The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism - Rilegato

Khan, Nyla Ali

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0415975212 ISBN 13: 9780415975216

Casa editrice: Routledge, 2005

Riassunto

In this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and linguistic authenticity is a pipe dream. The binary structures created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical interplay in which each culture or language makes incursions into the other. Some of these structures are as follows: black-white, primitive-savage, self-other, silent-articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled. These categories generate a dichotomy that creates the perception that a people have of themselves and their political and social relationships. Their recognition of this dialogic interplay of community and place becomes the basis for strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to revise dogmatic categories. Despite all their differences, the works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is manifested across the globe in this day and age. Khan shows, for instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology, prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that incorporates significant cultural, religious, and linguistic differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form of artistic, social, and political agency.

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Product Description

Focusing on the representation of South Asian life in the works of four Anglophone writers: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Anita Desai, Nyla Ali Khan presents a critical dialogue between these works and contemporary history. Exploring the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism and fundamentalism, she addresses the disrupting and disorientating consequences of dislocation with questions such as: * Does a dislocation enable the regeneration of cultural forces? * Does transnationalism enable a reconstruction respectful of cultural differences? * Does transnationalism allow subjects to engage in reflexive, self-critical distancing from their own cultural discourses? * Do the cosmopolitan political and cultural ideologies of Naipaul, Rushdie, Ghosh and Desai challenge ethnocentric cultural assumptions? Examining these questions in the context of the geographical and cultural dislocation of the era; the reaction to Rushdie's novel, the Indo-Pak war of 1971 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India, Khan also discusses: * how complexities bred by practices and identities can reinforce politicization of identity in fundamentalism, xenophobia and espousal of tradition * the local constraints and social moorings affecting transnational writers * the historical and religious forces involved in forging a national identity.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Routledge
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0415975212
• ISBN 13: 9780415975216
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 144