"This book considers how contemporary British children's books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain's imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. In this conception, the insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power relations in recent children's novels reveals significant tensions, or even contradictions, with regards to the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity. Postcolonial children's literature in Britain is shown to have been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is seen as both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. The author examines the ways in which children's fictions have challenged dominant structures of power and imperial ideologies while sometimes straddling the border between subversion and an uneasy complicity. The texts analysed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, the author demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young.Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature combines a critical survey of contemporary British writing for children and young adults with the central concerns of postcolonial studies. It reveals complex engagements with questions of national identity, cultural hybridity, decolonization, and diasporic culture within contemporary British children's literature"--
Increasing scholarly attention to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has exposed the colonial implications of the Spanish Republic's fight against Franco's fascist coup. The Spanish Republic's refusal to relinquish its colonial control allowed Franco to exploit Moroccan antipathy and poverty in support of his forces. For many North American volunteers—and particularly for the hundred or so African Americans who fought in Spain—the war's stakes were not only tied to European fascism and American racism, as Popular Front and black expatriate artists often depicted, but also to colonial relationships between Europe, Africa and the New World. This essay examines literary depictions of these colonial relationships in the works of Langston Hughes and John A. Williams, contextualizing their writings alongside fictional and biographical representations of Moroccan and African American participation by North American writers who, like Hughes, participated in the Spanish Civil War. Read together, the depictions and erasures of African diasporic contact across political lines reveal the underlying contradictions used to construct categories of racial, national, and religious difference—categories used as rallying cries on each side of the battle line. Williams's retrospective positioning and Hughes's writings from the war's midst together represent the war's stakes as yet another global conflict in which members of the African diaspora faced even greater risks and greater losses.
Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy und Aravind Adiga tragen mit ihren Romanen zu einem repräsentativen Querschnitt zeitgenössischer Anglo-Indischer Literatur bei. Die drei Autoren wuchsen unter ungleichen regionalen und sozioökonomischen Bedingungen auf und verfassten ihre Werke in unterschiedlichen Jahrzehnten nach der Unabhängigkeit Indiens, was sich in ihren Werken widerspiegelt. Daher ist das Ziel dieser Arbeit, durch die Analyse und die Gegenüberstellung der Werke, Rückschlüsse über postkoloniale Themen und ihre Erzähltechniken zu gewinnen. Hybridität, Macht in all ihren Ausprägungen, postkolonialer Feminismus und Globalisierung stellen grundlegende Aspekte in den behandelten Werken dar. Rushdies Midnight?s Children gilt aufgrund seiner Schilderungen über Indien, unter der Verwendung von magischem Realismus, historiografischer Metafiktion und der Koppelung von persönlicher und nationaler Geschichte, als Meilenstein auf dem Gebiet der postkolonialen anglo-indischen Literatur. Weiteres wird der Schreibprozess an sich problematisiert und durch den Protagonisten reflektiert, der genau um Mitternacht, als die neue Nation ausgerufen, geboren wird. The God of Small Things von Roy thematisiert die Rolle der Frau und das Kastensystem in der indischen Gesellschaft und macht auf Umweltprobleme des Subkontinents aufmerksam. Die Geschichte wird Großteils durch die Sichtweise von Kindern vermittelt und hinterlässt dadurch beim Leser einen noch dramatischeren Eindruck. Adigas The White Tiger spielt im 21. Jahrhundert und schildert die immer größer werdende Kluft zwischen arm und reich und den Kontrast zwischen Dörfern ohne Infrastruktur und den hochmodernen IT-Megastädten in Indien. Aufgrund der Fülle an vorliegenden Themen könnte das Spektrum dieser Arbeit problemlos durch politische Aspekte wie den Kommunismus und Marxismus, denen in allen drei Werken eine wichtige Rolle zukommt, erweitert werden. ; The Indian-English authors Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Aravind Adiga contribute with their works to a representative cross section in postcolonial Anglo-Indian literature. They did not only write their stories in different decades after India?s independence, but they also come from different regional and social backgrounds, which are reflected in their novels. By analysing and comparing the novels with each other, this thesis aims at drawing representative conclusions about prevailing postcolonial themes and narrative techniques in contemporary Anglo-Indian literature. Hybridity, power in its various forms, postcolonial feminism, and globalisation are recurring and essential themes that shape these works; however, permitting the novels to preserve their individuality. Rushdie?s Midnight?s Children centres on the impact of its protagonist?s birth at the precise instant of India?s arrival at independence, which ties him closely to his nation?s faith. After the British left India, there are still conflicts and struggles for power and religiously motivated conflicts between Muslims and Hindus. These themes are presented through experimental narrative techniques such as magic realism, historiographic metafiction, the linking of personal and national history and a highly symbolic language. The God of Small Things by Roy is more concerned with power structures in Indian society, the role of women, the caste system and environmental issues by perceiving the world through children?s eyes. Adiga?s The White Tiger, however, portrays the gap between the rich and the poor in India and the contrast between rural villages and highly modernized IT cities. The novels? wealth of themes would easily permit to analyse further themes, e.g. communism and Marxism, which are strongly connected to postcolonialism in India and also play a prominent role in the novels. ; vorgelegt von Gudrun Hammer ; Abweichender Titel laut Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des Verfassers ; Zsfassung in dt. und engl. Sprache ; Graz, Univ., Dipl.-Arb., 2013 ; (VLID)226646
