Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time
Download Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time
Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency.
Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time
Author: Amanda Lagji
language: en
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Release Date: 2022-08-24
Postcolonial Fiction and Colonial Time reveals the fundamental, constitutive role of the temporal dimensions of waiting in colonial regimes of time, as well as in postcolonial framings of time, history and agency. Drawing from critical time and postcolonial studies alike, this book argues that the temporality of waiting is an essential concept to theorise the relationship between time and power in postcolonial fiction across the long twentieth century - one that illuminates the contradictory temporalities that underlie narratives of progress, modernization and development. The book contributes to the resurgence of interest in time within literary studies by demonstrating that waiting is also integral to postcolonial temporalities, from anticolonial nationalist movements for independence to forms of reconciliation after conflict. In addition to innovative readings of both classic and contemporary postcolonial novels, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time of acceleration and movement by arguing for the centrality of waiting to time-consciousness in the postcolonial world.
Waiting for Now
This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement. In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. In chapter 1, I argue that V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River and Nadine Gordimer's July's People literalize the spatiotemporal metaphor "waiting room of history" to achieve very different ends. Maureen's refusal to wait any longer in July's People rejects the apartheid temporalities that condition that "waiting room," whereas Salim's refusal to wait in A Bend in the River ultimately reproduces the waiting room model of history - to which, in Naipaul's view, certain occupants of the globalized, postcolonial world will always be relegated. In chapter 2 I read Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World and J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K through the lens of marronage; the protagonists' labor and their "idleness" become newly legible as resistive waiting. I explore the temporal dimensions of waiting and disillusionment following political independence in Anita Desai's Cry the Peacock and Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments in chapter 3. In chapter 4, I link waiting with healing and reconciliation after apartheid and civil war using Ndebele's Cry of Winnie Mandela and Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow. I conclude my dissertation with a reflection on the significance of waiting in the post-9/11 world, such as in the rhetoric of preemptive military strikes that frame national security in terms of refusing to wait. As my dissertation argues, the temporal dimensions of waiting are not only implied in the discourses of colonial administration and anticolonial nationalisms, but are also deployed in strategic and political expressions of resistance, and remain central to the formation of geopolitical realities.