Order and Partialities

Theory, Pedagogy, and the "Postcolonial"

Edited by Kostas Myrsiades & Jerry McGuire

Subjects: Postcolonial Studies
Series: SUNY series, INTERRUPTIONS: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discourse/s
Paperback : 9780791426401, 415 pages, August 1995
Hardcover : 9780791426395, 415 pages, September 1995

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Table of contents

Introduction
Lalita Pandit and Jerry McGuire

Part I. Theory: New Histories and (Multi)cultural Poetics

1. Dimensions of African Discourse
Aiola Irele

2. An Iconography of Difference: Internal Colonialism, Photography, and the Crofters of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Martin Padget

3. Sanctioned and Proscribed Narratives in Postcolonial India: A Bicultural Reading of the Courtesan Film
Poonam Arora

4. The Gender of Tradition: Ideologies of Character in Post-Colonization Anglophone Literature
Patrick Colm Hogan

5. "Logiques metisses": Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations
Francoise Lionnet

6. Narrative, Pluralism, and Decolonization: Recent Caribbean Literature
Patrick Taylor

7. Hysterical Bodies, Colonial Subjects: La Mere's Hystery in Duras' Un barage contre le Pacifique
Joline Blais

8. Launcelot's Feast: Teaching Poststructuralism and the New Mestiza
Laura E. Donaldson

9. Subalterity and Feminism in the Moment of the (Post)modern: The Materialist Return
Teresa L. Ebert

10. Postcolonial Tour 93 (All Major U. S. Cities)
Amitava Kumar

Part II. Pedagogy: Terminologies, Problematics, Readings

11. Dodging the Crossfire: Questions for Postcolonial Pedagogy
Rajeswari Mohan

12. Teaching at the End of Empire
Stephen Slemon

13. Heart of Darkness, Tarzan, and the "Third World": Canons and Encounters in World Literature, English 109
Allen Carey-Webb

14. The Hybrid Terrains of Literary Imagination: Maryse Conde's Black Witch of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, and Aime Cesaire's Heroic Poetic Voice
Mara L. Dukats

15. Other Worlds, Other Texts: Teaching Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day to Canadian Students
Arun Mukherjee

16. "And Here I Am, Telling in Winnebago How I Lived My Life": Teaching Mountain Wolf Woman
Susan Gardner

17. Parenting the Nation: Some Observations on Nuruddin Farah's Maps
Derek Wright

18. Re-Inventing Ourselves a Million Times: Narrative, Desire, and Identity in Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
F. Timothy Ruppel

Index

Looks at the political and cultural issues involved in teaching postcolonial literatures and theories.

Description

Order and Partialities explores the complex and problematic relations among postcolonial literatures and theories, the people who teach them at the university level, and the institutions in which they are taught. Each essay traces a path through these relations; yet each also comments on the fundamental paradox and contradiction within which these relations operate: that they must engage with the powerful, labyrinthine apparatus of Western cultural hegemony—a set of systematic, interpretative procedures corresponding to, and in service of, a regime of ideological expectations and its institutional representatives—in order to disengage themselves from its operations. There is no way to teach these relations without entering, oneself, into the entanglements of postcolonial power.

Kostas Myrsiades is Professor of English at West Chester University and Editor of College Literature. Jerry McGuire is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Managing Editor of College Literature.

Reviews

"This is a rich, diverse resource that presents a variety of views concerning the conception of 'post-colonial literatures' and the teaching of such writings. The articles stand out as complex, detailed, creatively and comprehensively theorized, going beyond narrow readings to show how particular texts can disrupt discourses and logics which continue to secure the Western appropriation of 'the Other. '" — Roger I. Simon, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

"This collection of essays takes on some of the thorniest critical problems in postcolonial studies in highly nuanced and complex ways. The book consistently refuses a simplistic or reductive theoretical unity and coherence, instead capturing the rich and dynamic critical exchanges that characterize the best contemporary postcolonial theory. "— Madhu Dubey, Northwestern University