bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
La Guma, Alex
Authors: Field Roger Michael 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Born in Cape Town, Alex la Guma (1925–85) directed his fiction, journalism, politics, and art toward South Africa's liberation. A socialist who supported the nationalism of the African National Congress, he espoused the socialist realism canon. In practice, his journalism and radio plays are examples of satire, while his novella
A Walk in the Night
and the novels that followed display a range of intriguing, contradictory influences that include Jack London, Charles Dickens, the orientalism of Walter Scott, and John Steinbeck. His last three works, which include travel writing, display a tension between realism and modernism in both narrative and characterization. This is particularly evident in
A Soviet Journey
and
Time of the Butcherbird
, in which Hemingway's fiction is both vital and a source of irony. La Guma died in Cuba.
Latin American Literature, Criticism and Theory
Authors: Sánchez Prado Ignacio M. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
This entry discusses the role of literature in Latin America with respect to coloniality, decolonization, and postcolonialism. It focuses on the development of theoretical approaches that emphasize Latin America's literary and intellectual emancipation by focusing on the specificity of its cultural productions, the negotiation with processes of occidentalism, transculturation, and heterogeneity and the agenda of a properly Latin American expression as a key pursuit for decolonization.
Lessing, Doris
Authors: Turner Ellen 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) was one of the twentieth century's most important literary figures. She was a prolific novelist and short story writer whose varied output spanned a multitude of genres and resisted attempts at classification. Lessing was born of British parentage in Persia, moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia in 1925, and from 1949 spent most of her time in London. Lessing's first novel,
The Grass is Singing
was published in 1950.
The Golden Notebook
(1962) is widely recognized as one of Lessing's most important pieces of writing. Other important works include the five novels in her
Children of Violence
series (1952–1969); the dystopian
Memoirs of a Survivor
(1974); five science fiction novels (1979–1983); two novels published under the pseudonym Jane Somers; and
The Fifth Child
(1988) and its sequel
Ben in the World
(2000). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren)
Authors: Wang Pu 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), known by his pen name Lu Xun, was a pioneering Chinese writer and intellectual who became a symbol of spiritual enlightenment and cultural revolution in twentieth‐century China and East Asia. He was one of the founding fathers of what came to be known as China's “New Culture” (
xin wenhua
). Since his death, he has been accorded the status of the “soul of the nation.” Mao Zedong praised him as the “giant of Chinese cultural revolution,” and during the heyday of Maoism in the 1960s–70s, the iconic status of Lu Xun's image was second only to Mao's own. Even today, Lu Xun's works continue to stir controversy and invite reinterpretation.
Mahfouz, Naguib
Authors: Salama Mohammad 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) is one of the best known and most prolific novelists of the twentieth century and the first Arab to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1988). Mahfouz's early writings openly criticize the colonial rule under which Egyptians lived. His postcolonial novels are marked by characters and narratives that allegorically describe and comment on contemporary Egyptian society in a nuanced and complex way.
Mapanje, Jack
Authors: Kerr David 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Jack Mapanje, born of mixed Yao and Manganja parents in Malawi, has found issues of identity to be a rich source of creativity. His poems, which first came to light when he was at the University of Malawi in the 1970s, used irony to lampoon the dictatorial head of state, Kamuzu Banda. In London Mapanje assembled enough poems to be published in the Heinemann African Writers Series. His satirical verse led to his imprisonment without trial for nearly four years. Soon after his release he went into exile in UK. This proved a base for a series of poetry collections in which he explored the ironies of global and local identities, particularly in their manifestations of contesting oralities.
Marxist Postcolonial Criticism
Authors: Bohrer Ashley 
Published: June 2017

AbstractWhile often considered opposed theoretical traditions, Marxism and postcolonial theory have a vibrant history of interaction and synthesis. This entry examines the history of the synthetic tradition of Marxist postcolonial criticism, as well as the crucial debates, disagreements, and directions of this line of thinking. In particular, it discusses postcolonial Marxism's relationship to literary theory, feminist theory, and to liberation theology.
Menchú Tum, Rigoberta
Authors: Pardee Shiela Ellen 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Rigoberta Menchú is a K'iche’ Maya woman of Guatemala whose 1983 testimonial
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nacio la conciencia
exposed the brutality of the Guatemalan military campaign against Mayan villagers. The book, based on interviews by ethnologist Elisabeth Burgos‐Debray, put Menchú in the public eye as an advocate for Mayan rights and resulted in her Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Her book was also the subject of extended controversy about its accuracy and suitability for inclusion as required reading in high school and college classes in the United States. Several aspects of the risks involved when testifying from a subaltern viewpoint were illuminated by the extended scrutiny given to Menchú's work.
Messianism in Latin America
Authors: Price Rachel L. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Messianic and millenarian thought informed both the first European voyages to Latin America and indigenous resistance to European empire. Messianism – the belief in the imminent arrival on earth of a divine savior and of radical change – has often fused in Latin America with millenarianism – the idea that Christ (or another figure) will return to Earth in a near future and establish a reign or final judgment – and has been extended to more secular political movements and thought. Crucial to the very conception of the New World, messianism also characterizes colonial‐period experiments in alternative communities, nineteenth‐century religious communities resistant to modernizing republics, and it constitutes an undercurrent in twentieth‐century political movements throughout the region. Although messianism and millenarianism were originally religious lenses that attempted to fit new histories into Christian typological frames, messianism has been an important component of political thought in modern Latin America, inflecting colonial, indigenous, modernizing, and Caribbean movements, among others.
Morrison, Toni
Authors: Bower Rachel 
Published: June 2017

AbstractToni Morrison is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and a central figure in African American literature. Over the course of her career, Morrison has authored 10 magnificent novels and produced an extremely influential corpus of essays and speeches. She has played a central editorial role in shaping two decades of African American literary history, and has also written plays, librettos, and children's books. Morrison was the first African American woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first black woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university. Over the course of her career, Morrison has moved from the margins of the literary establishment to the very heart of the literary canon.
Nandy, Ashis
Authors: Deftereos Christine 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Ashis Nandy is an Indian political psychologist, contemporary cultural critic, social theorist, and self‐defined “intellectual streetfighter.” He is one of the most original and confrontational thinkers of his generation, and is one of India's leading public intellectuals. Some of the themes that Nandy's work addresses are postcolonial consciousness, the modern secular Indian state, cultural resistance, the psychosocial dimensions of power, cosmopolitanism, and post‐secular forms of awareness. Having written over 25 books and countless articles, he has made extensive contributions to the way in which colonialism is understood, and to postcolonial theory and contemporary social and political criticism.
Négritude
Authors: Simeon‐Jones Kersuze 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
The Négritude philosophy preceded the literary and cultural movement that emerged in 1939. Equally important, the principles and objectives of the movement are continuous and evolve in time to address the general black condition, which Césaire termed the “Negro situation.” Through its evolution the Négritude movement remained grounded in history. In studying, examining, and exposing the particular roots of contemporary black conditions, advocates of the movement contributed to its intellectual, social, and political developments, from the twentieth century into the twenty‐first century. Similar to the preceding and concurrent movements of the black world, Négritude is essentially a call for the reclamation of the Negro humanity and, by extension, the humanity of all races and colors. It is a humanism, as Césaire repeatedly asserted. In its ideologies, Négritude complements the literary and political works of such diasporic movements as Pan‐Africanism, Indigénisme, New Negro/Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, and Afrocriollo.
Opium
Authors: Wright Ashley 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Opium is a drug that has had transformative effects on politics, cultures, and economies in Asia and Europe. Since the late eighteenth century, opium has been inextricable from imperialism, as Indian opium revenues helped fund the maintenance of the British Empire in India, and opium contributed to two wars between Britain and China and the subsequent significant shift in the balance of power between the two countries. In the twentieth century, the international consensus came to favor the eradication of the opium industry, though colonial powers with an interest in its continuance opposed this consensus. Despite international attempts to regulate sales and consumption of this drug, opium cultivation continues in the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia and in Afghanistan.
Pacific Studies and Oceania
Authors: Najita Susan Y. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
The first section of the entry charts the emergence of Pacific Studies out of the years leading up to, during, and after World War II as US military and economic interests facilitated the production of useful knowledge about peoples and places it sought to occupy or influence during the Cold War. Literature by indigenous writers emerged in the post‐independence era of the 1970s with some of the first native writers to be published in the English language. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a critique of neocolonialism and globalization as these ideologies and practices threatened repetition – with a difference – of earlier imperial and colonial forms of oppression. Epeli Hauʻofa's notion of “Oceania,” perhaps the single most influential concept in resituating Pacific Studies, intervenes in these neocolonial discourses. The entry ends with a discussion of diasporic literatures.
Partition
Authors: Daiya Kavita 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
The British partition of India in 1947 to create Pakistan signaled a bloody end to British colonialism and the legacies of decolonization in South Asia. Marked by Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim ethnic violence and mass migration, it turned millions into refugees, and generated horrific violence against women in the name of religion, nationalism, and the state. While the partition has never been officially memorialized, postcolonial South Asian literature, Bollywood film, art cinema, and oral history archives now illuminate this migration and refugee experience in South Asia and its diasporas. Partition has been widely used as a strategy of divide and rule and of resolving political conflict in the twentieth century. Yet as with the division of Ireland, the Indian partition has only led to more conflict like the Bangladesh War of Independence, the Kashmir conflict, the Kargil war, and violent ethnonationalism in South Asia.
Peck, Raoul
Authors: Nzengou‐Tayo Marie‐José 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Born in 1953 in Haiti, Raoul Peck is today a renowned and respected filmmaker and film teacher. His filming choices are strongly influenced by his political commitment and his Haitian experience. With the passing of time, he has developed an inimitable style which mixes fiction and authentic documents. The recurring themes in his films include friendship, betrayal, and faithfulness to one's idea until death. He has received several awards and he is dedicated to the promotion of the Cinema of the South.
Postcolonial Digital Humanities
Authors: Olsen Porter , Risam Roopika 
Published: June 2017

AbstractPostcolonial digital humanities comprises a range of dialogues at the juncture of postcolonial studies and the digital milieu. Emerging from the diverse fields of humanities computing, new media studies, rhetoric and composition, and science and technology studies, these interventions foreground important questions of power, development, knowledge production, labor, and globalization elicited by computational technology and digital media. In addition to articulating a genealogy of postcolonial digital humanities, this entry examines a sampling of digital projects and discusses the challenges to pursuing postcolonial digital humanities scholarship.
Postcolonial Studies
Authors: Singh Amardeep 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Postcolonial studies refers to a broad range of inquiries related to the formerly colonized world, especially in literature, cultural anthropology, history, political science, religion studies, and sociology. Postcolonialist methodology originated in literary studies, but has subsequently had an intensely interdisciplinary focus. The use of the term “postcolonial” has been controversial, with some critics questioning the use of the prefix “post‐” and others questioning the ideological differences between postcolonial studies and Marxist thought. That said, postcolonial studies has become a broadly influential and established analytical lens, especially for research and teaching related to the Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone worlds, largely displacing earlier academic configurations such as the area studies model. Postcolonial studies can also be seen as a successor to terminology related to the “Commonwealth” (in the Anglophone world) as well as to the “Third World” configuration that was widely prevalent during the Cold War.
Postcolonial Theory
Authors: Phillips Delores B. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Postcolonial studies analyzes the legacy of violence of over 500 years of Western colonialism and the ways in which non‐Western people resist it. Its interest lies in the continuing significance of the colonial encounter for both Western and non‐Western people. Postcolonial theory constitutes a subfield of cultural studies even as it complicates not only the other subdisciplines that comprise cultural studies, but also the broader rubric of cultural studies itself. Postcolonial theory sinks deep theoretical roots into Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. Postcolonial theory studies migration and globalization, hybridity, diaspora, global momentum, transnationality, and transculturation. As it continues to evolve, postcolonial theory embraces multiple vantage points of gender, race, sexuality, and (inter)national identity.
Queer
Authors: Hawley John 
Published: June 2017

AbstractQueer is anti‐essentialist and defines sexuality as an effect of discourse and social context and construction. Gender, far from binary, reveals itself as unstable and its norms in the definition of the sexes as only artificially fixed. Queer might be conceived as a militant sensitivity to historic silences and crude universalisms. The intersection of postcolonial and queer theories has invited highly imaginative comparative interdisciplinary studies.
Rhys, Jean
Authors: Johnson Erica L. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica. Although she moved to England in 1908 and spent the rest of her life in Europe, her Caribbean origins informed much of her writing as well as its critical reception. Most notably, her 1966 novel
Wide Sargasso Sea
catapulted Rhys to fame and has become a fixture of postcolonial reading lists. The four novels and three collections of short stories that Rhys wrote prior to
Wide Sargasso Sea
, and mostly before 1939, are less well‐known but equally important artistic achievements that make Rhys a foremost modernist as well as postcolonial author. Rhys's explorations of race, class, gender, colonial relations, psychological dynamics, affective states, and aesthetics continue to inspire new scholarly directions.
El Saadawi, Nawal
Authors: Mehta Brinda J. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Nawal El Saadawi is an internationally known Egyptian writer, activist, psychiatrist, and physician. Named “the Simone de Beauvoir” of the Arab world, in her work El Saadawi focuses on the empowerment of women, children, and the rural poor in Egypt. Her writings critique the many faces of patriarchy found in religion, medicine, politics, nationhood, and the family. She is an award‐winning author and a voice of social justice for the “wretched of the earth.”
Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Robbins Bruce 
Published: June 2017

AbstractTraditional definitions of cosmopolitanism may tend more to the positive or negative, but they usually agree on some degree of synthesis: cosmopolitanism as a commitment to the good of humanity as a whole that overrides all smaller loyalties and commitments, creating a habitual detachment from the values of the locality. This account is singular and normative. Over the past 30 years, however, it has been gradually if only partially displaced by a plural, descriptive understanding. According to the new understanding, cosmopolitanism can be defined as any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others. This shift from a normative to a descriptive register has meant that there are more kinds of cosmopolitanism out there to be observed and explored, both in the present and in the past, and perhaps also a greater absolute quantity. It has meant a disciplinary shift: social scientists, cultural critics, and historians have recently staked claims to a concept that had seemed to belong largely to philosophers and political theorists.
Sexual Difference in Latin America
Authors: Pey Francisca Garat 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
To understand the consolidation of sexual difference in postcolonial Latin America we need to analyze the hegemonic evolution established by the nations of the Iberian peninsula – within an independent framework of civil and discursive laws – as they attempted to represent a unified Latin American community and identity. Recognizing this hegemonic imperialist framework enables an analysis from within its own configuration that puts that same configuration to the test because the existence of independent postcolonial national states is nothing but an attempt to construct a common history that defines (and was invented to monolithically transform) the continent while adhering to a structure of heterosexual sexual difference.
Sidhwa, Bapsi
Authors: Bhattacharya Anindya 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa (1938– ), a celebrated Pakistani author, spearheaded the new wave of writing from the Indian subcontinent that came with the phenomenal success of Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
. Her intimate and humane presentation of the Parsee diaspora in
The Crow Eaters
and
An American Brat
establish her as an authentic voice of that community. Her fame mainly rests on her saga,
Ice‐Candy‐Man
, which explores the growth of ethnic nationalisms before India's Partition and the issue of the rehabilitation of abducted women. Sidhwa's feminist politics is often asserted in her work through a presentation of women getting round patriarchal control through mutual empathy and benevolence.
Pueblo
Authors: Ortega Francisco A. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

The history of the Spanish term
pueblo
(people) conveys a broad range of political and social experiences: the location of inhabited settlements; the lower classes; a nation's core inhabitants; a state's population mass; a community of believers; a modern form of publicity; and the site of sovereignty. This entry treats
pueblo
as the central aporetic figure that at once refers to the emancipatory agents of political transformation, the source of a new legitimacy, the abstract and indivisible form of the general will, and the preferential object of attention by modern states. Far from possessing a stable definition, the concept of
pueblo
is best grasped as an object of dispute and a field of polemics structured around the above‐mentioned nodes of experience. This entry elucidates the history of that field of debate in Spanish America.
Sri Lankan Literature, Criticism and Theory
Authors: Goonetilleke D. C. R. A. 
Published: June 2017

Abstract

In 1935 J. Vijayatunga made a splash in London with piquant village vignettes,
Grass for My Feet
. Six decades later, expatriate Sri Lankan writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Shyam Selvadurai have acquired an international standing. Little of his writing is based on Sri Lanka, but Ondaatje is a writer of hypnotic power who captures the essential rhythms of his birth country in his prose and poetry. Selvadurai's
Funny Boy
(1994) movingly depicts a young boy's experience of ethnic conflict and the recognition of his sexual nature, while
Cinnamon Gardens
(1998) is a nostalgic vista of upper‐class Tamil life. Resident Lankan writers, however, though producing work of quality, failed to make a comparable impact until Shehan Karunatilaka's
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew
won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2012 and was marketed by the British book‐chain Waterstones as one of the eleven top debuts of 2011. Sri Lanka remains neglected on the literary map.
State
Authors: Figler Pete 
Published: June 2017

AbstractThe state is a political, cultural, ideological, economic, and military conceptual apparatus which holds governing sway over a population and a finite land territory. In order for the state to function, the population must implicitly and explicitly agree to be governed by and, in some circumstances, restricted by the state. This agreement is known as the social contract. Legitimation and validation are important aspects of state formation and sustenance, as both are necessary for recognition by domestic populations as well as other states. Complex systems of symbols and rituals legitimate the power of the state by way of normalization throughout the social body.
Tagore, Rabindranath
Authors: Balakrishnan Anita 
Published: June 2017

Abstract
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Nobel Prize‐winning, Indian author whose vast canon comprising lyrical poetry, realist novels, and short fiction, political essays, satirical and musical plays, and various other writings in both English and Bengali have established him as a preeminent figure in early modern Indian literature. Tagore was born into an artistic family and this helped to shape his aesthetic and political sensibilities. Initially drawn to the anti‐colonial movement, he later became disenchanted with the nationalist movement's coercive methods. He was opposed to western forms of nationalism as he did not feel they were suited to the heterogeneous character of Indian society. His creation of the “New Woman” in his fiction helped to debunk the abject subject position of women in India. Tagore was a universalist and a cosmopolitan.