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Full Description
The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diversity and what brings so many different cultures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories discussed focus on how artists render experiences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of 'nation'.
While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahābhārata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appropriate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefinition, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cultural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term 'postcolonial' suggests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colonization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary section, texts are read as mythopoeia, foregrounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mythologization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations.
CONTRIBUTORS
Elara Bertho, Dúnlaith Bird, Marie-Christine Blin, Jaine Chemmachery, André Dodeman, Biljana Đorić Francuski, Frédéric Dumas, Daniel Karlin, Sabine Lauret-Taft, Anne Le Guellec-Minel, Élodie Raimbault, Winfried Siemerling, Laura Singeot, Françoise Storey, Jeff Storey, Christine Vandamme
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
PART ONE: MYTHS OF NATION-BUILDING
Woman as Goddess or Woman as Victim? The Role of Women in the Mahābhārata and Chitra Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions
BILJANA ÐOR IĆ-FRANCUSK I
'On a road between two cities': Relocating the Myths of the Indian Nation in Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)
JULIE BELUAU
Framing the West: Myth and Art in Yosemite and Yellowstone's Early Photographs
MARIE-CHRIST INE BLIN
How to Picket-Fence a Mountain: Myths of Domesticity and Dislocation in Isabella Bird's Wild West
DÚNLAITH BIRD
The Tasmanian Tiger: From Extinction to Identity Myth in White Australian Society and Fiction
ANNE LE GUELL EC-MINEL
PART TWO: DIS/LOCATIONS: CLASHES AND CONFLICTS
Migrant Myth: Freedom, Diaspora, and the Black Atlantic
WINFR IED SIEMERLING
Reworkings of a Literary Myth and Historical Construction: Nehanda (Zimbabwe)
ELARA BERTHO
Constructing and Deconstructing Myths of British Colonial Identity and Femininity in Mutiny Fiction: Meadows Taylor's Seeta (1872) and Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1897)
JAINE CHEMMACHERY
Novel Myths for a White Australasia: Dealing with the Native in Mark Twain's Following the Equator
FRÉDÉRIC DUMAS
Transfiguration of Australian Founding Myths in Patrick White's Fiction: Voss as an Iconoclastic Reinterpretation of the Explorer Myth
CHRI ST INE VANDAMME
PART THREE: IMAGINARY DISLOCATIONS: FROM MYTHOPOEIA TO THE RELOCATION OF MYTH
"In Vishnu-land what avatar?" Robert Browning and the Empire of Song
DANIEL KARLIN
Imagined Topographies of the Sundarbans in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide
SAB INE LAURET-TAFT
Transcending Postcolonial Identity Through Myth: Yann Martel's Life of Pi
FRANÇOISE STOREY & JEFF STOREY
Relocating the Mythical Self in Three Māori Novels: Potiki by Patricia Grace, The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera,and the bone people by Keri Hulme
LAURA SINGEOT
Notes on Contributors and Editors
Index