Suchergebnisse

Following Ronen Palan's The Offshore World (2003) Connell understands the central feature of the offshore as the 'bifurcation of the nation state': the state splits itself in two by continuing to govern those areas that remain easy to legislate while surrendering to the international realm those which do not. Connell considers how the offshore can be understood as a form of cosmopolitanism, with a particular emphasis on the way that the obligations of the state are stretched to accommodate foreign businesses, foreign capital and even foreign citizens. Yet, as Connell demonstrates, the cosmopolitan promise of the offshore conceals the double nature of the nation-state which functions both as a node for discursive community formation and, simultaneously, as cover for the evasion of any communal responsibilities that this might imply. Reading Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch (1998), Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled (2006) and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) Connell examines how the idea of national belonging struggles to survive in representations of the offshore. In particular Connell's analysis shows that the difficulty that arises from trying to represent the offshore leads these texts to open up new perspectives on global capitalism by focussing upon its differential relationships to the state.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsRead the IntroductionThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness.Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry."