Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis (Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English: Asnel Papers, 20)

Cecile Sandten; Annika Bauer

ISBN 10: 900432285X / ISBN 13: 9789004322851

Verlag: Brill Rodopi, 2016

Beschreibung

Hardcover, xxi + 440 pages, NOT ex-library. Interior is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Boards show gentle cosmetic indentations, scuffing to tips of corners (rubbed tip of the upper outer corner of rear board). Issued without a dust jacket. -- Interdisciplinary analyses of how postcolonial cities are imagined, represented, and theorized in literature, media, and culture. The volume addresses the evolving role of urban environments in postcolonial discourse by exploring how metropolitan contexts reflect both the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and cultural transformation. Drawing on literary studies, cultural theory, linguistics, sociology, and media analysis, the collection repositions the postcolonial metropolis as a site of contestation, hybridity, and layered spatial narratives. Organized into five thematic sections, each engages with specific regions and discursive frameworks. The first, "Citizenship and (Alternative) Market Economies in the Postcolonial Metropolis," focuses on how urban poverty, housing displacement, and informal economies shape and are shaped by literary and media portrayals. Melissa Kennedy's chapter links the material precarity of slum dwellers to long-standing global economic structures, tracing continuities from 19th-century London planning to present-day postcolonial housing policies. Enda Duffy and the team of David Tavares and Marc Brosseau examine intersections of debt, poetry, and identity politics in London through second-generation South Asian British narratives. Building on these economic and spatial dynamics, the second section turns to African and South African cities, with essays on Johannesburg, Kampala, and other locations, interrogating rural-urban dynamics, post-apartheid tensions, queer geographies, and women's rights. Recurring themes include spatial inequality, contested memory, and the city as palimpsest. Contributions show how literature constructs counter-narratives to official redevelopment discourses, emphasizing marginalized communities and repressed histories. The third section focuses on Asian and South Asian metropolises, addressing rapid urbanization, linguistic multiplicity, and the transformation of transit and infrastructure. Contributions analyze literary and cinematic texts from Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Topics include urban rhythm, the role of local trains in shaping consciousness, topographies of excess, and the shifting line between the provincial and the global. Poems and fiction articulate transcultural subjectivities and challenge spatial hierarchies. The fourth section, on Australian and Canadian settler cities, considers colonial and postcolonial legacies of urban exclusion, particularly regarding Indigenous populations. Authors explore how Aboriginal and First Nations literature reclaims space through memory, mobility, and counter-mapping. Texts foreground the politics of presence and absence, disrupting dominant narratives and reframing urban identity. The final section examines senses, media, and language in postcolonial experience, analyzing soundscapes, linguistic practices, and audiovisual forms that configure and reshape metropolitan life. Topics include the subversive use of pidgin in Cameroonian media, phonetic variation in Jamaican English radio, and music videos envisioning alternative urban futures in diasporic Britain. The focus is on how sensory and linguistic modes participate in spatial and cultural negotiation, with recurring attention to affect, infrastructure, and mobility as key frameworks, alongside questions of surveillance, visibility, and the production of urban knowledge. Across texts and terrains, the volume traces how the postcolonial city is imagined not just as a place, but as a contested mode of knowing, remembering, and becoming.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 011380

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis (Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English: Asnel Papers, 20)
• Verlag: Brill Rodopi
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 900432285X
• ISBN-13: 9789004322851
• Einband: Hardcover
• Auflage: 1st Edition
• Zustand: Good

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

The notion of the postcolonial metropolis has gained prominence in the last two decades both within and beyond postcolonial studies. Disciplines such as sociology and urban studies, however, have tended to focus on the economic inequalities, class disparities, and other structural and formative aspects of the postcolonial metropolises that are specific to Western conceptions of the city at large. It is only recently that the depiction of postcolonial metropolises has been addressed in the writings of Suketu Mehta, Chris Abani, Amit Chaudhuri, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Zakes Mda, among others. Most of these works probe the urban specifics and physical and cultural topographies of postcolonial cities while highlighting their agential capacity to defy, appropriate, and abrogate the superimposition of theories of Western modernity and urbanism.
These ASNEL Papers are all concerned with the idea of the postcolonial (in the) metropolis from various disciplinary viewpoints, as drawn from a great range of cityscapes (spread out over five continents). The essays explore, on the one hand, ideas of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation, and, on the other, the possibility of transforming, reinventing and reconfigurating the 'postcolonial condition' in and through literary texts and visual narratives.
In this context, the volume covers a broad spectrum of theoretical and thematic approaches to postcolonial and metropolitan topographies and their depictions in writings from Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, and greater Asia, as well as the UK, addressing issues such as modernity and market economies but also caste, class, and social and linguistic aspects. At the same time, they reflect on the postcolonial metropolis and postcolonialism in the metropolis by concentrating on an urban imaginary which turns on notions of spatial subdivision and inequality, political repression, social discrimination, economic exploitation, and cultural alienation - as the continuing 'postcolonial' condition.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cecile Sandten, Dr. phil. (1997), Habilitation (2006), both Bremen University, is Professor of English Literatures at TU Chemnitz, Germany. She has published monographs and many articles on Shakespearean adaptations in postcolonial contexts, Indian English poetry and fictions of the postcolonial metropolis.

Annika Bauer, M.A. (2011), TU Chemnitz, Germany, is research assistant at the chair of English Literature at TU Chemnitz. She focuses on metropolises in Indian English literature and is co-editor of Stadt der Moderne (City of Modernity; WVT, 2013).