Culture and Imperialism

Moses and Monotheism

The science of climate change has important influences on humanist histories of human beings.What scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization.The current construction of historical knowledge presupposes a loss of the old distinction between human and natural histories.The idea of the Anthropocene which considers humans as a geological force severely qualifies humanist histories.This requires us to put histories of capitalism in conversation with the histories of the evolution of earth and human beings.Such conversation between recorded histories and deep histories is one process of exploring the limits of historical understanding.

The Climate of History:Four Theses

\"Hayden White...is the most prominent American scholar to unite historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative and cultural understanding.\" --'The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism' In his earlier books such as 'Tropics of Discourse' and 'The Content of the Form', Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In 'Figural Realism', White collects eight interrelated essays primarily concerned with the treatment of history in recent literary critical discourse. \"'History' is not only an object we can study,\" writes White, \"it is also and even primarily a certain kind of relationship to 'the past' mediated by a distinctive kind of written discourse. It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.\

Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (review)

This thesis explores how Anglophone literature debated the rise of modern international law since the late nineteenth century, including the founding of the United Nations and the 1948 declaration of human rights. While international law has its origins in the early modern period, it was largely at the turn of the century, with the Berlin Conference, that it began taking shape as a colonial and then a postcolonial, global ethics. In this thesis, I lay claim to literature’s capacity to legislate by examining instances where Anglophone novelists—including Joseph Conrad, Bryher, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—work through the promises and problems of international jurisprudence. More than a mere reflection of international law’s evolving theory and practice, the literature I treat registers the law’s presumptions and first principles while interrogating its capacity to follow through with its declarations. In spreading the law’s claims while also submitting them to the scrutiny of close reading, these novels are both advocates of and at times stubborn liabilities for international law’s normative worlds. Collectively, these Anglophone novelists scrutinize international law’s ability to shape the ways we come to know ourselves and one another as rights-bearing individuals, international actors, advocates, and activists. Recent work in the humanities has begun to address the ways in which international law is a set of interlocked narratives that claim

For All Peoples and All Nations: Anglophone Literature and the Imaginative Work of International Law (1884-2017)

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts, including those to which it is not usually applied The analysis further reveals tensions between different texts’ appeals for recognition, and suggests that these tensions problematize the claim that solidarity will emerge from sympathetic engagement with trauma victims As such, the paper makes three key arguments: first, that trauma offers a productive ground for comparing postcolonial fiction; second, that comparison uncovers problems for theorists attempting to “decolonize” trauma studies; and third, that trauma theory needs to be supplemented with systemic material analyses of particular contexts if it is not to obfuscate what makes postcolonial traumas distinct

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The Question of “Solidarity” in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle

Analyses of settler-colonial narrative have focused on how settlers imagine the past, identifying a problem of origins that makes history an object of anxiety. The meaning settlers attribute to the future has been, less thoroughly examined. This article addresses that gap by analysing literary texts from South Africa, Australia, and Canada that posit an ‘end’ to settler colonialism, imagining futures beyond the settler-colonial present. It argues that a key metaphor of the settler future is extinction. This concept allows the death of the settler subject to be constructed as comparable, to the elimination of indigenous peoples, superseded societies, maladapted species, or even – through the invocation of climate change – to the end of humanity itself. The article analyses the implications of settler extinction, arguing that the works in question rely on a slippage between the settler subject and ‘the human’ that replicates features of settler-colonial and patriarchal ideology. The article suggests...

The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature

Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács's concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács's progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia.

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The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel

In this interview, the Australian historical novelist Rohan Wilson discusses the intellectual, aesthetic, and political challenges of writing fiction about the colonial frontier. He highlights the tension between a widespread desire for knowledge of the "true" or actual past, and the novelist's freedom to explore human experience beyond the archive. He talks in particular about his first novel, The Roving Party , which explores genocide on the Tasmanian frontier, and its continuities with his newest work, set on the island a generation after the defeat of the Indigenous resistance.

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/35611/29150

In Defence of “the lesser cousin of history”: An Interview with Rohan Wilson

V. S. Naipaul’s career as a novelist, travel writer, and journalist presents a case study for exploring the links between realist form and the global imagination as they evolve over a 60-year perio...

Hamish Dalley

Papers

The Question of “Solidarity” in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle

The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of decolonization in contemporary settler literature

The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel

In Defence of “the lesser cousin of history”: An Interview with Rohan Wilson

V. S. Naipaul and the Worlds of Postcolonial Realism