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Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Online ISBN:
9780804772501
Print ISBN:
9780804754903
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Published online:
20 June 2013
Published in print:
8 October 2009
Online ISBN:
9780804772501
Print ISBN:
9780804754903
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood as superseding national borders, the book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics. Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, it explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V. S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen; the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga; and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.

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