Suchergebnisse

Timothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.

This essay tracks Kamau Brathwaite's life, his poetic and critical writing, and his travails and thinking, from youth and early career—in Barbados, England, Ghana, and the Caribbean, but mainly from his arrival at New York University in 1991—through his retirement in 2013 and return to Barbados, up to his death in 2020. It especially follows Kamau from his low "time of salt" of the late 1980s in Jamaica through the stunning critical and poetic burgeoning from the 1990s on, with such works as Barabajan Poems; the two-volume MR; the prize-winning Born to Slow Horses; and Elegguas and his unpublished third poetry trilogy, Missa Solemnis, Rwanda Poems, and Dead Man Witness, commemorating and trying to rise beyond what he called his "cultural lynching." The essay looks at Brathwaite's online/print Sycorax voice and the politico-philosophico-cultural concept of tidalectics that he developed over these years to create an ongoing Caribbean-based decolonizing of mind, spirit, and material life.

The Algerian writer Malika Mokeddem embeds her novels in the geography of a desert that belongs ever more to the past of the nomadic immediate ancestors of her main characters. Object of nostalgic yearning, this desert past and the nomads peopling it also necessitate flight, especially for women, trapped there in a patriarchal culture and society whose violence has been perpetuated into that of contemporary Algeria - also often aimed against women. Besides a few strong older women able to take advantage of their age and status to help their juniors, these novels principally set on stage young women or girls whose accidental or perilously self-willed access to education and - above all, writing - frees them from binding traditions even while, for most, such writing is akin to the nomadic traveling of their ancestors (as `writing' on the desert's very body). Even so, because it is a revolt against such traditions, their writing is the site and actuality of fraught struggle and pushes them into the `nomadism' of literal exile, across seas themselves often envisaged as wider deserts.