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Intimations of the Local in a Globalised World
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This volume examines how Indigenous theatre and performance from Oceania has responded to the intensification of globalisation from the turn of the 20th to the 21st centuries. It foregrounds a relational approach to the study of Indigenous texts, thus echoing what scholars such as Tui Nicola Clery have described as the stance of a “Multi-Perspective Culturally Sensitive Researcher.” To this end, it proposes a fluid vision of Oceania characterized by heterogeneity and cultural diversity calling to mind Epeli Hau‘ofa’s notion of “a sea of islands.”

Taking its cue from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, the volume offers a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical approach to the study of the various shapes of Indigeneity in Oceania. It covers Indigenous performance from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hawai’i, Samoa, Rapa Nui/Easter Island, Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Each chapter uses vivid case histories to explore a myriad of innovative strategies responding to the interplay between the local and the global in contemporary Indigenous performance. As it places different Indigenous cultures from Oceania in conversation, this critical anthology gestures towards an “imparative” model of comparative poetics, favouring negotiation of cultural difference and urging scholars to engage dialogically with non-European artistic forms of expression.
Urban Ecotones in the Global South
Global South cities are magnets of immigration flows. They are vivid crucibles of human diversity, cultural interactions, but also of political tensions and social violence. From Kolkata to Bogota, from Harare to Fort-de-France, from Bamako to Cape Town, this book offers a unique set of studies on cities where multifarious diaspora flows converge. Building on the concept of the ecotone, i.e. a contact zone between populations of different backgrounds, it elicits a multidisciplinary dialogue between social science and humanities scholars, exploring the articulation between the postcolonial and the neoliberal city. Following Ananya Roy’s proposition of a worlding the South (Roy 2014), this book contributes to forging a situated world view rooted in the experience and the imaginary of Southern cities.

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What is center and periphery? How can centers and peripheries be recognized by their ontological and axiological features? How does the axiological saturation of a literary field condition aesthetics? How did these factors transform center-periphery relationships to the former metropolises of Romance literatures of the Americas and Africa? What are the consequences of various deperipheralization contexts and processes for poetics? Using theoretical sections and case studies, this book surveys and investigates the limits of globalization. Through explorations of the intercultural dynamics, the aesthetic contributions of former peripheries are examined in terms of the transformative nature of peripheries on centralities.
In the post-war mid-century Robert van Gulik produced a series of stories set in Imperial China and featuring a Chinese Judge: Judge Dee. This book examines the author’s unprecedented effort in hybridising two heterogenous crime writing traditions – traditional Chinese gong’an (court-case) fiction and its Anglo-American counterpart – bringing to light how his fiction draws elements from these two traditions for plots, narrative features, visual images, and gender representation.

Relying on research on various sources and literary traditions, it provides illumination of the historical contexts, centring on the cultural interaction and connectedness that occurred during the multidirectional global flows of the Judge Dee texts in both western and Chinese markets. This study contributes to current scholarship on crime fiction by questioning its predominantly Eurocentric focus and the divisive post-colonial approach often adopted in accessing works concerning foreign peoples and cultures.
Troisième homme de la négritude, Léon Damas s’alignait sur la Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay) et Richard Wright, sur des surréalistes comme Apollinaire et G. Luca pour transmettre son message d’urgence : ‘a ti pa’, la France opère sa mue décoloniale. Damas est « l’antillectuel transfuge » qui, traversant les Lignes de couleur, de classe, de genre, annonce la « Cité de demain » où les différences de tout genre sont tolérées et respectées.

Third man of négritude, Léon Damas aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay), and Richard Wright, as well as with the surrealists like Apollinaire and G. Luca to transmit his urgent message: “a ti pa”, France is little by little undergoing its decolonial transformation. Damas is the “antillectuel transfuge” who crosses boundaries of color, “race”, class and gender. Hereby he announces the “City of tomorrow” where differences of all kind are tolerated and respected.
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What is the role of literature in our global landscape today? How do local authors respond to the growing worldwide power of English and the persisting effects of the colonial systems that paved the way for globalization today? These questions have often been approached very differently by postcolonialists and by students of world literature, but over the past two decades, a developing dialogue between these divergent approaches has produced robust scholarship and sometimes fractious debate, as issues of language, politics, and cultural difference have come to the fore. Drawing on a wide variety of cases, from medieval Wales to contemporary Syria and Australia, and on works written in Arabic, Basque, English, Hindi, and more, this collection explores the mutual illumination that can be gained through the interaction of postcolonial and world literary perspectives.
Écologie du roman africain francophone
Cohabiter l’espace postcolonial s’interroge essentiellement sur les enjeux écologiques dans le roman africain en français. Cet ouvrage met en lumière les stratégies complexes et diverses par lesquelles les questions environnementales s’inscrivent dans la fiction. Recourant à l’écocritique, aux théories postcoloniales et posthumanistes pour analyser un corpus romanesque large et varié, il mène le lecteur, à travers la diversité des problématiques abordés, à la découverte des nuances contextuelles du rapport entre l’humain et le non-humain. De la précarité du monde rural à la survie en milieu urbain et autres écosystèmes hostiles, en passant par l’altérité animale, l’importance du végétal, le racisme environnemental et la justice environnementale, ce livre montre comment, à l’échelle de la localité, les questions écologiques se déclinent en réels défis socioculturels et politiques.

Cohabiter l’espace postcolonial focuses on the importance of ecological issues in African fiction. The book highlights the complex and diverse strategies deployed in French speaking Africa to incorporate environmental subjects in literary productions. Using ecocriticism, postcolonial and posthumanist theories to analyse a wide variety of novels, it brings to the fore, through the diversity of the issues it addresses, some contextual inflections of the relationship between the human and the non-human. From its discussion of animal otherness, cultural significance of plants, environmental racism, environmental justice, the fragility of the rural world and the survival in urban environments, the book demonstrates how ecological issues translate into socio-cultural and political challenges for local communities in Africa.
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Brill’s Companion to Classical Reception and Modern World Poetry explores the relations between antiquity and modernity from the angle of the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern world poetry. In an innovative combination of the fields of Classical Reception and World Literature, it tackles ever-challenging questions which are central to both fields, such as the questions of literature and identity, specificity and universality, Eurocentrism, poetics and translation. Leading experts from both Classics and Modern Languages contribute 11 chapters on modern poetry and poets from different linguistic and cultural traditions from around the world.
This book investigates literary representations and self-representations of people with cosmopolitan identities arising from mobile global childhoods which transcend categories of migrancy and diaspora. Part I focuses on the ways in which cosmopolitan characters are represented in selected novels, from the debauched Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Brideshead Revisited, to the victimized Ila in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, to John le Carré’s undefinable spies. Part II focuses on self-representations of people with a cosmopolitan upbringing, in the form of autobiographical narratives by well-known authors such as Barack Obama and Edward Said, along with lesser-known writers, all of whom “write back” to the ways in which they have at times been stereotyped and othered in literary fiction and public discourse.