Postcolonial Cultures and Literatures : Modernity and the (Un)Commonwealth

by Benjamin, Andrew E.; Davies, Tony; Goh, Robbie B. H.

• ISBN13: 9780820451404
• ISBN10: 0820451401
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-02-01
• Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Inc

Summary

National identities, like nations themselves, have complex and troubled histories. In the case of the British nation, history and identity are not a simple matter of a progression through political consolidation, industrialization, and imperialism, but involve narratives of displacement, alterities, dislocation, and abiding conflict. The essays in this book trace the remnant presences of these conflicts and, in the process, revisit the notion of the modern nation. With decolonization, nations in the former Commonwealth inevitably inherit the political and cultural problematics of the former colonial master. In this case, modernity is as much a matter of cultural amnesia and sublimation as it is of progress and reinvention.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction: Britishness and the Construction of Postcolonial Identities	xiii
Tony Davies
Robbie B. H. Goh
Part I Centrifugus: (Neo-) Colonial Identities, Fictions and Discourses
Modernity and the Subject of National Identity	3	(9)
Andrew Benjamin
Settling Identities: Britishness Abroad	12	(28)
James N. Brown
Patricia M. Sant
Soil: Repeat, Multiply, Address	40	(16)
John Phillips
Jean Rhys, ``Human Ants,'' and the Production of Expatriate Creole Identities	56	(17)
Sue Thomas
English Language Teaching Today: Are ``British Identities'' Relevant?	73	(20)
Desmond Allison
Part II Centripetus: Multiculturalism, Production and Social Dialectics
Imported Identities: The Making of a British Ruling Class	93	(14)
Tony Davies
Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Reconstructing An Absent Nation	107	(21)
David Punter
Staging John Bull: British Identity and Irish Drama	128	(33)
Bernice Schrank
Subversive Modernity: Coleridge, Gothic Imagery, the ``Body Politic,'' and the Contestation of the Romantic Nation-State	161	(16)
Robbie B. H. Goh
Edwin Morgan, Contemporary British Poetry Publishing and British Multiculturalism	177	(13)
Barnard Turner
Industry and Identity: Filming the British Action Hero	190	(14)
Edna Lim
Valerie Wee
Three (More) Women's Texts and a Critique of New Historicism: Self-Disciplinary Soul-Making in Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Bronte	204	(23)
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Rewriting Shakespeare and Englishness: George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra	227	(17)
Loon Seong Yun, Robin
The Religion of the English Bible: From Wycliffe to James I	244	(17)
Gwee Li Sui
Part III Hereafter: ``Britishness'' and New Cultural/Literatures
Reading the Motif of Captivity: Fragmentation or Unity in Remembering Babylon	261	(14)
Julie K. Eberly
Patrick White's Early Work: An Introduction to a Literary Puzzle	275	(16)
Axel Kruse
Beadless in a Foreign Land, or a Jouti of a New Kind: David Dabydeen's Turner	291	(9)
Shanthini Pillai
The Abject and Sublime: Enabling Conditions of New Zealand's Postcolonial Identity	300	(20)
Janet Wilson
Interrogating Identity in New Zealand Stage Plays	320	(16)
Judith Dale
Nirad C. Chaudhuri's A Passage to England: A Site of Colonial Anxiety	336	(11)
Chitra Sankaran
Contributors	347