4 results
21 - Narratives of Survival
- from (III) - Here to Stay
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- By Chris Weedon
- Edited by Susheila Nasta, Queen Mary University of London, Mark U. Stein, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
- Published online:
- 19 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 16 January 2020, pp 353-367
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Summary
Opening up and drawing attention to what Kobena Mercer has called ‘the referential realities of race’, in postwar Britain many writers turned (perhaps like their eighteenth-century forebears) towards autobiography, testimony, and realist forms to contest racism and impact dominant sites of representation. Whether Braithwaite in Paid Servant (1962), Markandaya in The Nowhere Man (1972), Emecheta in her autobiographical fictions such as In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974), Dhondy in his 1970s East End short stories, Gilroy in her memoir Black Teacher (1976), or Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), these writers document and articulate the harsh conditions of black and Asian existence in postwar Britain. Using hindsight to link what might at first appear to be a disparate series of texts published between 1960 and the mid-1980s, this chapter highlights how thematic, contextual, and stylistic correspondences emerge across a wide range of different writers whose fictions became partially determined by the need to make evident the grim realities of the widespread culture of institutional and interpersonal racism which continued to face black and Asian people and communities in Britain.
2 - British Black and Asian Writing since 1980
- from PART I - TRACES AND ROUTES
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- By Chris Weedon, Professor Emerita at Cardiff University
- Edited by Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths, University of London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 October 2016, pp 40-56
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Summary
The period 1980–2010 saw an increase and diversification in writing by black and Asian writers in the UK, augmented thematically and aesthetically by work from generations born and/or educated in Britain and their new configurations of questions of difference and identity. While often marked by the effects of racism and social exclusion, the writing of this period offers imaginative insights into new diasporic communities, with perspectives on colonial history, the slave trade, the effects of the rise of global Islamism and what Stuart Hall has called ‘multicultural drift’. The context for this writing is a Britain undergoing major social and cultural changes, driven in part by increased immigration, ongoing struggles over discrimination, racialised inequalities, the nature and content of education, and debates over what it means to be British.
Although racial discrimination was made illegal in the 1970s, the process of transforming institutional and interpersonal racism has been slow, and is an ongoing theme in contemporary literary and dramatic work. Authors use a broad spectrum of literary forms, including narrative fiction, autobiography, poetry and drama, frequently experimenting with transgeneric approaches that can interweave, fragment and transform these forms. While significant numbers of works have been discussed in the media and at literary festivals, and short-listed for literary and dramatic prizes, others remain less widely known. Paul Warmington foregrounds the link between formal education (schooling) and education as cultural survival (with a broader remit of cultural longevity), where ‘Black Britain has produced many intellectual, cultural and educational spaces outside formal settings: supplementary schools, independent community education projects, reading circles, grassroots journals, bookshops and publishing houses’. The strategy of small presses publishing both unknown and established writers has been important in building audiences for new writers. In addition to black and Asian publishing initiatives, community publishers such as Centreprise and feminist publishers Sheba Press, the Women's Press and Virago created access to work which did not always receive mainstream attention. Following on from presses established in the 1960s and 1970s, further small influential publishers emerged during the 1980s. Mantra Publications (1984–) specialises in fiction about British Asian life (often bi-lingual) aimed at young audiences and has among its titles prize-winning texts by Sailesh Ramakrishnan and Ravinder Randhawa.
15 - Postcolonial feminist criticism
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- By Chris Weedon, Cardiff University
- Edited by Gill Plain, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Susan Sellers, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- Book:
- A History of Feminist Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 August 2007, pp 282-300
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Summary
In its formative years – the late 1960s and 1970s – second-wave feminist criticism in the West had two main aims. The first was to analyse literature as vehicle for reproducing and contesting patriarchal images of women in fictional texts. The second was to identify and analyse the specificity of women's writing. It set out to recover the lost history of women's writing and to identify both a difference of view in women's writing and a feminine aesthetic. By the 1980s, this process was increasingly being questioned by women critics who found both its underlying assumptions and the range of texts and traditions that it privileged narrow and exclusionary. The tendency to focus on the work of white, middle-class, Western, heterosexual women, often under a general heading of ‘women's writing’, had led to the silencing or marginalisation of issues of class, heterosexism, racism and the colonial legacy as they affected women's cultural production. Moreover, these absences in the important work of recovery that was being undertaken by feminist scholars and publishing houses were beginning to produce new, yet exclusionary, canons.
Even as these debates were being conducted within feminist literary and cultural studies, the increasing influence of poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and postcolonial theories was also making its mark. Such theories questioned the transparency of language, the fixity of meaning, claims to universalism and singular truth. They further problematised the Eurocentric gaze, the sovereignty of intentional subjectivity, authorship and untheorised appeals to global sisterhood and to women's experience.
12 - Cultural studies
- from FROM CULTURAL POETICS TO CULTURAL STUDIES
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- By Chris Weedon
- Edited by Christa Knellwolf, Australian National University, Canberra, Christopher Norris, University of Wales College of Cardiff
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2001, pp 155-164
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Summary
Since the 1960s the discipline of cultural studies has taken root throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. It has developed a wide range of approaches to the study of culture which are usually characterised by attention to political, ideological, social and historical factors, in particular the relationship between culture and power. In the course of its development cultural studies has challenged established cultural canons and disciplinary boundaries and has focused attention on those aspects of culture which have been excluded by longer established humanities disciplines. Thus, for example, cultural studies has looked extensively at cultural theory, popular culture and the media. The development of cultural studies, in its turn, has influenced other disciplines, for example, literary studies, encouraging a more inclusive approach to the range of texts studied and greater attention to theory, context and the institutions that constitute the literary discursive field.
Since the late 1960s cultural studies has become an established international discipline, yet its early roots are to be found in Britain, where they are closely intertwined with the development of literary studies. In its formative years cultural studies defined itself both in relation to and against what is known in Britain as the ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition, i.e. that tradition of English literary and cultural criticism that begins with Matthew Arnold in the 1860s.
For Arnold, culture was an explicitly political question, directly linked to class relations in nineteenth-century Britain. With the expansion of literacy among the working classes, the implementation of compulsory elementary education and the rise of trade unionism, social unrest and even social revolution increasingly came to be seen as real threats to existing social relations.