Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation

Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation

by Imre Szeman
Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation

Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation

by Imre Szeman

Hardcover

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Overview

Attempts by writers and intellectuals in former colonies to create unique national cultures are often thwarted by a context of global modernity, which discourages particularity and uniqueness. In describing unstable social and political cultures, such "third-world intellectuals" often find themselves torn between the competing literary requirements of the "local" culture of the colony and the cosmopolitan, "world" culture introduced by Western civilization.

In Zones of Instability, Imre Szeman examines the complex relationship between literature and politics by exploring the production of nationalist literature in the former British empire. Taking as his case studies the regions of the British Caribbean, Nigeria, and Canada, Szeman analyzes the work of authors for whom the idea of the"nation" and literature are inexorably entwined, such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and V.S. Naipaul. Szeman focuses on literature created in the two decades after World War II, decades in which the future prospects for many colonies went from extreme political optimism to extreme political disappointment. He finds that the "nation" can be read as that space in which literature is thought to be able to conjoin two things that history has separated—the writer and the people.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801868030
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 02/03/2004
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Imre Szeman holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and is the cofounder of the Petrocultures Research Group. He is the coauthor of After Oil and the coeditor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Politics of Postcolonial Nationalist Literature
1. The Nation as Problem and Possibility
2. Caribbean Space: Lamming, Naipaul, and Federation
3. The Novel after the Nation: Nigeria after Biafra
4. The Persistence of the Nation: Literature and Criticism in Canada
Conclusion: National Culture and Globalization
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Peter Hitchcock

Szeman's framework defamiliarizes the platitudes and pieties we associate with the invocation of such names as Naipaul, James, and Achebe. This is a book that will stir debate in the best sense.

Peter Hitchcock, City University of New York

From the Publisher

Szeman's framework defamiliarizes the platitudes and pieties we associate with the invocation of such names as Naipaul, James, and Achebe. This is a book that will stir debate in the best sense.
—Peter Hitchcock, City University of New York

Tightly written, boldly argued, and politically sophisticated, this is a major intervention in the study of postcolonial literature and globalization. Szeman retools the problem of the nation as it is usually understood in the study of national literatures, ripping out its Romantic 'soul' and replacing that with the much more concrete and workable concept of the zone. It's an exciting project with enormous consequences, and it should be widely read.
—Caren Irr, Brandeis University

Caren Irr

Tightly written, boldly argued, and politically sophisticated, this is a major intervention in the study of postcolonial literature and globalization. Szeman retools the problem of the nation as it is usually understood in the study of national literatures, ripping out its Romantic 'soul' and replacing that with the much more concrete and workable concept of the zone. It's an exciting project with enormous consequences, and it should be widely read.

Caren Irr, Brandeis University

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