acutely conscious of the importance of imperial hegemony in the shaping of social patterns and literary traditions, they... more
While Australians and Canadians are inescapably aware of the imperial-colonial nexus that is their genesis, and are acutely conscious of the importance of imperial hegemony in the shaping of social patterns and literary traditions, they have in the modern world often found themselves implicated in the imperial role as politicians, diplomats, journalists or tourists, particularly in certain 'spheres of influence' - in the case of Canada, in the Caribbean and Africa; of Australia, in South-East Asia and the Pacific. The ironies of imperial involvements here have not escaped writers who have explored this 'complex fate' of being both colonised and coloniser.
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In A House for Mr Biswas and in Voss both Naipaul and White, in characteristically complex ways, couched their explorations of the postcolonial psyche in the house-building and journey motifs, motifs which ultimately draw upon the ethic... more
In A House for Mr Biswas and in Voss both Naipaul and White, in characteristically complex ways, couched their explorations of the postcolonial psyche in the house-building and journey motifs, motifs which ultimately draw upon the ethic they sought to repudiate. In A Bend in the River and The Twyborn Affair, both published almost twenty years after the earlier works, these novelists seem to have moved away from the idea of the possibility and even desirability of indigenization (with its concomitant promise of personal and communal integrity) towards the notion that the postcolonial world acceptance of fragmentation of personality and the abandonment of the idea of home might be often not a strategy for survival but offer a potential for creativity. Here the connotation of 'mere' disappears from survival, and fragmentation and integration are revalued.
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All of George Lamming's writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is an attempt to grapple with the central dilemma of colonialism and its post-colonial legacy - how to recreate an indigenous personality and destiny when the only literary... more
All of George Lamming's writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is an attempt to grapple with the central dilemma of colonialism and its post-colonial legacy - how to recreate an indigenous personality and destiny when the only literary forms and language available are those of the former colonizer. As a West Indian writer Lamming is perhaps more conscious of this crippling paradox than his contemporaries in Africa or India, for while they may deliberately choose to continue their artistic restructuring of post-colonial worlds in the European languages of the former imperial powers, West Indian writers of African descent have no such choice. No alternative language is available to them, and if they are to write at all, it must be in English.
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This paper explores some theoretical aspects of the discipline of comparative Commonwealth literature and language studies, focusing on what I see as the two most problematic areas and those most requiring some theoretical examination:... more
This paper explores some theoretical aspects of the discipline of comparative Commonwealth literature and language studies, focusing on what I see as the two most problematic areas and those most requiring some theoretical examination: the problems (and benefits) of the comparative mode itself, and the question of literary critical judgment. ... More important than a methodology for a cross-cultural literary standard is the attempt to comprehend the ways in which the individual imagination works, and the ways individual literary works share characteristics with or diverge from other works in their national traditions, and the post-colonial literary world generally.
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I need to begin by stressing two different kinds of obvious limitations on my argument. Firstly, I am not considering the nature and treatment of contemporary community involvement in Indo-Fijian and Indo-Trinadadian writing except where... more
I need to begin by stressing two different kinds of obvious limitations on my argument. Firstly, I am not considering the nature and treatment of contemporary community involvement in Indo-Fijian and Indo-Trinadadian writing except where it is directly related by writers to the concept of history, so there are vast areas of community involvement I'm not considering. Secondly, the comparative basis itself - there is an enormous difference in the sheer amount of material available from the two areas. ... Yet I think there are enough interesting tendencies in the work of writers like Subramani, Sulochana Chand, Raymond Pillai and Satendra Nandan for critics to hazard some fruitful comparisons and contrasts between the two literary traditions - as the Trinidadian has developed, and as the Indo Fijian seems to be developing.
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While debate continues on the nature, semantic function, and 'energetic relation' of the components of metaphor or metaphoric activity, it is becoming increasingly clear that this activity is of primary cultural as well as literary... more
While debate continues on the nature, semantic function, and 'energetic relation' of the components of metaphor or metaphoric activity, it is becoming increasingly clear that this activity is of primary cultural as well as literary significance in those areas of the world to which a language was transported, ready made, from a different environment: 'It is ... the supreme paradox of the colonial condition that all experience is articulated for us in the forms and institutions of the Old World.' However, in 'new' post-colonial societies, these inevitably undergo metamorphosis as recognition of this paradox forces writers to a conscious and accelerated metaphoric invention in refining, restructuring or reforming the old language to express new social, climatic, geographic and metaphysical realities
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With the rise of national feeling and the re-establishment of race consciousness in this century, we have come to see that the operation of language in such a situation is rather like the workings of sport. It has frequently been noted... more
With the rise of national feeling and the re-establishment of race consciousness in this century, we have come to see that the operation of language in such a situation is rather like the workings of sport. It has frequently been noted that cricket provided the white Commonwealth with a safety valve for rising national sentiment, within the confines of a 'gentlemanly' set of rules. On the other hand, of course, it attested to the superiority of English cultural mores, and inculcated the very comfortable belief (from a British viewpoint) that the best way for a colonial to assert a national identity was to beat the British at their own game.
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Most of these stories reflect the changing self-image of peoples transplanted to the South Pacific during the last two centuries. Indians bought to Fiji and British transplanted to Australia and New Zealand have been for two centuries... more
Most of these stories reflect the changing self-image of peoples transplanted to the South Pacific during the last two centuries. Indians bought to Fiji and British transplanted to Australia and New Zealand have been for two centuries spiritually and culturally oriented towards places other than those in which they found themselves. These stories demonstrate a further closing of the gap between spiritual past and physical present; a coming to terms by imported populations with the people and spirits of place and the lands of the South Pacific.
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It is important to note at the outset that the literature of the English-speaking West Indian islands is not in any sense a literature in translation. It is a literature written in English by people whose ancestors came from Africa,... more
It is important to note at the outset that the literature of the English-speaking West Indian islands is not in any sense a literature in translation. It is a literature written in English by people whose ancestors came from Africa, India, China, or Europe and whose historical and cultural circumstances deprived them of any common language other than that of their European proprietors.
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Obviously both writers felt that the destructive historical bond of Empire persisted in spite of the promising political prognostic, and in their most recent works Lamming and Naipaul have intensively anatomized the nature and effect of... more
Obviously both writers felt that the destructive historical bond of Empire persisted in spite of the promising political prognostic, and in their most recent works Lamming and Naipaul have intensively anatomized the nature and effect of this seemingly indestructible 'blood knot' on contemporary West Indians and Britons. Instead of being able to proclaim its demise, both novelists have been forced to re-examine the colonial relation in what is perhaps a final attempt to exorcise the beast; an exorcism worth performing since both novelists see the continuing connection as stifling individual creativity, warping or annihilating political purpose, and resulting, for both ex-colonizer and ex-colonial in rape, suicide and murder
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Wild Man from Borneo offers the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Arguably the most humanlike of all the great apes, particularly in intelligence and behavior, the orangutan has been cherished, used, and abused... more
Wild Man from Borneo offers the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Arguably the most humanlike of all the great apes, particularly in intelligence and behavior, the orangutan has been cherished, used, and abused ever since it was first brought to the attention of Europeans in the seventeenth century. The red ape has engaged the interest of scientists, philosophers, artists, and the public at large in a bewildering array of guises that have by no means been exclusively zoological or ecological. One reason for such a long-term engagement with a being found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra is that, like its fellow great apes, the orangutan stands on that most uncomfortable dividing line between human and animal, existing, for us, on what has been called “the dangerous edge of the garden of nature.”
Beginning with the scientific discovery of the red ape more than three hundred years ago, this work goes on to examine the ways in which its human attributes have been both recognized and denied in science, philosophy, travel literature, popular science, literature, theatre, museums, and film. The authors offer a provocative analysis of the origin of the name “orangutan,” trace how the ape has been recruited to arguments on topics as diverse as slavery and rape, and outline the history of attempts to save the animal from extinction. Today, while human populations increase exponentially, that of the orangutan is in dangerous decline. The remaining “wild men of Borneo” are under increasing threat from mining interests, logging, human population expansion, and the widespread destruction of forests. The authors hope that this history will, by adding to our knowledge of this fascinating being, assist in some small way in their preservation.
Beginning with the scientific discovery of the red ape more than three hundred years ago, this work goes on to examine the ways in which its human attributes have been both recognized and denied in science, philosophy, travel literature, popular science, literature, theatre, museums, and film. The authors offer a provocative analysis of the origin of the name “orangutan,” trace how the ape has been recruited to arguments on topics as diverse as slavery and rape, and outline the history of attempts to save the animal from extinction. Today, while human populations increase exponentially, that of the orangutan is in dangerous decline. The remaining “wild men of Borneo” are under increasing threat from mining interests, logging, human population expansion, and the widespread destruction of forests. The authors hope that this history will, by adding to our knowledge of this fascinating being, assist in some small way in their preservation.
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In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and... more
In Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin examine relationships between humans, animals and the environment in postcolonial texts. Divided into two sections that consider the postcolonial first from an environmental and then a zoocritical perspective, the book looks at:
- narratives of development in postcolonial writing
- entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre
- colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission
- the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
- animality and spirituality
- sentimentality and anthropomorphism
- the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.
- narratives of development in postcolonial writing
- entitlement and belonging in the pastoral genre
- colonialist 'asset stripping' and the Christian mission
- the politics of eating and representations of cannibalism
- animality and spirituality
- sentimentality and anthropomorphism
- the place of the human and the animal in a 'posthuman' world.
Making use of the work of authors as diverse as J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Jamaica Kincaid and V.S. Naipaul, the authors argue that human liberation will never be fully achieved without challenging how human societies have constructed themselves in hierarchical relation to other human and nonhuman communities, and without imagining new ways in which these ecologically connected groupings can be creatively transformed.
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The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in... more
The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture.
The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language.
This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.
The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language.
This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.
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As a subject, post-colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism, gender, politics and language. In the language of post-colonial studies, some words are new, others are familiar but charged with new... more
As a subject, post-colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism, gender, politics and language. In the language of post-colonial studies, some words are new, others are familiar but charged with new significance. This volume provides an essential key to understanding the issues that characterize post-colonialism, explaining what it is, where it is encountered and why it is crucial in forging new cultural identities. This comprehensive glossary has extensive cross-referencing, suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry, a bibliography of essential writings in post-colonial studies and is presented in an easy-to-use A-Z format.
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Commonwealth literature (English) - History and criticism - Bibliography Decolonization in literature - Bibliography Commonwealth countries -- In literature -- Bibliography
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Colonialist concepts continue to drive Parks and Wildlife/ Conservation Department policies and practices in Australia and other settler colonies. In the case of Australia, returning the country to its pre- European invasion (pristine)... more
Colonialist concepts continue to drive Parks and Wildlife/ Conservation Department policies and practices in Australia and other settler colonies. In the case of Australia, returning the country to its pre- European invasion (pristine) condition becomes policy dictate, even where the often draconian implementations of these parameters prove unsuitable or even dangerous. And the notion of restoring Australian ecosystems to their pre-1788 condition is closely linked to the fetishisation of species purity. Australia has one of the world's highest extinction rates, and conservation of what remains is obviously of paramount importance. But the emphasis on eradication of so-called ‘pest’ species can sometimes become counterproductive – reducing rather than enhancing or shoring up biodiversity. An instance of the latter is provided by the recent Rat Eradication Project on Lord Howe Island, where losses promise to be greater than gains, biodiversity reduced rather than increased, and unethical animal suffering simply ignored.
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This paper briefly considers the broad social and scientific background to research into the possibility of insects experiencing pain sensations analogous to our own. There has been increasing use of insects in pain experiments generally,... more
This paper briefly considers the broad social and scientific background to research into the possibility of insects experiencing pain sensations analogous to our own. There has been increasing use of insects in pain experiments generally, as ethical constraints on the use of other animals increased through the last century. The ways in which scientists have tackled the question of insect pain, particularly in trying to distinguish between nociception and pain are then selectively summarised. These include opioid, hormonal, evolutionary, neurophysiological and behavioural approaches, as well as experiments designed to elucidate the difficult area of insect consciousness, from the 1980s to the present.
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During the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, dogs and men were thrown into several different, sometimes contradictory relationships. The Greenland dogs were considered to be ‘semi-wolves’ who required thrashings to keep them in line... more
During the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, dogs and men were thrown into several different, sometimes contradictory relationships. The Greenland dogs were considered to be ‘semi-wolves’ who required thrashings to keep them in line (Madigan 146), but were also at times treated as pets and were certainly loved. They were working dogs on whose muscle the success of the expedition partly depended, but no one had any prior expertise in caring for or training them. These contradictions came to a head in the Far Eastern sledging journey undertaken by the expedition leader, Douglas Mawson, along with the doghandlers Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Its main events are well known to polar enthusiasts: Ninnis’s sudden plunge into a crevasse with the healthiest dogs and most of the supplies; Mawson and Mertz’s desperate flight back towards base; Mertz’s mysterious death; and Mawson’s astonishing—to some, suspicious—
completion of the journey on next to no rations. The remaining dogs, who until Ninnis’s death had been partly fed on native Antarctic animals (as well as each other), suddenly found themselves fodder for the men, with unpredictable results. In this essay, we examine the relationship between dogs and men during the AAE, and in particular on the Far Eastern sledging journey, looking at who ate whom on the journey, and what the consequences were of eating—or not eating—meat.
completion of the journey on next to no rations. The remaining dogs, who until Ninnis’s death had been partly fed on native Antarctic animals (as well as each other), suddenly found themselves fodder for the men, with unpredictable results. In this essay, we examine the relationship between dogs and men during the AAE, and in particular on the Far Eastern sledging journey, looking at who ate whom on the journey, and what the consequences were of eating—or not eating—meat.
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Like fellow South Australian resident J. M. Coetzee, Peter Goldsworthy has, in a number of his works, sought to raise crucial ethical issues for a predominantly post-Christian Western world where problems posed by technologies and their... more
Like fellow South Australian resident J. M. Coetzee, Peter Goldsworthy has, in a number of his works, sought to raise crucial ethical issues for a predominantly post-Christian Western world where problems posed by technologies and their products precipitate new moral, ethical and psychological dilemmas. It is increasingly clear that our current legal frameworks and traditional moral guides are inadequate in dealing with developments over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Both John Coetzee and Peter Goldsworthy then, have used fiction to raise these issues, and, reaching imaginatively 'outside the box,' drawn our attention to the directions in which we might seek at least partial solutions.
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... But whatever its politics, green postcolonialism brings out a truism that clearly applies to, but is not always clearly stated in, the different strands of both postcolonialism and ecocriticism: no social justice without environmental... more
... But whatever its politics, green postcolonialism brings out a truism that clearly applies to, but is not always clearly stated in, the different strands of both postcolonialism and ecocriticism: no social justice without environmental justice; and without social justice for all ecological beings no justice at all.
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The world-wide panic occasioned by outbreaks of BSE was (and is) incommensurate with the number of human fatalities incurred. This apparent over-reaction can in part be accounted for by BSEs simultaneous disruption of cherished... more
The world-wide panic occasioned by outbreaks of BSE was (and is) incommensurate with the number of human fatalities incurred. This apparent over-reaction can in part be accounted for by BSEs simultaneous disruption of cherished "boundaries" between those categories (civilization and savagery; cannibalism and carnivory; human and animal) upon which our human self-definition depends.
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... Yet as I began to read more and more literature and history from the Caribbean, and visited more regularly, I increasingly re-read and re thought England - her imperial history and her place, both past and present, in our... more
... Yet as I began to read more and more literature and history from the Caribbean, and visited more regularly, I increasingly re-read and re thought England - her imperial history and her place, both past and present, in our landscape(s). If England had simultaneously enriched and impoverished our geography, and contributed to my later love of the Caribbean - part memory and nostalgia, a recognition of differences and similarities in Anglo imperial refractions - it had done so through a history, not of idealism and glory, but of genocide, slavery and displacement. ...
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I am interested in macro-photography, particularly in the ways that natural objects or substances, when viewed at close range, are transformed into intriguing abstract patterns or conjure unfamiliar worlds. My favourite subjects for this... more
I am interested in macro-photography, particularly in the ways that natural objects or substances, when viewed at close range, are transformed into intriguing abstract patterns or conjure unfamiliar worlds. My favourite subjects for this are bark, sand, rock and snow, and, to a lesser degree, flowers and fruit. The colours, textures and shapes of the everyday things we take for granted or simply pass without noticing can become fascinatingly alive.
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The nature/culture dichotomy finds uneasy meeting ground in the garden. But particularly in settler cultures, "the garden" introduces other unresolved dichotomies: indigenous and imported; wild and domesticated; pests and pets;... more
The nature/culture dichotomy finds uneasy meeting ground in the garden. But particularly in settler cultures, "the garden" introduces other unresolved dichotomies: indigenous and imported; wild and domesticated; pests and pets; traditional myth and scientific rationality. This essay considers these issues by focussing on the public debate over fruit bat colonies in the Melbourne (Australia) Botanical Gardens.
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While issues of plant and animal conservation have also become important in Europe, it was (and is) in the settler colonies particularly that paradoxes of human/animal accommodation (or lack of it) were and are most starkly realised. The... more
While issues of plant and animal conservation have also become important in Europe, it was (and is) in the settler colonies particularly that paradoxes of human/animal accommodation (or lack of it) were and are most starkly realised. The particular example I wish to explore in more detail here concerns the late 1990s 'invasion' of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens by a colony of grey-headed native bats or 'flying foxes'.
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The following roundtable discussion took place at the University of Queensland, Australia on 12 June 2001 as the concluding session of the No Sense of Discipline conference. The discussion brought together Mosaic Editor Dawne McCance (DM)... more
The following roundtable discussion took place at the University of Queensland, Australia on 12 June 2001 as the concluding session of the No Sense of Discipline conference. The discussion brought together Mosaic Editor Dawne McCance (DM) with conference plenary speakers Sander Gilman (SG), Linda Hutcheon (LH), Michael Hutcheon (MH), and Helen Tiffin (HT). Mosaic is pleased to publish this roundtable discussion, which originally appeared in Mosaic 35.2 (June 2002)
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From a twentieth-century point of view, the life and works of Sir Spenser Buckingham St. John offer a not dissimilar instance of apparent contradiction. Spenser St. John is remembered in the Caribbean as a particularly influential... more
From a twentieth-century point of view, the life and works of Sir Spenser Buckingham St. John offer a not dissimilar instance of apparent contradiction. Spenser St. John is remembered in the Caribbean as a particularly influential nineteenth-century racist, a writer whose Hayti or the Black Republic (1884) both supported those Haitian stereotypes already in circulation, (for instance, at the time of the Morant Bay Uprising), and vastly extended their influence. St. John's work on Haiti remains notorious for its uncompromising dismissal (one that echoes that of J.A. Froude) of the very possibility of blacks being able to govern themselves, and for its sensationalist treatment of cannibalism (particularly child-eating) in nineteenth-century Haitit.
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This paper is primarily concerned with the ways in which three contemporary Caribbean writers - Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison - deploy gardens, flowers, and flowering trees to represent this "entangled" cultural... more
This paper is primarily concerned with the ways in which three contemporary Caribbean writers - Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison - deploy gardens, flowers, and flowering trees to represent this "entangled" cultural history. Representations of crops and flowers in contemporary Caribbean writing can never escape their history, that is, their constructedness within Caribbean historical circumstances (and their part in that very construction) whereby the landscape and agriculture (or floriculture) have particular significance.
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In this essay I want to address two related issues for postcolonial criticism: the politics of intertextuality through the relationship between colonialist texts and the material conditions of colonial practices; and the politics of... more
In this essay I want to address two related issues for postcolonial criticism: the politics of intertextuality through the relationship between colonialist texts and the material conditions of colonial practices; and the politics of rewriting, by the former colonizers, of such colonialist texts. To do this I will focus on one particular context and cluster of texts: Randolph Stow's Visitants (set in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea) and the pre-texts it interrogates.
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Recent West Indian literature by women offers a locus of debate over the retrieval of the body from and within western discursive erasure. This erasure of the female body and its possible reclamation is of course central to contemporary... more
Recent West Indian literature by women offers a locus of debate over the retrieval of the body from and within western discursive erasure. This erasure of the female body and its possible reclamation is of course central to contemporary feminist debate, and has its own genealogy within feminist discourse. My interest in this question, however, is in the ways in which colonialism's discursive and institutional apparatuses obliterated and continue to obliterate the colonised (specifically female) body, and the counter-colonial strategies by which this "lost" body might be reclaimed. In their fiction Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid anatomize the body's erasure under a colonialist scriptive drive and explore potentials for the re/cognition of corporeality and sexuality. ...
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In this paper I wish to focus on V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas, a novel now almost 20 years old, to explore issues with which post-colonial critics and theorists and some post structuralist critics are currently engaged - issues that cluster... more
In this paper I wish to focus on V.S. Naipaul's Guerrillas, a novel now almost 20 years old, to explore issues with which post-colonial critics and theorists and some post structuralist critics are currently engaged - issues that cluster around intertextuality, agency and the body. I do not intend to offer a comprehensive reading of Guerrillas, but to focus on these issues by considering Naipaul's novel as a critique of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.
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This paper considers malaria and its constructions within biomedical and literary discourse in the context of nineteenth-century European colonialist and twentieth-century post-colonial and neo-colonising configurations.
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Interview with Christopher Koch.
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Achebe's famous statement, 'I would be quite satisfied if my novels ... did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's... more
Achebe's famous statement, 'I would be quite satisfied if my novels ... did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf, delivered them,' has by now become a commonplace of post-colonial critical commentary. Yet curiously, even though it is much quoted, and directs us specifically to the relationship between text and audience, there has been relatively little attention paid to this question in post-colonial criticism. Nationalist critics and commentators have castigated writers for seeming to write for British or foreign audiences and markets; the provision of glossaries has been adduced as evidence of continuing hegemonies in publishing and marketing; Questions such as 'For whom should Indian, African, or Aboriginal writers write?' have often been raised and have provoked heated debate. Yet there has been little detailed study of the relationship between texts and their captive colonial (indeed post-colonial) audiences, and there have been few studies of the implied audience or audiences of post-colonial texts. This is a curious omission given the degree to which questions of this kind have direct bearing on any analysis of the discursive field within which texts and textuality are enmeshed in post-colonial societies.
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A number of Canadian writers (as Max Dorsinville, Diana Brydon and Chantal Zabus' have noted) have taken up the challenge by rewriting particular European pre-texts, notably Shakespeare's The Tempest: but in Not Wanted on the Voyage... more
A number of Canadian writers (as Max Dorsinville, Diana Brydon and Chantal Zabus' have noted) have taken up the challenge by rewriting particular European pre-texts, notably Shakespeare's The Tempest: but in Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) Timothy Findley interrogates that ur-text of Western imperialism, the Bible, rewriting the account of Noah and the Great Flood, source myth in Western civilisation for motifs of destruction and salvation.
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I am concerned in this paper with the performative function of
autobiography, not with its definition, or its characteristic tropes.
autobiography, not with its definition, or its characteristic tropes.
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'A second epoch of colonisation' - this is how Wole Soyinka characterises Western theoretical practice as it applies itself, even with the best of intentions, to the cultural productions of the non-Western world. And it would be fair to... more
'A second epoch of colonisation' - this is how Wole Soyinka characterises Western theoretical practice as it applies itself, even with the best of intentions, to the cultural productions of the non-Western world. And it would be fair to say that post-colonial writing - by which we mean writing that is grounded in the cultural realities of those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted at least in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism - contains hundreds of such statements: statements which lay bare the material, often devastating, consequences of a centuries-long imposition of Euro-American conceptual patterns onto a world that is at once 'out there' and yet thoroughly assimilable to the psychic grasp of Western cognition.
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I am not here concerned to establish definitions, but to elucidate the power relationships involved in the use of these terms, since the labelling of individual works or national or regional traditions has profound implications for the... more
I am not here concerned to establish definitions, but to elucidate the power relationships involved in the use of these terms, since the labelling of individual works or national or regional traditions has profound implications for the current and future consideration of the literatures and cultures of countries outside Europe.
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As George Lamming once remarked, over three quarters of the contemporary world has been directly and profoundly affected by imperialism and colonialism. Although it is clear just how profound an effect this has had on the social and... more
As George Lamming once remarked, over three quarters of the contemporary world has been directly and profoundly affected by imperialism and colonialism. Although it is clear just how profound an effect this has had on the social and political structures of the twentieth century and on the relations which exist between nations in our age, it has until recently been less clear how profoundly this has influenced the perceptive frameworks of the majority of people alive now. The day to day realities of colonized peoples were in large part generated for them by the impact of European discourses. But the contemporary art,
philosophies and literature produced by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European models. The processes of artistic and literary colonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered 'reality', free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, with its pandemic brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable. But as the contradictions inherent in a project such as Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike's The Decolonization of African Literature demonstrate,' such pre-colonial cultural purity can never be fully recovered.
philosophies and literature produced by post-colonial societies are not simply continuations or adaptations of European models. The processes of artistic and literary colonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses. This has frequently been accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered 'reality', free of all colonial taint. Given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, with its pandemic brutalities and its cultural denigration, such a demand is desirable and inevitable. But as the contradictions inherent in a project such as Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike's The Decolonization of African Literature demonstrate,' such pre-colonial cultural purity can never be fully recovered.
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Throughout his writing career, V.S. Naipaul has been exploring the contemporary repercussions for both colonizer and colonized of imperial colonial history, and his works have been a series of experiments in what the Barbadian novelist... more
Throughout his writing career, V.S. Naipaul has been exploring the
contemporary repercussions for both colonizer and colonized of imperial colonial history, and his works have been a series of experiments in what the Barbadian novelist George Lamming has called "the informing influence of history on the imaginative rendering of character."! Post-colonial societies are for Naipaul essentially mimetic. ...
contemporary repercussions for both colonizer and colonized of imperial colonial history, and his works have been a series of experiments in what the Barbadian novelist George Lamming has called "the informing influence of history on the imaginative rendering of character."! Post-colonial societies are for Naipaul essentially mimetic. ...
Research Interests:
R.K. Narayan's novels are, like Raja Rao's implicitly Vedāntin in framework and atmosphere, but it is primarily Raja Rao, novelist and short-story writer as well as professional philosopher, and a Vedāntin himself, who has directly... more
R.K. Narayan's novels are, like Raja Rao's implicitly Vedāntin in framework and atmosphere, but it is primarily Raja Rao, novelist and short-story writer as well as professional philosopher, and a Vedāntin himself, who has directly confronted the problem of the meeting ground between English language and form and Indian metaphysic in terms of character, action and theme in his works.
Research Interests:
I begin with the proposition that a comparative post-colonial framework - if not strictly a methodology - is not only useful, but necessary. We no longer subscribe to the belief that a literary text can be isolated from the contexts out... more
I begin with the proposition that a comparative post-colonial framework - if
not strictly a methodology - is not only useful, but necessary. We no longer
subscribe to the belief that a literary text can be isolated from the contexts out of which it was produced, or from the historical conditions of its production.
not strictly a methodology - is not only useful, but necessary. We no longer
subscribe to the belief that a literary text can be isolated from the contexts out of which it was produced, or from the historical conditions of its production.
Research Interests:
Discusses the growing (and shifting) interest of Australian writers in Asian cultures, religions and philosophies and gives an overview of the representation of Asia in some recent Australian novels. Argues that earlier Australian novels... more
Discusses the growing (and shifting) interest of Australian writers in Asian cultures, religions and philosophies and gives an overview of the representation of Asia in some recent Australian novels. Argues that earlier Australian novels “saw Asia simply as an exotic background for adventure romance”, whereas more recent fiction has reflected more complex attitudes towards Asia and has started to explore Asian philosophies and cultures for elements which challenge and clarify the way Australians perceive their “psychic relationship with the universe”.
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LIKE Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Christopher Koch explores in his fiction the post-colonial Australian identity, not in an exclusively political sense, but rather in its spiritual and metaphysical ramifications. While all three... more
LIKE Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Christopher Koch explores in his fiction the post-colonial Australian identity, not in an exclusively political sense, but rather in its spiritual and metaphysical ramifications. While all three novelists have constantly dealt with aspects ol" this theme. Koch has seemed most conscious of the vestigial European inheritance and the increasing Asian perspectives in shaping the Australian spirit.
Research Interests:
Apart from orthodox Christian reference, two mystical trends are apparent in recent Australian fiction. Firstly, Australian writers have felt the need to come to terms with the spirits of place which remain unappeased by an imported... more
Apart from orthodox Christian reference, two mystical trends are apparent in recent Australian fiction. Firstly, Australian writers have felt the need to come to terms with the spirits of place which remain unappeased by an imported Christianity attuned over the centuries to a very different physical and social environment. A corollary of this in Australian writing has been an interest in the religions of the aboriginal inhabitants whose intimate understanding of the land might provide the European interloper with a key to its metaphysical rhythms.
Research Interests:
Whatever the point of view of a particular writer, the overriding concern of the West Indian novelist or poet has been history and its oppression. West Indian literature has moved excitingly and rapidly in the last forty years, obsessed... more
Whatever the point of view of a particular writer, the overriding concern of the West Indian novelist or poet has been history and its oppression. West Indian literature has moved excitingly and rapidly in the last forty years, obsessed by a vision which, in Margaret Laurence's phrase '[looks] back into the future'. All the major West Indian writers, whatever their protestations, or wherever they choose to live, continue to be obsessed by Caribbean history and its implications even when their works are set in Africa, India, or England.
Research Interests:
Interview with Wilson Harris (Guyana, Caribbean)
Research Interests:
IN the West Indies a concern with the slave past and the disorienting effects of colonialism on contemporary man's individuality underlies works as different in tone and technique as V.S. Naipaul's novels and Derek Walcott's poems. This... more
IN the West Indies a concern with the slave past and the disorienting effects of colonialism on contemporary man's individuality underlies works as different in tone and technique as V.S. Naipaul's novels and Derek Walcott's poems. This literature of disorientation has developed from simply registering the state of being "divided to the vein"1
to investigating the fundamental nature of the human personality
and its legacy from the historical traumas of slavery and colonialism, and has gone on to explore ways of reintegrating the colonized personality.
to investigating the fundamental nature of the human personality
and its legacy from the historical traumas of slavery and colonialism, and has gone on to explore ways of reintegrating the colonized personality.
Research Interests:
Rhys's fiction in its entirety, however, presents a complex picture of the mind of a people uniquely isolated by the vagaries of history and winning a grip on their "postage stamp of native soil""* not, like Faulkner's Southerners, by... more
Rhys's fiction in its entirety, however, presents a complex picture of the mind of a people uniquely isolated by the vagaries of history and winning a grip on their "postage stamp of native soil""* not, like Faulkner's Southerners, by revolutionary war but from the Sargasso Sea of an ambiguously divisive yet shackling colonial history. ...
Research Interests:
Wendt's writing, like that of contemporary Australian, Canadian, West Indian, New Zealand and African writers, is basically post-colonial, in that both his themes and his mediums are governed by the experience of colonisation and Empire.... more
Wendt's writing, like that of contemporary Australian, Canadian, West Indian, New Zealand and African writers, is basically post-colonial, in that both his themes and his mediums are governed by the experience of colonisation and Empire. He uses the English language to explore ideas of national assertion, imaginative ties to the motherland or colonising country, rebellion, and the self-definition uneasily growing from a complex of ancestral values and twentieth century colonial dislocations.
Research Interests:
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',... more
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 'globalization').This book considers these imperial 'exchanges' and charts some contemporary legacies of those inequitable imports and exports, transportations and transmutations. Sheep farming in Australia, transforming the land as it dispossessed the native inhabitants, became a symbol of (new, white) nationhood. The transportation of plants (and animals) into and across the Pacific, even where benign or nostalgic, had widespread environmental effects, despite the hopes of the acclimatisation societies involved, and, by extension, of missionary societies “planting the seeds of Christianity.” In the Caribbean, plantation slavery pushed back the “jungle” (itself an imported word) and erased the indigenous occupants – one example of the righteous, biblically justified cultivation of the wilderness. In Australia, artistic depictions of landscape, often driven by romantic and 'gothic' aesthetics, encoded contradictory settler mindsets, and literary representations of colonial Kenya mask the erasure of ecosystems. Chapters on the early twentieth century (in Canada, Kenya, and Queensland) indicate increased awareness of the value of species-preservation, conservation, and disease control. The tension between traditional and 'Euroscientific' attitudes towards conservation is revealed in attitudes towards control of the Ganges, while the urge to resource exploitation has produced critical disequilibrium in Papua New Guinea. Broader concerns centering on ecotourism and ecocriticism are treated in further essays summarising how the dominant West has alienated 'nature' from human beings through commodification in the service of capitalist 'progress'.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Helen Tiffin) pp. xi.
Empire's Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment (Leigh Dale) pp. 1-14.
Representations of Landscape and Nature in Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main and James Anthony's Froude's The English in the West Indies (Claudia Brandenstein) pp. 15-30.
Polluted River or Goddess and Saviour? The Ganga in the Discourses of Modernity and Hinduism (Meennakshi Sharma) pp. 31-50.
Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy? (Helen Gilbert) pp. 51-70.
Colonial Nature-Inscription: On Haunted Landscapes (Andrew McCain) pp. 71-84.
'Transported Landscapes': Refections on Empire and Environment in the Pacific (Ruth Blair) pp. 85-112.
The 'I' in Beaver: Sympathetic Identification and Self-Representation in Grey-Owl's Pilgrims of the Wild (Carrie Dawson) pp. 113-31.
The Sandline Mercenaries Affair: Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation-State (Robert Dixon) pp. 131-48.
Planting the Seeds of Christianity: Ecological Reform in Nineteenth-Century Polynesian London Missionary Society Stations (Anna Johnston) pp. 149-64.
Five Emus to the King of Siam: Acclimatization and Colonialism (Chris Tiffin) pp. 165-76.
'Back to the World': Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context (Susie O'Brien) pp. 177-200.
Views from Van Diemen's Land: Space, Place and the Colonial Settler Subject in John Glover's Landscapes (Catherine Howell) pp. 201-220.
Colonial Cordon Sanitaire: Fixing the Boundaries of the Disease Environment (Jo Robertson) pp. 221-234.
'The Animals are Innocennt': Latter-Day Women Travellers in Africa (Gillian Whitlock) pp. 235-46.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Helen Tiffin) pp. xi.
Empire's Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment (Leigh Dale) pp. 1-14.
Representations of Landscape and Nature in Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main and James Anthony's Froude's The English in the West Indies (Claudia Brandenstein) pp. 15-30.
Polluted River or Goddess and Saviour? The Ganga in the Discourses of Modernity and Hinduism (Meennakshi Sharma) pp. 31-50.
Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy? (Helen Gilbert) pp. 51-70.
Colonial Nature-Inscription: On Haunted Landscapes (Andrew McCain) pp. 71-84.
'Transported Landscapes': Refections on Empire and Environment in the Pacific (Ruth Blair) pp. 85-112.
The 'I' in Beaver: Sympathetic Identification and Self-Representation in Grey-Owl's Pilgrims of the Wild (Carrie Dawson) pp. 113-31.
The Sandline Mercenaries Affair: Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation-State (Robert Dixon) pp. 131-48.
Planting the Seeds of Christianity: Ecological Reform in Nineteenth-Century Polynesian London Missionary Society Stations (Anna Johnston) pp. 149-64.
Five Emus to the King of Siam: Acclimatization and Colonialism (Chris Tiffin) pp. 165-76.
'Back to the World': Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context (Susie O'Brien) pp. 177-200.
Views from Van Diemen's Land: Space, Place and the Colonial Settler Subject in John Glover's Landscapes (Catherine Howell) pp. 201-220.
Colonial Cordon Sanitaire: Fixing the Boundaries of the Disease Environment (Jo Robertson) pp. 221-234.
'The Animals are Innocennt': Latter-Day Women Travellers in Africa (Gillian Whitlock) pp. 235-46.
Research Interests:
The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field. Leading, as well as lesser... more
The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field.
Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.
Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.
Research Interests:
Table of Contents Preface pp. vii-viii. Acknowledgements pp. ix. Progress and Ambivalence in the Colonial Novel (Chris Tiffin) pp. 1-10. Exiles from Tradition: Women's Life Writing (Gillian Whitlock) pp. 11-24. Concealing Her Blue... more
Table of Contents
Preface pp. vii-viii.
Acknowledgements pp. ix.
Progress and Ambivalence in the Colonial Novel (Chris Tiffin) pp. 1-10.
Exiles from Tradition: Women's Life Writing (Gillian Whitlock) pp. 11-24.
Concealing Her Blue Stockings: Femininity and Self-Representation in Susanna Moodie's Autobiographical Works (Misao Dean) pp. 25-36.
Atwood and Drabble: Life after Radiance (Lee Briscoe Thomson) pp. 37-46.
Out of the Blank: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (Stan Dragland) pp. 47-66.
Rite of Reply: Shorter Fiction of Jean Rhys (Helen Tiffin) pp. 67-78.
Sound, Depth and Disembodiment in Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (Russel McDougall) pp. 79-90.
Elements of the Mock-Heroic in West Indian Fiction: Samuel Selvon's Moses Ascending and Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance (Victor Chang) pp. 91-.
Preface pp. vii-viii.
Acknowledgements pp. ix.
Progress and Ambivalence in the Colonial Novel (Chris Tiffin) pp. 1-10.
Exiles from Tradition: Women's Life Writing (Gillian Whitlock) pp. 11-24.
Concealing Her Blue Stockings: Femininity and Self-Representation in Susanna Moodie's Autobiographical Works (Misao Dean) pp. 25-36.
Atwood and Drabble: Life after Radiance (Lee Briscoe Thomson) pp. 37-46.
Out of the Blank: Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (Stan Dragland) pp. 47-66.
Rite of Reply: Shorter Fiction of Jean Rhys (Helen Tiffin) pp. 67-78.
Sound, Depth and Disembodiment in Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (Russel McDougall) pp. 79-90.
Elements of the Mock-Heroic in West Indian Fiction: Samuel Selvon's Moses Ascending and Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance (Victor Chang) pp. 91-.
Research Interests:
This book is an examination of two major literary movements which are often misleadingly conflated. The post-colonial differs from the post-modern in its provenance in former British colonies and dominions, in its historical reach... more
This book is an examination of two major literary movements which are often misleadingly conflated. The post-colonial differs from the post-modern in its provenance in former British colonies and dominions, in its historical reach extending from the time of Imperial dominance down to the contemporary, in its critical commitment to context, and in its development of an independent body of theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Helen Tiffin) pp. vii-.
Modernism's Last Post (Stephen Slemon) pp. 1-12.
Narration in the Post-colonial Moment: Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (Simon Gikandi) pp. 13-22.
Waiting for the Post: Some Relations between Modernity, Colonization and Writing (Simon During) pp. 23-46.
'Numinous Proportions': Wilson Harris's Alternative to All 'Posts' (Hena-Maes Jelinek) pp. 47-64.
'The Empire Writes Back': Language and History in Shame and Midnight's Children (Aruna Srivastava) pp. 65-78.
Breaking the Chain: Anti-Saussurean Resistance in Birney, Carey and C.S. Peirce (Ian Adam) pp. 79-94.
Post, Post and Post. Or, Where is South African Literature in All This? (Annamaria Carusi) pp. 95-108.
SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus (Robert Rawdon Wilson) pp. 109-124.
Decolonizing the Map: Post-colonialism, Post-structuralism and the Cartographic Conection (Graham Huggan) pp. 125-38.
What Was Post-modernism? (John Frow) pp. 139-52.
Being there, being There: Kosinsky and Malouf (Gareth Griffiths) pp. 153-66.
'Circling the Downspout of Empire' (Linda Hutcheon) pp. 167-90.
The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy (Diana Brydon) pp. 191-204.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Helen Tiffin) pp. vii-.
Modernism's Last Post (Stephen Slemon) pp. 1-12.
Narration in the Post-colonial Moment: Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (Simon Gikandi) pp. 13-22.
Waiting for the Post: Some Relations between Modernity, Colonization and Writing (Simon During) pp. 23-46.
'Numinous Proportions': Wilson Harris's Alternative to All 'Posts' (Hena-Maes Jelinek) pp. 47-64.
'The Empire Writes Back': Language and History in Shame and Midnight's Children (Aruna Srivastava) pp. 65-78.
Breaking the Chain: Anti-Saussurean Resistance in Birney, Carey and C.S. Peirce (Ian Adam) pp. 79-94.
Post, Post and Post. Or, Where is South African Literature in All This? (Annamaria Carusi) pp. 95-108.
SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus (Robert Rawdon Wilson) pp. 109-124.
Decolonizing the Map: Post-colonialism, Post-structuralism and the Cartographic Conection (Graham Huggan) pp. 125-38.
What Was Post-modernism? (John Frow) pp. 139-52.
Being there, being There: Kosinsky and Malouf (Gareth Griffiths) pp. 153-66.
'Circling the Downspout of Empire' (Linda Hutcheon) pp. 167-90.
The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy (Diana Brydon) pp. 191-204.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Introduction (H. Tiffin and C. Tiffin). Invitation (J. McQueen). Hello Camel (A. Badger). Gamalian's Womann (Subramani). Swimmers (B. Baer). Not without Rain (L. Houbein). The Guru (S. Nandan). Good old Joe (R. Conway). Balandja, the... more
Introduction (H. Tiffin and C. Tiffin).
Invitation (J. McQueen).
Hello Camel (A. Badger).
Gamalian's Womann (Subramani).
Swimmers (B. Baer).
Not without Rain (L. Houbein).
The Guru (S. Nandan).
Good old Joe (R. Conway).
Balandja, the Cockatoos (B. Wongar).
When the Ants Look Like People (M. Richards).
The Boss (J. Kolia).
A Good Marriage (O. Masters).
Go, Said the Bird (C. O'Brien).
Dear Primitive (Subramani).
The Well-bred Thief (E. Jolley).
Crocodile (P. Sharrad).
Invitation (J. McQueen).
Hello Camel (A. Badger).
Gamalian's Womann (Subramani).
Swimmers (B. Baer).
Not without Rain (L. Houbein).
The Guru (S. Nandan).
Good old Joe (R. Conway).
Balandja, the Cockatoos (B. Wongar).
When the Ants Look Like People (M. Richards).
The Boss (J. Kolia).
A Good Marriage (O. Masters).
Go, Said the Bird (C. O'Brien).
Dear Primitive (Subramani).
The Well-bred Thief (E. Jolley).
Crocodile (P. Sharrad).
Research Interests:
The incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards catastrophically resulted in genocide or the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples across the globe. It also caused drastic... more
The incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards catastrophically resulted in genocide or the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples across the globe. It also caused drastic changes in extra-European temperate as well as tropical environments. As Alfred Crosby argues, environmental impact in the form of disease - human, plant and animal - forest felling, the casual or systematic slaughter of indigenous animals, and the introduction of European crops and livestock were both prime cause and continuing consequence of environmental change incurred through the post-1492 European diasporic intrusions (Crosby 1986).
Table of Contents:
Green Postcolonialism (Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin) pp. 1-11.
Global Designs and Local Lifeworlds: Colonial Legacies of Conservation, Disenfranchisement and Environmental Governance in Postcolonial India (Shalini Randeria) pp. 12-30.
Estranging an Icon: Eucalyptus and India (Paul Sharrad) pp. 31-48.
Conservation in Colonial Indonesia (Robert Cribb) pp. 49-61.
Quantum Landscapes: A 'Ventriloquism of Spirit' (Elizabeth DeLoughrey) pp. 62-82.
Survival Strategies for Global Times: The Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage (Susie O'Brien) pp. 83-98.
'Postcolonial' Describes You as Negative: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh (T. Vijay Kumar) pp. 99-105.
Laughing Out of Place: Humour Alliances and Other Postcolonial Translations In an Antique Land (Christi Ann Merrill) pp. 106-123.
'Daughters Who Know the Languages of Power': Community, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Development in Tess Onwueme's Tell it to Women (Kanika Batra) pp. 124-138.
Book Reviews pp. 139-164.
Table of Contents:
Green Postcolonialism (Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin) pp. 1-11.
Global Designs and Local Lifeworlds: Colonial Legacies of Conservation, Disenfranchisement and Environmental Governance in Postcolonial India (Shalini Randeria) pp. 12-30.
Estranging an Icon: Eucalyptus and India (Paul Sharrad) pp. 31-48.
Conservation in Colonial Indonesia (Robert Cribb) pp. 49-61.
Quantum Landscapes: A 'Ventriloquism of Spirit' (Elizabeth DeLoughrey) pp. 62-82.
Survival Strategies for Global Times: The Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage (Susie O'Brien) pp. 83-98.
'Postcolonial' Describes You as Negative: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh (T. Vijay Kumar) pp. 99-105.
Laughing Out of Place: Humour Alliances and Other Postcolonial Translations In an Antique Land (Christi Ann Merrill) pp. 106-123.
'Daughters Who Know the Languages of Power': Community, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Development in Tess Onwueme's Tell it to Women (Kanika Batra) pp. 124-138.
Book Reviews pp. 139-164.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Helen Tiffin (University of Wollongong, Australia) presents on "Philosophies Clash: Conservation versus Animals" at the RCC Lunchtime Colloquium on Thursday, 24 April 2014. The RCC Lunchtime Colloquium series allows fellows of the Rachel... more
Helen Tiffin (University of Wollongong, Australia) presents on "Philosophies Clash: Conservation versus Animals" at the RCC Lunchtime Colloquium on Thursday, 24 April 2014.
The RCC Lunchtime Colloquium series allows fellows of the Rachel Carson Center to present their research to other fellows, to staff, and to the general public. It takes place weekly from 12-2 p.m. Entry is free and lunch is provided. Talks last approximately 30 minutes and are followed by a Q&A session.
The RCC Lunchtime Colloquium series allows fellows of the Rachel Carson Center to present their research to other fellows, to staff, and to the general public. It takes place weekly from 12-2 p.m. Entry is free and lunch is provided. Talks last approximately 30 minutes and are followed by a Q&A session.
Research Interests:
In this exciting episode of Knowing Animals I am joined by Helen Tiffin. Helen is an adjunct professor at the University of Wollongong. We discuss her upcoming book chapter ‘Australian Conservation Policies and the Owls of Lord Howe... more
In this exciting episode of Knowing Animals I am joined by Helen Tiffin. Helen is an adjunct professor at the University of Wollongong. We discuss her upcoming book chapter ‘Australian Conservation Policies and the Owls of Lord Howe Island’ which will soon appear which will be published by Brill and edited by Beate Neumier from the University of Colon, coming out in 2019.