Postcolonial Past and Present: Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies

Description

In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau’ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These ‘makers’ include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay, Anne Brewster, Diana Brydon, Meeta Chatterjee—Padmanabhan, Anne Collett, Dorothy Jones, Kay Lawrence, Russell McDougall, Tekura Moeka’a, Tony Simões da Silva, Teresia Teaiwa, Albert Wendt, Lydia Wevers, Diana Wood Conroy Postcolonial Past & Present: Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies Copyright Contents Foreword Illustrations and Appendices Notes on Contributors and Editors Part 1: Collision, Connection, and Change 1 Textiles from the Sea of Islands: Sacred Heart Nuns and Craft Advisers in Papua New Guinea and Australia 2 Reading Across the Pacific, Reorienting “North” 3 Nationalism from Below: Folk Nationalist Formations of Mukunda Das 4 Xavier Herbert’s Enlightenment: The Solomon Islands Nightmare, 1928 5 Regime Change Literature and Transitional Justice Part 2: Case Studies 6 Laughter and the Indigenous Trickster Aesthetics of Marie Munkara’s: Every Secret Thing 7 Claude McKay and the Pestilential City: The Metropolis, the Clinic, the Crisis 8 Bodily Cloth: The Making Process in Artworks by Elsje van Keppel and Jane Whiteley 9 Overseas and Underground: Travel and Travellers in Janet Frame’s Fiction 10 “Indias of the mind”: Maps, Mothers, and Ethnicized Wonder Woman Outfits in Australian–Indian Fiction 11 Singing the Spiral of Time: Albert Wendt’s The Adventures of Vela 12 Comparative History in Polynesia: Some Challenges of Studying the Past in the Postcolonial Present Afterword Index