Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture PDF Download

Author: Basuli Deb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317632109
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

Author: Miriam Wallraven
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317581393
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Examining the intersection of occult spirituality, text, and gender, this book provides a compelling analysis of the occult revival in literature from the 1880s through the course of the twentieth century. Bestselling novels such as The Da Vinci Code play with magic and the fascination of hidden knowledge, while occult and esoteric subjects have become very visible in literature during the twentieth century. This study analyses literature by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisits texts with occult motifs by canonical authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Leonora Carrington, and Angela Carter. This material, which has never been analysed in a literary context, covers influential movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality. Wallraven engages with the question of how literature functions as the medium for creating occult worlds and powerful identities, particularly the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. Based on the concept of ancient wisdom, the occult in literature also incorporates topical discourses of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology. Hence, as an ever-evolving discursive universe, it presents alternatives to religious truth claims that often lead to various forms of fundamentalism that we encounter today. This book offers a ground-breaking approach to interpreting the forms and functions of occult texts for scholars and students of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.

Author: Steffen Hantke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317383249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Author: Elvira Pulitano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317331281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.

Author: Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317507312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions—through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore draws on theories of vulnerability, precarity, and dispossession to argue for the necessity of recognizing the embodied and material contexts of human rights subjects. At the same time, she demonstrates how these theories run the risk of reproducing the structural imbalances that lie at the core of critiques of human rights. Pairing conventional human rights genres—legal instruments, human rights reports, reportage, and humanitarian campaigns—with literary and visual culture, Moore develops a transnational feminist reading praxis of five sites of rights and their violation over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address state-sponsored ethnocide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, the human rights campaigns, fiction, and film that have brought Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how literature and visual culture participate in that cultural imaginary. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability, Moore demonstrates the importance of situating human rights violations not only in the context of neo-liberal development policies but also in relation to the growth of security networks that serve the nation-state often at the expense of the security of specific subjects and populations. In place of conventional victims and agents, the intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, yet which run the risk of cooptation by security rhetoric.

Author: Birgit Mara Kaiser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317681975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Over the past decade ‘singularity’ has been a prominent term in a broad range of fields, ranging from philosophy to literary and cultural studies to science and technology studies. This volume intervenes in this broad discussion of singularity and its various implications, proposing to explore the term for its specific potential in the study of literature. Singularity and Transnational Poetics brings together scholars working in the fields of literary and cultural studies, translation studies, and transnational literatures. The volume’s central concern is to explore singularity as a conceptual tool for the comparative study of contemporary literatures beyond national frameworks, and by implication, as a tool to analyze human existence. Contributors explore how singularity might move our conceptions of cultural identity from prevailing frameworks of self/other toward the premises of being as ‘singular plural’. Through a close reading of transnational literatures from Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and South Africa, this collection offers a new approach to reading literature that will challenge a reader’s established notions of identity, individuality, communicability, and social cohesion.

Author: Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317584228
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This is the first study to examine the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern and contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the collection situates medicine as an important and largely overlooked discourse in these literatures, while also considering the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions underpinning illness. Investigating how Hispanic and Lusophone writers have reflected on the personal and cultural effects of illness, it raises central questions about how medical discourses, cultural pathologies, and the art of healing in general are represented. Essays pay particular attention to the ways in which these interdisciplinary dialogues chart new directions in the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures, and emerging disciplines such as the medical humanities. Addressing a wide range of themes and subjects including bioethics, neuroscience, psychosurgery, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, indigenous herbal medicine, the rising genre of the pathography, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope, the collection engages with the discourses of cultural studies, gender studies, disability studies, comparative literature, and the medical humanities. This book enriches and stimulates scholarship in these areas by showing how much we still have to gain from interdisciplinary studies working at the intersections between the humanities and the sciences.

Author: Mari Hatavara
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317524616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.

Author: Casey Cothran
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317435249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

Author: Karen Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134699603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book proposes a fundamental relationship between exile and mapping. It seeks to understand the cartographic imperative inherent in the exilic condition, the exilic impulses fundamental to mapping, and the varied forms of description proper to both. The vital intimacy of the relationship between exile and mapping compels a new spatial literacy that requires the cultivation of localized, dynamic reading practices attuned to the complexities of understanding space as text and texts as spatial artifacts. The collection asks: what kinds of maps do exiles make? How are they conceived, drawn, read? Are they private maps or can they be shaped collectively? What is their relationship to memory and history? How do maps provide for new ways of imagining the fractured experience of exile and offer up both new strategies for reading displacement and new displaced reading strategies? Where does exilic mapping fit into a history of cartography, particularly within the twentieth-century spatial turn? The original work that makes up this interdisciplinary collection presents a varied look at cartographic strategies employed in writing, art, and film from the pre-Contact Americas to the Renaissance to late postmodernism; the effects of exile, in its many manifestations, on cartographic textual systems, ways of seeing, and forms of reading; the challenges of traversing and mapping unstable landscapes and restrictive social and political networks; and the felicities and difficulties of both giving into the map and attempting to escape the map that provides for exile in the first place. Cartographies of Exile will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary and cultural studies; gender, sexuality, and race studies; anthropology; art history and architecture; film, performance, visual studies; and the fine arts.