Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes

Product Description Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes explores traditional theories on hybridity, generated in consideration of multicultural infusions, and at times profusions, of colonial migrations. Arguments on defining Englishness and the insinuations of a 'fixed centre' for the marginalised are now considered on a global scale as postmodernity defies imperial homogeneity. Although postcolonial studies have largely been Anglocentric and Western in focus, developments elsewhere have opened up theoretical applications on cultural shifters such as that of the diaspora. The Arabian world, the Caribbean, North and Latin America, Australia, and more recently, countries such as Ireland and Scotland, have emerged as regions confronted with comparable power struggles. Mass migration, exile, refugee reshuffling and diasporic repositioning provide neo-hermeneutics on the predicament of the global, which is undergoing major geopolitical and cultural transformation. This volume addresses how writing from the peripheries is developing a new worldview through diasporic modes of thought. By moving beyond the facile search for an imperial 'centre,' these contributions provide an understanding of the ruptue in identity since there is a feeling of 'being held back from a place or state we wish to reach...' (Brooks). This volume is a unique collaboration by academic scholars from four different continents, and a vast number of regions, critically converging on the contemporaneous debate that problematizes the diasporic identity. About the Author Guest Editor: David Brooks has for thirty years been a leading scholar of Australian Literature, and is regarded as one of that country's finest poets and novelists. He is currently Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, where, until early 2013, he was also Director of the Graduate Writing Program. He has long been co-editor of Australia's premier literary journal, Southerly. General Editor: Anastasia Nicephore has published numerous articles on cultural anxieties, postcolonial theory and disparate narratives within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is author of Organised Hallucinations: Literary Topoi of (Post)Colonial Disease. Her current research project, Plato's Reality: Baudrillard's Nostalgia, is a comparative study of classical literary theory and ontological modes of postmodern thinking.