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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > General
This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by
colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work
of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a
region and world-Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey
Collen-alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If
postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories,
this book presents an account of a different and significant strand
of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal
and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south
Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections
that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and
stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and
an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its
centre in the ocean and the south.
The 1960s saw the nexus of the revolution in popular music by a
post-war generation amid demographic upheavals and seismic shifts
in technology. Over the past two decades, musicians associated with
this period have produced a large amount of important
autobiographical writing. This book situates these works -- in the
forms of formal autobiographies and memoirs, auto-fiction, songs,
and self-fashioned museum exhibitions -- within the context of the
recent expansion of interest in autobiography, disability, and
celebrity studies. It argues that these writings express anxiety
over musical originality and authenticity, and seeks to dispel
their writers' celebrity status and particularly the association
with a lack of seriousness. These works often constitute a
meditation on the nature of postmodern fame within a
celebrity-obsessed culture, and paradoxically they aim to regain
the private self in a public forum.
This volume aims to address kinship in the context of global
mobility, while studying the effects of technological developments
throughout the 20th century on how individuals and communities
engage in real or imagined relationships. Using literary
representations as a spectrum to examine kinship practices, Lamia
Tayeb explores how transnational mobility, bi-culturalism and
cosmopolitanism honed, to some extent, the relevant authors'
concerns with the family and wider kinship relations: in these
literatures, kinship and the family lose their familiar,
taken-for-granted aspect, and yet are still conceived as
'essential' spheres of relatedness for uprooted individuals and
communities. Tayeb here studies writings by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie
Smith, Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Khaled Housseini and Nadia
Hashimi, working to understand how transnational kinship dynamics
operate when moved beyond the traditional notions of the blood
relationship, relationship to place and identification with
community.
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