Migrant Identities Of «creole Cosmopolitans»: Transcultural Narratives Of Contemporary Postcoloniality (postcolonial Studies)

One defining question links the essays of this collection: How do aesthetic and stylistic choices perform the condition of dislocation of the migrant and, in doing so, also put pressure on the seemingly global promise of cosmopolitanism? __Migrant Identities of «Creole Cosmopolitans»: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality__ offers a wide array of narratives that complicate the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and the related discourses of «hybridity». Many such narratives are under-theorized migrations, such as Dalit narratives from India and inter-island migrations in the Caribbean. Collectively, the essays suggest that there are ways in which the forms of the migrant aesthetics, language, and imaginaries may offer new insights in the interactions between practices and discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism by examining their precise points of intersection and divergence. This inquiry is especially timely because it raises questions about the circulation, marketing, and consumption of narratives of migration, dislocation, and «diaspora.» In addition, the collection addresses in at least two significant ways the question about «beyond postcolonialism» and the future of the discipline. First, by questioning and critically examining some foundational theories in postcolonialism, it points to possible new directions in our theoretical vocabulary. Second, it offers an array of reflections around disparate geographies that are, equally importantly, written in different languages. The value that the authors place on languages other than English and their choice to focus on the effect that multiple languages have on the present of postcolonial studies are in line with one of the aims of the collection – to make the case for a multilingual expansion of the postcolonial imaginary as a necessary imperative. Cover Table of Contents Introduction Part I: Creole Cosmopolitanism(s): Traveling Texts Chapter One: The Migrant Text: Aimé Césaire’s Hemispheric Gambit and the Editorial Blind-Spot (Alex Gil) Home: Tropiques’ Hemispheric Push The Francophone Diaspora and the Culture of Reprinting The Migrant Fragment: “Poème” Notes Works Cited Chapter Two: Border Crossings: Cultural Collisions and Reconciliation in Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only in London (Hanadi Al-Samman) Crossing Ethnic Borders Crossing Gender and Sexual Borders Stretching Identity Borders Notes Works Cited Chapter Three: Politics and Belonging in the Music of Turkish-French Rapper C-it (Annedith Schneider) Notes Works Cited Chapter Four: Postcolonial Textualities and Diasporic Imagination: Reading Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) through Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) (Marika Preziuso) Notes Works Cited Chapter Five: Migration Literature and Place: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (Søren Frank) Spatial Turns The Smoothness of Globalization The Reading Paradigm of World Literature Globalization and the Migrant Writer The Lazarus Project Planet Earth Works Cited Part II: Hybridity Refracted: Migrant Narratives Chapter Six: Lamming vs. Naipaul: Writing Migrants, Writing Islands in the British Literary Field (Malachi McIntosh) Writing Islands/Writing Migrants Notes Works Cited Chapter Seven: Long-Distance Nationalism: The Filipino Ilustrados Abroad (Eugenio Matibag) Works Cited Chapter Eight: The Hullabaloo about Hybridity in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Los ’s (Nirmala Menon) Notes Works Cited Chapter Nine: Liminality within Borders: A Study of Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke and Urmila Pawar’s The Weave of My Life (Putul Sathe) Notes Works Cited Chapter Ten: Family Desires: Kinship and Intimacy among Japanese Immigrants in America (Satoko Kakihara) Capturing Desires and Intimacies Japanese Immigration to the Americas Comic Book as Narrative Photograph as Visual Text Conclusion Notes Works Cited Chapter Eleven: Rethinking Hybridity: Liminality in the Cultural Productions by Black and Asian Women in Britain (Sumana Ray) Liminality vs Hybridity Literature of Liminal Britons Liminality in Cultural Productions Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Contributors One defining question links the essays of this collection : How do aesthetic and stylistic choices perform the condition of dislocation of the migrant and, in doing so, also put pressure on the seemingly global promise of cosmopolitanism Migrant Identities of -Creole Cosmopolitans- : Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality offers a wide array of narratives that complicate the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and the related discourses of hybridity. Many such narratives are under-theorized migrations, such as Dalit narratives from India and inter-island migrations in the Caribbean. Collectively, the essays suggest that there are ways in which the forms of the migrant aesthetics, language, and imaginaries may offer new insights in the interactions between practices and discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism by examining their precise points of intersection and divergence. This inquiry is especially timely because it raises questions about the circulation, marketing, and consumption of narratives of migration, dislocation, and -diaspora.- & ltBRu003e In addition, the collection addresses in at least two significant ways the question about -beyond postcolonialism- and the future of the discipline. First, by questioning and critically examining some foundational theories in postcolonialism, it points to possible new directions in our theoretical vocabulary. Second, it offers an array of reflections around disparate geographies that are, equally importantly, written in different languages. The value that the authors place on languages other than English and their choice to focus on the effect that multiple languages have on the present of postcolonial studies are in line with one of the aims of the collection - to make the case for a multilingual expansion of the postcolonial imaginary as a necessary imperative