Colonialism and Cultural Identity

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Colonialism and Cultural Identity
Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean

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Patrick Colm Hogan - Author

SUNY series, Explorations in Postcolonial Studies

Price: $95.00
Hardcover - 373 pages

Release Date: February 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4459-7
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4459-7

Price: $33.95
Paperback - 373 pages

Release Date: January 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4460-0
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4460-3

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

Explores diverse cultural identities, both theoretically and through concrete, specific interpretations of selected major texts from former British colonies.

This book examines the diverse responses of colonized people to metropolitan ideas and to indigenous traditions. Going beyond the standard isolation of mimeticism and hybridity--and criticizing Homi Bhabha's influential treatment of the former--Hogan offers a lucid, usable theoretical structure for analysis of the postcolonial phenomena, with ramifications extending beyond postcolonial literature. Developing this structure in relation to major texts by Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Chinua Achebe, Earl Lovelace, Buchi Emecheta, Rabindranath Tagore, and Attia Hosain, Hogan also provides crucial cultural background for understanding these and other works from the same traditions.

"Patrick Hogan analyzes literary works to tell the story of the annihilation of selves and the death of cultures that accompanied colonialism. But it is also a story of the emancipatory visions that have emerged from the crucibles of self-disavowal and massive cultural dislocations. This book is a homage to human creativity under oppressive and humiliating conditions and to the indomitable resilience of the defeated and the forgotten. In Hogan's analysis, the homelessness produced by colonialism becomes the bedrock of a new tension in the postcolonial world, between categories that sustain conventionality and categories tinged with a new transcultural vision." -- Ashis Nandy, coeditor of Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self

"With great learning and a polished, accessible literary style, Hogan has undertaken--with the use of carefully defined terminology and intellectually rigorous interpretation--the formidable task of examining a large body of literature produced in postcolonial societies to show it as an integral part of the universal human heritage. His penetrating reading of Rabindranath Tagore's great novel, Gora, and Derek Walcott's play, Dream on Monkey Mountain, are indicative of his pioneering work that marks a breakthrough in scholarship in the field." -- Ainslie T. Embree, author of Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in Modern India

Patrick Colm Hogan is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. He is the coeditor of Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture, with Lalita Pandit, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Identities and Universalism

1. Literatures of Colonial Contact: Cultural Geography and the Structures of Identity

2. Dialectics of Mimeticism and Nativism: Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain

3. Colonialism, Patriarchy, and Creole Identity: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

4. Culture and Despair: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

5. Worship and "Manness": Earl Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment

6. Lives of Women in the Region of Contact: Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood

7. Orthodoxy and Universalism: Rabindranath Tagore's Gora

8. The Economics of Cultural Identity: Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column

Afterword. Socialism and the Politics of Otherness

Appendix. Analytic Glossary of Selected Theoretical Concepts

Works Cited

Index

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism
Literary Theory
Postcolonial Studies

36063/36064(JFB/LDS/FK)

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