Fiona Tolan

Bio: Fiona Tolan is an academic researcher from Liverpool John Moores University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Feminism & Second-wave feminism. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 23 publications receiving 96 citations.

Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction

Abstract: INTRODUCTION The Edible Woman: The Psychology of Early Second-Wave Feminism Surfacing: Origins and Identity Lady Oracle: Postmodernism and the Body Life Before Man: Feminism and Science Bodily Harm: The Imprisoning Gaze The Handmaid's Tale: Second-Wave Feminism as Anti-Utopia Cat's Eye: Articulating the Body The Robber Bride: The Other Woman in Post-Colonial Discourse Alias Grace: Narrating the Self The Blind Assassin: The End of Feminism? Oryx and Crake: A Postfeminist Future BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

Abstract: Published in 1985, a year after the date made infamous by George Orwell's novel, The Handmaid's Tale appeared during a period of heightened interest in utopian literature, particularly feminist uto...

Literature, Migration and the 'War on Terror'

Abstract: Foreword Part 1: Migration and Terrorism 1. Introduction 2. Salman Rushdie and the "war on terror" 3. Migrating from terror: The postcolonial novel after September 11 4. E-terror: Computer viruses, class and transnationalism in Transmission and One Night @ the Call Center 5. Anarchism, anti-imperialism and "The Doctrine of Dynamite" 6. Towards a critique of colonial violence: Fanon, Gandhi and the restoration of agency Part 2: Literary Responses to the War on Terror 7. Introduction 8. Moving through America: Race, place and resistance in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist 9. Another Black September? Palestinian writing after 9/11 10. "Why I am writing from where you are not": Absence and presence in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 11. 9/11, image control, and the graphic narrative: Spiegelman, Rehr, Torres 12. Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11 mourning in Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days 13. Jihad as rite of passage: Tahar Djaout's The Last Summer of Reason and Slimane Benaissa's The Last Night of a Damned Soul 14. Paranoia in Spook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror

Rerouting the Postcolonial

Abstract: This special issue traces several new directions in postcolonial studies in which the earlier paradigm of roots/rootedness can be seen to emerge into a new model of routes/“(re)routing”, thus refle...

Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Postcolonial Other in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride

Abstract: Margaret Atwood published her eighth novel, The Robber Bride, in 1993; it marks a moment when the postmodernism and the post-colonialism that have always been discernible in Atwood's work came to the fore in critical dialog. (1) The Robber Bride is a novel concerned with place and with origins. Many of the characters have complicated ethnic and cultural histories, reflecting something of the increasingly multicultural composition of contemporary Canada. But this multiculturalism is always in tension in the novel with the traditionally White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of British colonial Canada. Consequently, the question "where do you come from?" recurs throughout the novel, and Atwood reads it as an aggressive rather than a neutral question: seeking to distinguish insiders from outsiders. In this article I examine this tension between insiders and outsiders--which is effectively the classic tension between the self and the other--and I suggest that The Robber Bride articulates a peculiarly Canadian view of the postcolonial other. Canada is caught between two opposing power positions. It is both the ex-colonial nation (that is, the colonial other to Britain's colonizing self), and it is also undeniably a First World nation, with a position of privilege and power in the world (and therefore is the First World self to the Third World other). This unstable division continues even within the borders of Canada, as Donna Bennett points out: "both French and English Canada, while they may be postcolonial to a dominant Other, have played, and continue to play, the role of imperial power to Native culture" (Bennett 2004, 115). This article examines Canada's dual power position, and much of the argument is framed by an examination of the parallel experience of ambiguous power positions faced by white feminists addressing the problems of Third World women. Both topics--feminism and nationalism--are connected by a quest for power and a quest for identity. I demonstrate that Atwood's examination of women's power is frequently employed as a metaphor for Canada's experience as a postcolonial nation. Identity in The Robber Bride is frequently shifting, and by this, I argue, Atwood attempts to reflect what she sees to be the shifting identity of Canada itself. In both the novel and the nation, the boundary between self and other--between colonizer and colonized--is fluid and uncertain. In The Robber Bride, Atwood articulates a common late-twentieth-century interest in postcolonial discourse, but she translates prevalent postcolonial ideas of difference and otherness to fit her own understanding. The split voice of a racially divided culture becomes, in this novel, the separation of the narratorial focus into three separate speaking subjects. For each of the three (white) protagonists, Tony, Roz, and Charis, there is a detailed history; for each woman, origins are of fundamental importance. Post-colonialism in this novel is largely read through the experiences of white women, which may seem to undermine the potency of the examination, but this allows Atwood to challenge Canada on some of its assumptions of postcolonial innocence by examining, in abstract, the manner in which the First World self responds to the presence of the other. Further to this, Atwood interacts with many of the issues thrown up by postcolonial thinking in her depiction of the shape-shifting Zenia. This character's instability--demonstrated by her compulsive re-reading of her own origins--creates a powerful depiction of "the other woman." Most frequently read in terms of sexuality and greed (most notably by Coral Howells and Atwood herself, as discussed below), Zenia's otherness, when considered through the lens of post-colonialism, becomes simply a metaphorical figure of "the other." By examining the interaction of each of the three protagonists with this alien other, The Robber Bride plays out a number of tensions, including exoticism and orientalism, currently being articulated by postcolonial theorists. …

The New York Review of Books

Abstract: It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects

Abstract: Decolonizing trauma theory has been a major project in postcolonial literary scholarship ever since its first sustained engagements with trauma theory. Since then, trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies have been uneasy bedfellows, and the time has now come to take stock of what remains in postcolonial trauma studies from the original formulations of trauma theory, and see which further steps must be envisaged in order to reach the ideal of a truly decolonized trauma theory today. To this end, this article presents a detailed overview of the short history and the present situation of the trajectory of decolonizing trauma theory for postcolonial studies, clarifying the various re-routings that have so far taken place, and delineating the present state of the project, as well as the need for further developments towards an increased expansion and inclusiveness of the theory. I argue that openness to non-Western belief systems and their rituals and ceremonies in the engagement with trauma is needed in order to achieve the remaining major objectives of the long-standing project of decolonizing trauma theory.

Links Between Terrorism and Migration: An Exploration

Abstract: This Research Paper explores and questions some assumed causal links between terrorism on the one hand and (forced and irregular) migration on the other. The paper delves into the role that state and non-state terrorism might have in causing migration as well as analysing if and how refugees’ camps and the diaspora community might be a target for radicalisation. One of the findings of the paper is how migration control for the control of terrorism is a widely used instrument however, it might hurt bona fide migrants and legal foreign residents more than mala fide terrorists. Finally, this Research Paper offers recommendations that can go some way towards disentangling the issues of (refugee) migration and terrorism