Suchergebnisse

As one of the foundational texts in the field of postcolonial writing, Barbara Harlow's Resistance Literature introduced new ground in Western literary studies. Originally published in 1987 and now reissued with a new Preface by Mia Carter, this powerfully argued and controversial critique develops an approach to literature which is essentially political. Resistance Literature introduces the reader to the role of literature in the liberation movements of the developing world during the 20th Century. It considers a body of writing largely ignored in the west. Although the book is organized according to generic topics - poetry, narrative, prison memoirs - thematic topics, and the specific historical conditions that influence the cultural and political strategies of various resistance struggles, including those of Palestine, Nicaragua and South Africa, are brought to the fore. Among the questions raised are the role of women in the developing world; communication in circumstances of extreme atomization; literature versus propaganda; censorship; and the problem of adopting literary forms identified with the oppressor culture.

This article proposes to consider, in particular, Ruth First's work in her final years at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique (UEM), with reference to her own biographical trajectory and towards a reconsideration of contemporary and subsequent developments in the institutional history of post-independence education: public spheres (the university), personal papers (the archive), and pedagogical practices (the classroom).

This article includes material from a work-in-progress, Barbara Harlow's major book on South African writer and political activist, Ruth First, assassinated in 1982. Ruth First's own life followed many paths, intersecting along the way with several historical trajectories, national narratives that remain incomplete today, and political events and eventualities that are still being negotiated, contested and resisted. The author follows these paths in an attempt to locate a framework and a direction for writing what she calls a bio-bibliography, an intellectual biography that is at once a political history.

This article is composed of the schema of Barbara Harlow's final but unfinished book project, The Drone Imprint: literature in the age of UAVs. Harlow had drafted a proposal, given a version of it as the keynote address at the South Asian Literature Association meeting at the University of Texas, Austin in 2016, and taught many of the materials in it as an undergraduate studies signature course. This piece draws on her proposal, expands it with notes she made and parts of composed text for the talks, and attempts to flesh out and complete the citations. It reveals Harlow's ongoing commitment to thinking through the dialectical relationship of literary and cultural studies to both the political exigencies of the present and the long histories of Empire. The project is instructive in the ways that it concatenates an interdisciplinary archive – human rights reports, novels, films, diaries, law cases, journalism – to elucidate both what drone warfare is doing to problems of literary and cultural representation and how literary modes are being redeployed in the understanding of the phenomenology of the drone. The project explores with some alarm and outrage what drone warfare is doing to questions of accountability and impunity in international human rights law, 'kill lists' as part of US foreign policy, questions of citizenship, habeas corpus and due process in the compressions and attenuations of sovereignty that UAVs accentuate.

"What the Holy See Saw – and Didn't See" reflects on and historically contextualizes selected images from the virtual exhibition mounted by the nascent Palestinian Museum on the occasion of Pope Francis's 2014 visit to the Holy Land with particular reference to photography in Palestine and current debates over Palestinian cultural politics.

Postwar Lebanon, Sufism, imperial translations, Hamlet, trials and atlases, city streets, literary cafés, and Tahrir Square: disorienting as these various themes might appear to be, they nonetheless entitle eight recent inquiries into contemporary—and precedent—directions of literary critical studies of the modern Arabic novel and their calculated revisions of, perhaps, another Arabic literary historical narrative that necessarily engages multigenre, comparative literary–historical investigations. Each of the works under review here was published between 2010 and 2013, with just one specifically, and that ex post facto, addressing the momentous events in Cairo's Tahrir Square in the early months of 2011. In other words, these works might well have already anticipated a more than seasonal, some would even argue historic, "Arab spring," and at least several of the works' authors found it necessary to append an epilogue to their in-production text, or otherwise slightly, subtly, revise at the last minute their presumptive chronologies and the contested trajectories of modern Arabic literature that attend them. From the classically proverbial "tradition versus modernity" discussions through their historicist implications for the cultural production of new media and alternative public spheres, each of these studies seeks, in its own way/s, to instantiate Arabic literature—and Arabic literary criticism—within and against its respected precursors. But where will that self-same literature, and its current critical mediations, eventually wind up, whether globally, nationally, or historically?

It is not well known that Ruth First found an opening to debates on the world stage by working as a consultant for the United Nations whilst she was still in South Africa and whilst in exile. The author describes the projects she was engaged on and her motivation in this work. She links Ruth's participation to the emergence of human rights discourse, seen as a means to condemn apartheid in South Africa, whilst also regarded sceptically.