Reading lists Archives – writers make worlds

Reading list: On reading

Erica Lombard — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:07:23 +0000

Reading list: On reading

The following is a list of articles and books that will be useful to those who wish to learn more about reading (including reader-response, reception and cognitive theory), with a particular emphasis on how postcolonial writing is read.

Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

T. J. Clark, ‘Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage’, New Literary History 45.2 (Spring 2014): 221–52.

J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015).

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

–––, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History 45.2 (2014): v–xi.

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981).

John Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: ‘How to Play the Game of Life’ (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002).

James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007).

James Procter and Bethan Benwell, Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2^nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 [1986]).

Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

The post Reading list: On reading appeared first on writers make worlds.

Reading list: Black and Asian British writing

Erica Lombard — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:01:32 +0000

Reading list: British Literature and Identity

The following is a list of books and articles that will be useful to those seeking to delve deeper into the themes, concerns and techniques of contemporary Black and Asian British writing.

Ian Baucom, Out of Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1989).

Michael Gardiner and Claire Westall, eds, Literature of an Independent England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Simon Gikandi, ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 627–53.

Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz, eds, End of Empire and the English Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 2002).

–––, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press/London: Routledge, 2005).

Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland, eds, Race, Nation and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar, Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007).

John McLeod, Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Deirdre Osborne, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

The post Reading list: Black and Asian British writing appeared first on writers make worlds.

Brian Chikwava: Further Reading

Erica Lombard — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 09:31:20 +0000

Brian Chikwava: Further Reading

—Josh Jewell

Brian Chikwava’s writing has attracted a small but diverse critical following. Grace Musila’s 2007 article remains the most thorough investigation of Chikwava’s early short fictions, and echoing the ideas of Paul Gilroy, considers Chikwava in terms of musicality and rhythm. This strand of critique is continued in Christopher N. Okonkwo’s 2017 article in Research in African Literatures. By situating Chikwava in debates about rhythm and migration, and alongside articles about authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okonkwo’s piece suggests Chikwava’s work is becoming increasingly significant in African and diasporic writing. Since the publication of Harare North in 2009, however, Chikwava’s work has been discussed increasingly within the field of world-literature. This marked a shift in the debate about Chikwava’s fiction, which up until that point had largely been viewed in terms of diaspora and cultural hybridity. World-Literature critics, however, have argued that Harare North reveals the structural asymmetry and violence of the modern world-system. Madhu Krishnan, Irikidzayi Manase, and Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies all consider how Harare North tells us as much about the brutal legacies of empire as they play out in and between Zimbabwe and Britain, as about those postcolonial subjects who consequently vacillate between ‘Zimbabweanness’ and ‘Britishness’. Chikwava’s work, it would seem, sits on the fault-line between postcolonial and world-system critical paradigms. Bringing these paradigms together, future research might consider how Chikwava’s visceral representations of manual work show how a postcolonial Britain remains dependent on a colonial-era exploitation of labour.

Primary

Fiction

Chikwava, Brian. ‘Seventh Street Alchemy’. Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe, edited by Irene Stanton, Weaver Press, 2003, 17–30.

–––. ‘ZESA Moto Muzhinji’. Writing Now: More Stories from Zimbabwe, edited by Irene Stanton, Weaver Press, 2005, 41–51.

–––. ‘Dancing to the Jazz Goblin & his Rhythm’. The Literary Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, 2005, n.p.

–––. Harare North. 2009. Vintage, 2010.

Non-Fiction

Brian Chikwava ‘One Dandelion Seed-head’. Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival, edited by JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac, Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 246–54.

–––. ‘Mia Couto talks to Brian Chikwava’. Wasafiri, n.d., n.p.

Secondary

Boehmer, Elleke, and Dominic Davies. ‘Literature, Planning and Infrastructure: Investigating the Southern City through Postcolonial Texts’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 51, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1–15.

Krishnan, Madhu. ‘Race, Class and Performativity’. Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Manase, Irikidzayi. ‘Representations of the Post-2000 Zimbabwean Economic Migrancy in Petina Grappah’s “An Elegy for Easterly” and Brian Chikwava’s “Harare North”’. Journal of Black Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014, pp. 59–76.

Musila, Grace. ‘Between Seventh Street, Goblins and Ordinary People: Textures of Resilience in Brian Chikwava’s Short Fiction’. English Studies in Africa, vol. 50, no. 2, 2007, pp. 133–49.

Okonkwo, Christopher N. ‘Migration Blues in Jazz Styling: Spinning Them Overlooked Jazz and Blues Numbers in Brian Chikwava’s Fiction’. Research in African Literatures, vol. 47, Number 4, 2017, pp. 152–70.

Primorac, Ranka, and Brian Chikwava. ‘“Making New Connections”: An Interview with Brian Chikwava’. Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival, edited by JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac, Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 255–60.

The post Brian Chikwava: Further Reading appeared first on writers make worlds.