bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Finnegan, Ruth
Authors: Ebeogu Afam N. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Ruth Finnegan has been a major contributor to postcolonial scholarship since the early 1960s. Her book,
Oral Literature in Africa
, which was published in 1970 and revised in 2012, is a landmark achievement that has impacted on students and researchers of African oral literature for the past four decades. This book and her other publications establish the author as a visible scholar of oral literature, orality, and communication aesthetics. This entry critiques Finnegan's contributions to the study of oral literature in Africa, including the relevance of her major works to that scholarship and the orality/ writing debate.
Fourth World
Authors: Córdova Robert Vela 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Though multiple definitions of the Fourth World exist, this entry will center around the contribution the term offers to Latin American studies in its Amerindian context and, in particular, to the priority of understanding the history of its textual sources. The definition of the Fourth World as a signifier for the Native Americas is established through arguments that affirm a philosophy, a political coherence, a historical continuity, and, most importantly, authoritative literary sources that corroborate each of those aspects.
Fugard, Athol
Authors: Shariati Maryam 
Published: June 2017

AbstractNovelist, poet, director, and playwright, Athol Fugard is a leading contemporary dramatist. Concerned for his people and individual freedom, he is lauded as “the conscience of his country.” His familiarity with the work of European intellectuals such as Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus also finds resonance in his work. But Fugard's plays are rooted in South Africa. They offer an insight into the life of ordinary people under apartheid and deal with the ties of blood, love, and friendship. His first major play,The Blood Knot(1961) daringly used racially mixed casts and brought him international recognition. The story, similar to many of his subsequent plays, focuses on family relationships and the issue of racism in South Africa. Prominent among Fugard's dramaturgy is “Master Harold”… and the Boys(1982), which skillfully combines artistry with political statement. His most recent plays continue to receive acclaim worldwide, especially in the United States where he currently lives.
Danticat, Edwidge
Authors: Valella Daniel 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
A Haitian‐American writer, Edwidge Danticat (1969–) was born near Port‐au‐Prince on January 19, 1969. She is best known for her award‐winning prose fiction, almost all of which addresses themes of trauma, familial relationships, and Haitian (diasporic) identity.
Ghosh, Amitav
Authors: Iyer Nalini 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Born in Calcutta, India, Amitav Ghosh (1956– ) is a novelist and essayist whose publications include seven novels, three anthologies, a travel narrative/history, and numerous essays. He has received several major awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Prix Médicis étranger, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Dan David Prize
Guillén, Nicolás
Authors: Arnedo‐Gómez Miguel 
Published: June 2017

AbstractNicolás Guillén (1902–89) was a Cuban writer who achieved notoriety with his black poetry of the 1930s. A question central to much critical work on Guillén, a mulatto, is whether he can be considered a black poet. His 1930s poetry celebrated Afro‐Cuban culture, but also seemed to hail the nationalist ideal ofmestizaje, an African–Spanish mixture. Many Afro‐Hispanist critics see him as an “authentic black poet” with a racial awareness comparable to that of black United States writers. Cuban critics, though, tend to present him as an advocate of the raceless society the Revolution claims to have achieved. With the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Guillén did become a prominent member of the revolutionary cultural establishment, and his poetry became more Marxist and less noticeably “black.” Nevertheless, some critics show how, at times, it subverts the dominant ideology of the Cuban regime.
Historiography
Authors: Yusin Jennifer 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Scholars working on historiography have increasingly focused on the relationship among language, narrative, and historical consciousness. This entry briefly reviews the development of historiography from a term that means the writing of history to a concept that challenges the objectivity of the historical method, the cultural function of historical knowledge, and the role of narrative in representing past events. Additionally, the entry examines the influence of postmodern literary theories on the understanding of historiography as a discourse that is inherently problematized by itself as a form of writing. It suggests that the postmodern approach has been especially influential in shaping the recent trends in methodologies and research goals of postcolonial historiography, which looks to marginalized identity groups and the conditions of their everyday life for historical understanding. It also points to current debates surrounding the relation between historiography and historical knowledge that are influencing the directions of future research.
Hove, Chenjerai
Authors: Dodgson‐Katiyo Pauline 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean poet, novelist, and essayist. His early poetry employs nature and corporeal imagery to represent the harshness and displacement of life in Zimbabwe. His later poetry draws on the same imagery but in a minimalist fashion. Hove's fiction, including the prizewinning novel
Bones
, centers on the lives of women. The originality of Hove's fictional language lies in his translation of Shona idiom into English to connect the past and the present. Hove's essays combine reflections on life in Zimbabwe with trenchant criticism of the abuse of power and corruption of political language in Africa.
Illiteracy in Latin America
Authors: Acosta Abraham 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
This entry discusses the concepts of orality and literacy in contemporary Latin American cultural, literary, and philosophical thought: orality serves as the name for indigenous, nonwritten language forms, and literacy as Western, alphabetic, language. The entry addresses the ways in which orality and literacy feature as terms that have come to define Latin American culture, both as a narrative of the originary clash between indigenous and Western civilizations as well as in its modern iteration as cultural politics used by indigenous communities to resist modernization and development. Additionally, it foregrounds key critical and theoretical problems that obtain with orality and literacy that not only complicate their current understanding, but also make possible the development of a more democratic and egalitarian vocabulary to analyze and describe indigenous speech and cultural production.
Irele, Abiola
Authors: Brown Michelle Lynn 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Francis Abiola Irele, a Nigerian academic and prominent African literary and cultural critic, was born in 1936. He is best known for his seminal essays on postcolonial African identity formation at both the individual and societal levels, and on the portrayal of women in African literature. A prolific writer, Irele's analyses of African and diaspora literature, philosophy, and culture are considered to be seminal influences on Africanist and postcolonial studies. His editions of African literatures have helped to shape the contemporary African literary canon. He is currently provost of the College of Humanities, Management and Social Sciences at Kwara State University in Ilorin, Nigeria. The 2011 collection of critical essays by leading contemporary Africanist literary and cultural scholars,
Africa in the World and the World in Africa: Essays in Honor of Abiola Irele
, was inspired by his work.
Japanese American Internment Literature
Authors: Chua Jarrell Eiko Iu‐Hui , Chua C. L. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
During World War II the United States violated the civil rights of Japanese Americans by treating them like internal colonial subjects and incarcerating them without trial in concentration camps (euphemistically termed “relocation camps”). Among Japanese American writers recording and criticizing this internment, Lawson Fusao Inada's poetry is prominent in protesting the unconstitutionality of the government's action and in exposing the similar racist and colonialist impulses and actions that caused the plight of Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans.
Johnson, Linton Kwesi
Authors: Arana Victoria 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Renowned for his militant stance against British racism and police brutality, especially during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as prime minister (1979–90), Jamaican‐born Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952– ) gave his particular brand of embattled postcolonial politics the strong‐stress shape of reggae and initiated an explosion in black performance arts in Britain that is still going strong today.
Liberalism
Authors: Blair Peter 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
A political philosophy that emerged from the Enlightenment, liberalism has a complex relationship with democracy, colonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, and literature. Democracy has been shaped by a tension between “classical liberalism,” which prioritizes liberty, and “modern liberalism,” which emphasizes equality. Liberalism also molded the informal empire of free trade, and the “liberal imperialism” that devised a “civilizing mission” to justify formal empire. The development of liberalism has been vital in the Anglophone settler colonies, particularly the United States; often, especially in South Africa, it has been focused on racial justice. The neoliberalism that emerged in the late twentieth century advocates the globalization of unfettered capitalism and personal liberty. Many postcolonialists consider neoliberalism a reprise of liberal imperialism, with “human rights” replacing the “civilizing mission” as a cultural‐imperialist pretext for economic exploitation.
Latin American Literature of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Sánchez Prado Ignacio M. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

This entry focuses on the role of Latin American literature of the twentieth century in shaping a postcolonial thinking in the region. It discusses an intellectual genealogy of literary thought in the region's decolonization, and then proceeds to discuss the legacies of
modernismo
, poetry, fiction, and other trends and genres.
Maathai, Wangari
Authors: Clemens Colleen Lutz 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) led a life of activism that inspired a people's movement on the African continent. A trailblazer for women's and environmental rights, Maathai was the first African woman to win a Nobel Prize, having won the 2004 Peace Prize for her development of the Green Belt Movement. One of the founding mothers of ecofeminism, Maathai's legacy is her work to show the connections between human rights, women's rights, and environmental rights.
Marginality
Authors: Nabizadeh Golnar 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Marginality is a metaphor used to describe the state of being on the periphery of a cultural “center,” where the latter is usually constituted as the primary domain of power. A multifaceted concept, marginality is often associated with colonized cultures, disenfranchised subjectivities, or in terms of literature, works that reside outside the canon of Western literature. In contemporary critical theory, debates about marginality have expanded the dyadic relationship between margin and center by considering the role of ambivalence, as well as what it meant to speak “from the margins.”
Markandaya, Kamala
Authors: Thomas Mirosh 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Kamala Markandaya is one of the best known first generation Indian writers writing in English. She is known for her social commitment in her works, and Markandaya herself acknowledges her works as “the literature of concern.” Most of her novels are set in India and portray the changing social situations in India, the struggles of the peasant class, or the complex relationship between Indians and the British. Markandaya is also known as a pioneer diaspora writer since she spent most of her life in Britain and wrote several novels about the plight of Indian immigrants there. Some of her best known novels are
Nectar in a Sieve
,
Some Inner Fury
,
A Handful of Rice
, and
The Nowhere Man
.
Marson, Una
Authors: Donnell Alison 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Although Una Marson has been claimed as “the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in the West Indies,” she has remained a marginal figure within literary histories. Her plays are unpublished and the mixed bag of devotional sonnets, love lyrics, feminist parodies, Afro‐blues and folk monologues that comprise her poetry volumes struggle to be identified with the clean, sharp edges of Caribbean nationalist writings or the neat frames of feminist criticism. This entry offers a summary of her achievements.
Marxism in Latin America
Authors: Cerrato Maddalena 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Marxism in Latin American political thought neither identifies a uniform current nor a whole philosophical perspective to which one can refer various theories. To understand the diversity of Marxist thought in Latin America, it is not a matter of outlining some general features in order to try to reduce the multiplicity of different theoretical positions to a sort of a cohesive unity. It is, instead, a matter of mapping, conceptually and chronologically, a territory of political thought in which a certain number of Latin American thinkers – who have inflected or used the ideas of Marx and Engels, but also of Lenin and Stalin, and then Gramsci and Althusser, in very different ways – had situated themselves and confronted each other.
Mukherjee, Bharati
Authors: Iyer Nalini 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
This entry provides biographical information about the writer Bharati Mukherjee and also outlines the significance of Mukherjee's work within South Asian diasporic writing. It looks at the controversies surrounding her, including criticism that her work is excessively assimilationist and does not pay adequate attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender when portraying diasporic subject formation.
Nehru, Jawaharlal
Authors: Ratti Manav 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) served as the first prime minister of India after the country gained independence from British colonial rule, and was a key figure in the Indian independence movement. Nehru's key policies included secularism, democratic socialism, and nonalignment. He was the father of Indira Gandhi, who served as the third prime minister of India (1966–77, 1980–84), and the maternal grandfather of Rajiv Gandhi, who served as the sixth prime minister (1984–89). Nehru's policies were committed to building an India that would be a unified, secular, and socialist republic supported by a parliamentary democracy. Nehru established a state‐controlled, planned economy that regulated industrialization and the growth of domestic industries, sheltering them from foreign competition and ensuring equality across regions. He was committed to state secularism, ensuring that India's full diversity of religious groups felt accommodated and protected by the state, for the sake of national unity.
Okri, Ben
Authors: Green‐Simms Lindsey 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Ben Okri (OBE), born on March 15, 1959 in Minna, central Nigeria, is a novelist, poet, and essayist known for his “magical realist” style. Okri published his first novel,
Flowers and Shadows
(1980) at the age of 21 and is most famous for his Booker Prize‐winning novel
The Famished Road
(1991), which focuses on a spirit child (or
abiku
) who shuffles back and forth between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
p'Bitek, Okot
Authors: Todorovic Ivana 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
This entry provides basic information about the life and major works of the renowned Ugandan poet, novelist, anthropologist, and social critic, Okot p'Bitek. After a short biographical note, p'Bitek's most influential works and central themes are elaborated on, with special emphasis on his outlooks on African identity within a (post)colonial context. He is recognized as one of the principal African voices of the 1960s.
Penguin Books
Authors: Rogers Asha 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Penguin Books transformed publishing in postwar Britain and, following the “paperback revolution,” brought its cultural mission to readers across the world. Important works of postcolonial literature and world literature have appeared in the Penguin Classics, Penguin Modern Classics, and Penguin African Library series. Penguin has a strong overseas presence with autonomous branches in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Ireland, and China. Penguin has combined a strategic exploitation of world markets with the commitment to publishing as a civic act, characterized by the publishing of controversial books (most famously, D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
in 1960 and
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie in 1988). Pioneering local lists and now vernacular publishing, Penguin Books is one of the most recognizable global brands.
Realism
Authors: Dalley Hamish 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Realism has been an object of ongoing debate in postcolonial criticism and theory. Early analyses of postcolonial literature emphasized the radical potential of realist representation to unsettle hegemonic accounts of the colonized world. However, the emergence of poststructuralist reading practices and the dominance of anti‐mimetic styles in Western literature subsequently led to realism being dismissed as peripheral to postcolonial studies, and often aligned with regressive political and intellectual positions. This attitude has recently begun to shift with the reemergence of a body of postcolonial scholarship sympathetic to realism. New formulations of the concept stress its ambivalence, multiplicity, and complexity, and offer new possibilities for a sympathetic analysis of a mode that encompasses much of the literary production of the formerly colonized world.
Rodney, Walter
Authors: Campbell Horace G. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

In his best‐known work,
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
, Walter Rodney identified the world capitalist system, in its varying manifestations (mercantile, industrial, and monopoly capital), as the principal agency of underdevelopment of the African continent for over five centuries. The book covers a wide range: an introductory discussion on the concepts “development and underdevelopment”; the state of Africa prior to European invasion and plunder; Africa's contribution to capitalist development; the effects of colonial education and the impact of missionary activity; the collective nature of African organization; and of course the exploitation of African resources during the colonial era and consequent “underdevelopment.”
Secularization in Latin America
Authors: Williams Gareth 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Postcolonial secularization does not refer to de‐Christianization or to the modern replacing the traditional. As Carl Schmitt's famous dictum – “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” – attests, secularization is a primary discourse of metaphysical transposition built on the passage from God's throne as the central and organizing principle of the world, to its supplementation by mundane and worldly factors such as state formation, economic liberalization, population management, or nationalism.
Selvadurai, Shyam
Authors: Singh Ravindra Pratap 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

A Sri Lankan‐Canadian gay writer, Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1965, to a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father. His parents hailed from conflicting ethnic groups. Sri Lankan ethnic riots in 1983 forced his family to migrate to Canada when he was 19. His essay “Coming Out” (1997) presents an authentic account of this period. In this essay he also presents an account of the discomfort he felt with his gay partner while staying in Sri Lanka. In Canada, he pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University, where he took creative and professional writing as part of his studies. Later, he pursued an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Right from the York University days, he published in print and electronic media, but success came with the publication of his debut novel,
Funny Boy
(1994). Besides
Funny Boy
, he has published three brilliant novels:
Cinnamon Garden
,
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
, and
The Hungry Ghosts
, and has edited a story collection,
Story‐Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers
(2005). He has also contributed to leading periodicals including the
New York Times
,
Time
magazine,
Toronto Life
,
Walrus
magazine,
Enroute
magazine,
The Globe
,
Mail
, and the
Toronto Star
. He has also worked as curator for the Galle Literary Festival.
Social Movements in Latin America
Authors: Legrás Horacio 
Published: June 2017

AbstractThe number, characteristics, functioning, and networks established by new social movements delineate a dazzling map of activism in Latin America at the dawn of the twenty‐first century. A non‐descriptive enumeration of these movements would fill the space assigned to this entry. An attempt to organize them in social, geographical, or thematic terms would result in over‐simplification. From young surfers working together to prevent the extinction of marine species in Costa Rica to the indefatigable trans‐national toiling of the members of “un techo para mi país” in the southern cone; from the barrio‐based social activism of drum‐playing in Caracas to the politics of hip‐hop in São Paulo; from the network of small associations that supported the Zapatista's other campaign in Mexico to the centers of rehabilitation from drugs and prostitution in Colombia, the impression is one of a general assault of grassroots organizations on what was until very recently the exclusive province of state attention – or inattention.
Race in Latin America
Authors: von Vacano Diego 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
The concept of race is central to the history of ideas in postcolonial Ibero‐America for two main reasons: one, the fact that the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas generated the first global appearance of race; two, the fact that race plays a pivotal role in the shaping of citizenship in the region to this day. From the postcolonial perspective, race is a central mechanism through which power is exercised upon subaltern groups.
Subaltern Studies
Authors: Chowdhury Arnab Roy 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
This entry tracks the “genealogy” and “archaeology” of subaltern studies, which has emerged as a subdisciplinary and alternative historical field over the last three decades. It broadly covers the work of Ranajit Guha, the chief proponent of the “school,” along with works by other eminent “members” like Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Starting with the social context and debates within which the idea of subaltern studies in the South Asian context was formed, it discusses the notion of subaltern historiography and its distinction from other “elite” historiographies. Various dimensions of the concept “subaltern” are also covered in depth and breadth, as well as the critical assessments that subaltern studies have been subjected to. The entry then traces the slow transformation of the field, as it merges into the tradition of postcolonial studies and postcolonial theory. Finally, it presents a glimpse of the current trends and future tendencies that are emerging in subaltern studies.
In‐Between Space
Authors: Borsò Vittoria 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
The notion of in‐between space is established in postcolonial studies, and its epistemological status makes it a direct challenge to the logic of identity and difference that sustains Western metaphysics. Since its emergence, the concept has evolved into a form of cultural politics, and is employed as a tool for displacing, dislocating, and decentering knowledge.