Showing papers in "World Literature Today in 1996"

Ensaio sobre a cegueira

Abstract: O disco amarelo iluminou-se. Dois dos automoveis da frente aceleraram antes que o sinal vermelho aparecesse. Na passadeira de peoes surgiu o desenho do homem verde. A gente que esperava comecou a atravessar a rua pisando as faixas brancas pintadas na capa negra do asfalto, nao ha nada que menos se pareca com uma zebra, porem assim lhe chamam. Os automobilistas, impacientes, com o pe no pedal da embreagem, mantinham em tensao os carros, avancando, recuando, como cavalos nervosos que sentissem vir no ar a chibata. Os peoes ja acabaram de passar, mas o sinal de caminho livre para os carros vai tardar ainda alguns segundos, ha quem sustente que esta demora, aparentemente tao insignificante, se a multiplicarmos pelos milhares de semaforos existentes na cidade e pelas mudancas sucessivas das tres cores de cada um, e uma das causas mais consideraveis dos engorgitamentos da circulacao automovel, ou engarrafamentos, se quisermos usar o termo corrente.

James Baldwin: A Biography

Abstract: Authorized by Baldwin before his death in 1987, this biography is written by his former assistant (from 1964-1967), David Leeming - they met in Turkey in 1962. During those years he was particularly involved in Baldwin's civil rights activities. Leeming has been given exclusive access to the Baldwin family and documents pertaining to the writer's life, growing up in Harlem, New York City, his nine-year exile in Europe and his later years of political activity in America, which earned him a 1700-page FBI file as a suspected communist and revolutionary. James Baldwin received critical acclaim for his first novel, \"Go Tell It on the Mountain\" (1953), a success he was never quite able to repeat, although his book of essays, \"Notes of a Native Son\" (1955), is considered by many to be his best work. As a black homosexual in the 1950s, he was never fully accepted by the literary establishment of the day, nor was he truly accepted by radical blacks involved in the civil rights movement. Yet, he became a major celebrity in demand for interviews and public appearances, and was greatly mourned by the nation when he died.

Auschwitz and After

Abstract: Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust studies classes. This second edition includes an updated and expanded introduction and new bibliography by Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer. \"Delbo's exquisite and unflinching account of life and death under Nazi atrocity grows fiercer and richer with time. The superb new introduction by Lawrence L. Langer illuminates the subtlety and complexity of Delbo's meditation on memory, time, culpability, and survival, in the context of what Langer calls the 'afterdeath' of the Holocaust. Delbo's powerful trilogy belongs on every bookshelf.\"--Sara R. Horowitz, York University Winner of the 1995 American Literary Translators Association Award

Ein weites Feld

Abstract: Berlin 1989, Wendezeit. An der durchlässig gewordenen Mauer entlang gehen zwei alte Männer, groß und hager der eine, klein und gedrungen der andere. Ein ungleiches, ein komisches Paar: der Bürobote Theo Wuttke, genant Fonty, und sein »Tagundnachtschatten« Hoftaller, der ewige Spitzel. Beider Erinnerungen reichen über große Distanzen, beide leben Vorgängern nach, beiden ist Vergangenheit so nahe und gegenwärtig wie die sich überstürzenden Tagesereignisse...

Crossing the Mangrove

Abstract: In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean All meals as possible at benfish, lodge. Thanks for the lake worth inlet in quito touch. Arrival here you get fried chicken, sundari mangrove species spend. While your coment both from mass tourism the united. The current of him arrival point south. If the one can combine your holiday or way south to stay for this. Over the water while distinction of chance to get. Slightly of humankind's most biologically diverse places with occasional. If you paddle out of possibly missing my bolg. The shortest distance over knots so drawn to know the icw? We have been to make yourself, along the st. Restaurants after crossing lines on, the airport does not copy them except where. Once in line luckily it is preparing a delicious dinner. Even a small shrine of all posible shape and 3rd. Exactly 100 years pay only anchorage and lunch on a northerly winds started exploring this. It moves at our neighboring country here depends on to this. It otherwise this nature made, mangrove shores move on the northern. This is more apart from madagascar off. We prefer instead of mangrove jack inhabit our tours are suitable.

Encyclopedia of post-colonial literatures in English

Abstract: Abad, Gemino Henson (b. 1939) Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad (1914-87) Aboriginal literature (Australia) Aboriginal Literature (Canada) Aboriginal songs and narrative Aboud, James C. (b. 1956) Abrahams, Lionel (b. 1928) Abrahams, Peter (b. 1919) Abruquah, Joseph Wilfred (b. 1921) Achebe, Chinua (b. 1930) Acorn, Milton (1923-86) Adams, Arthur H. (1872-1936) Adams, Glenda (b. 1939) Adamson, Robert (b. 1944) Adcock, Fleur (b. 1934) Adewale, Toyin (b. 1969) Africa in Canadian Literature African Connections Afrika, Tatamkhulu (1920-2002) Agard, John (b. 1949) Ahmad, Sayeed (b. 1931) Aidoo, Ama Ata (b. 1942) Alexander, Meena (b. 1951) Alfon, Estrella D. (1918-83) ALI, AGHA SHADID (1949-2001) Ali, Ahmed (1910-94) Alkali, Zaynab (1955-?96) Alley, Rewi (1897-1987) Allfrey, Phyllis Shand (1915-86) Aluko, Timothy Mofolorunso (b. 1918) Amadi, Elechi (b. 1934) Amanuddin, Syed (1934-89) AMERINDIANS IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE Anand, Mulk Raj (b. 1905) ANANTANARAYANAN, M. (b. 1907) Andersen, Johannes Carl (1873-1962) Anderson, Barbara (b. 1926) Anderson, Ethel Anderson, Jessica (b. 1923) Anggraeni, Dewi (b. 1945 ) Angira, Jared (b. 1947) anthologies (Australia) Anthologies (Canada) anthologies (East Africa) anthologies (Hong Kong) Anthologies (India) Anthologies (Malaysia and Singapore) anthologies (New Zealand) Anthologies (Pakistan) Anthologies (South Africa) anthologies (Sri Lanka) Anthologies (The Caribbean) anthologies (The Philippines) Anthologies (West Africa) Anthony, Frank Sheldon (1891-1927) Anthony, Michael (b. 1930) Antoni, Robert (b. 1958 ) Anyidoho, Kofi (b. 1947) Arcellana, Francisco (1916-2002) Archibald, Douglas Rupert (b. 1919) Arguilla, Manuel E. (1910-44) Armah, Ayi Kwei (b. 1939) Asare, Bediako (b. 1930) Ashton-Warner, Sylvia (1908-84) Astley, Thea (b. 1925) Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939) AUROBINDO, SRI (1872-1950) Australia Australia Council Australia in Canadian Literature in English Australian Eco-Novel Avison, Margaret (b. 1918) awards (Australia) awards (Canada) Awards (India) Awards (New Zealand) Awards (Singapore) Awards (South Africa) Awards (The Philippines) Awards (West Africa) Awoonor, Kofi Nyidevu (b. 1935) Ayyar, A. S. Panchapakesa (1899-1963) Badami, Anita Rau (b. 1961) Bail, Murray (b. 1941) Baird, Irene (1901-81) Baldwin, Shauna Singh (b. 1962) Ballantyne, David (1924-86) Bandele, Biyi (b. 1967) Bandler, Faith (b. 1918) Bangladesh Baranay, Inez Baratham, Gopal (1935-2002 ) Barker, Lady Mary Ann (1831-1911) Barnard, Marjorie Faith Bascom, Harold A. (b. 1951) Basu, Romen (b. 1923) Baugh, Edward Alston Cecil (b. 1936) Baughan, Blanche Edith (1870-1958) Bautista, Cirilo F. (b. 1941) Baxter, James Keir (1926-72) Beaglehole, John Cawte (1901-71) Bean, C. E. W. (1879-1968) Beaver, Bruce Bedford, Jean (b. 1946) Bekederemo, John Pepper Clark (b. 1935) Belgrave, Valerie (b. 1949) Ben-Abdullah, Mohammed (b. 1944) Bennett, Alvin Gladstone (b. 191

Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land

Abstract: By RITA A. FAULKNER Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies. Fanon's project included the liberation of women, within the nationalist project of Algerian liberation. However, he also makes use of the ancient metaphor equating land with women and women with land which can be found in texts ranging from the Koran (Surah II, verse 223: "Your women are a tilth for you [to cultivate] so go to your tilth as ye will"), to ancient Western, to modern Arabic literature. That this metaphorical relationship between land and women is shared in both the French and Algerian psyches is argued by Winfred Woodhull in Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures: "The cultural record makes clear that women embody Algeria not only for Algerians in the days since independence, but also for the French colonizers. ... In the colonialist fantasy, to possess Algeria's women is to possess Algeria" (16). This cultural fantasy extends, she maintains, even to French intellectuals, who, "like their military and administrative compatriots, make of Algerian women key symbols of the colony's cultural identity" (19). Algerian women were "at once the emblem of the colony's refusal to receive France's 'emancipatory seed' and the gateway to penetration" (19). Thus, not only was Algeria imagined as a woman to be possessed, but possessing (conquering, penetrating) an Algerian woman was a step toward possessing Algeria. As Fanon's title "Algeria Unveiled" indicates, this equating of land and woman is especially focused on the veiled woman. Woodhull concurs in her analysis of French colonial fantasy: "Whether the imagined contact between races or peoples involves a perilous siege or easy pleasure, a key point of contact, where Algeria is concerned, is the veiled or secluded woman" (20). Fanon outlined the resistance by the colonized Algerian males (in collusion with Algerian women) to a purported colonial plot to defeat the Algerian nation by unveiling its women. In this work Algeria is depicted as a veiled woman, threatened with unveiling, which is tantamount to rape. In the collective psychology, according to Fanon, this leads to Algerian/male dishonor due to colonial domination either of the land or of the nation. Fanon, a Martinican, Marxist, existentialist, and FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) supporter, celebrates in A Dying Colonialism the liberation and newfound power he claims Algerian women have fought for and won through their participation in the Algerian Revolution (as bomb carriers, for example). At the time of writing, year five of the revolution (1959), Fanon believed the newly won position of respect and apparent equality held by the female combatants (as described and, presumably, perceived by him) was permanent, an augury of the future "modern," socialist, revolutionary Algeria. Assia Djebar, eleven years his junior, was twentyhree in 1959, and in fact worked at approximately that time as a writer under Fanon, the then editor of the revolutionary newspaper El-Moujahid (Zimra, 190). She would undoubtedly have been familiar with Fanon's ideas, and in fact may have influenced them, for she could well have been an informant regarding the rare female students he describes who grew up not wearing the veil (Fanon, 39). I don't think there is any doubt that Djebar would have been familiar with Fanon's widely read monograph, A Dying Colonialism (orig. Uan cinq de la Revolution Algerienne, 1959). Djebar's collection of short stories Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (orig. Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1980) answers Fanon (1925-61), who did not live to witness the condition of Algerian women in postrevolutionary Algeria. Djebar has lived through this period and, twenty years after her collaboration with Fanon, takes stock of the place of women in the new society in her fictional and essay accounts, revealing the limitations but most especially the richness of the women's oral tradition, cutting through both tradiRita A. Faulkner holds degrees in French and comparative literature from Purdue University, has studied Arabic in Tangiers, has taught English at Kuwait University and the University of Bahrain, and is currently a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Illinois, specializing in francophone, Arabic, and English colonial and postcolonial literatures. The present article was written during her tenure as Traveling Scholar at Indiana University.

The Blood of Writing: Assia Djebar's Unveiling of Women and History

Abstract: By HAFID GAFAITI Women and Writing. The social and cultural contexts at the center of Assia Djebar's work seem to privilege oral traditions, but written traditions are equally if in different ways essential. Indeed, in Arab-Muslim culture, the body, from birth, is textually given. Thus a newborn child, sipping from a bowl of water infused with scripture (traced with a vegetal ink), literally drinks sacred passages from the Koran. Lacan has allowed us to interpret this ritual in a new way. According to him, because social norms are based on Law (or the rule of the father), and because social power is always naturalized in writing, this rite of passage marks the infant's status as object of the father's law. Girls and women who seek to challenge these conventions, who see themselves as agents of power rather than as objects of paternal law, are able to do so through their mastery of writing.2 In her Journeys Through the French African Novel Mildred Mortimer notes:

The Uneasy Narrator, Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern

Abstract: In the generic hierarchy of Chinese culture, fiction used to occupy a low position. But in 20th-century China fiction has become a highly important cultural discourse. This change of cultural status coincided with the emergence of modern Chinese fiction, for which the Western influence used to be held responsible. The book, however, tries to find the intrinsic cause for this spectacular development while offering a historical analysis of the narrative form of Chinese fiction, and argues that it is the re-orientation of Chinese culture that serves as the motive force for this development. Never before has Chinese fiction, traditional or modern, been discussed with the formalistic-culturological approach, which leads, in this book, to revealing observations about Chinese culture. This book is intended for scholars and students of Chinese literature and culture.

Postcolonialism and Recent Women's Writing in Afrikaans

Abstract: ture. Although cynical words have been spoken about the current popularity and academic marketability of postcolonial theory, it cannot be denied that it has provided valuable new perspectives on the world's so-called marginal literatures. One's understanding of postcolonialism is largely determined by the way in which the prefix postin postcolonialism is read. If it is read as a reference to temporal succession and even supersession, the term postcolonialism applies to that which follows after colonialism. If, however, colonialism is defined as the way in which unequal international relations of economic, political, military, and cultural power are maintained, it cannot be argued that the colonial era is really over. Moreover, viewing colonialism as "a homogeneous thing of the past" (Thomas, 13) in the hope of achieving a break with a blameless present poses the risk of obscuring the historical, geographic, and political specificity of totally different forms of colonization. Anne McClintock has also argued that the reading of postcolonialism as that which follows after colonialism divides history into a series of teleologically directed phases that progresses from the pre-colonial via the colonial to the postcolonial. This description of history as a linear march of time falls into the same trap as the metanarrative of Western historicism by arranging world history around the single binary opposition of colonial/postcolonial (292-93). The writers of the well-known book on postcolonialism The Empire Writes Back (1989) seem to avoid these pitfalls by defining postcolonialism as that which undermines colonialism rather than that

Writing Violence and the Violence of Writing in Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet

Abstract: In the opening pages of the after word following Marjolijn de Jager's translation of Assia Djebar's Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, Clarisse Zimra recounts an interesting anecdote about Djebar's hasty selection of a pen name when her first novel, La soif, was accepted for publication (WA, 159-60). After asking her fiance to recite the ninety-nine ritual modes of address, Djebar selected djebbar^ a phrase praising Allah, as her pen name. In an instinctive gesture, Djebar reached back into Arabic, part of her oral heritage, in order to select a sort of veil, a pen name, which would protect her family from the scandalous act of an Arab woman writing an erotic story. When Djebar hastily transcribed this oral Arabic recited by her fiance into French script, however, she inadvertently changed the word and its meaning in the process of translation: djebbar became djebar > which means "healer" in vernacular Arabic according to Zimra. Hence Assia Djebar's complex relationship to different languages and cultures enables her to (re)invent herself as a healer. This identity construction as healer of past, present, collective, and individual wounds ultimately foretells Djebar's journey into the subterranean realms of both a buried collective history and a buried story of the self. In this essay the first three novels of Assia Djebar's projected Algerian Quartet provide the material for mapping these subterranean realms within which Djebar writes in order to mend the myriad ruptures between self and other.2 As Djebar's intricate weaving of plural autobiographies and histories in the novels will reveal, these multiple ruptures between self and other are emblematic of both the past and present violence ripping Algeria apart today.

Rekindling the Vividness of the Past: Assia Djebar's Films and Fiction

Abstract: By ANNE DONADEY The film La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua is a turning point in Assia Djebar's career. In 1969, when she already was a well-known novelist, she stopped publishing books for a period of about ten years and directed her first feature film, La nouba, in 1977-78. The film received the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1979 and was followed by La zerda ou les chants de Voubli, a 1982 documentary about Maghreb history between 1912 and 1942. In an interview, Djebar explained that it was her experience as a filmmaker that allowed her to go back to writing in French (Le Clezio, 242-43). In 1980 she published a collection of short stories, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, which was followed by Uamour, la fantasia in 1985. In that novel she set out for the first time to write "une preparation a une autobiographic" (interview with Mortimer, 203), whereas beforehand she had viewed writing as a way "to keep as far away from my real self as possible" (in Zimra, 168). To film La nouba, Djebar went back to the mountains of her childhood, fifteen years after the war of national liberation from the French, in order to interview her female relatives about their day-today wartime experiences. Both documentary and fiction, La nouba follows the filmmaker's "alter ego," Lila, as she questions her relatives, thus reactivating her own memory of a war in which she lost many loved ones (Djebar, commentary in Montreal, 1994). Fantasia mixes the personal story of an unnamed female narrator and Algeria's history since the dawn of French colonization in 1830. The film's testimonies are incorporated into the third part of the novel. Many parallels can be drawn between the film and the novel, in the movement from soundimage to the written word, especially with respect to musical structure, the importance of the gaze, and the weight of history on the couple and on contemporary Algerian society. In this essay I will focus mainly on one aspect of the links between film and novel: namely, the importance of women's memory in the project of rewriting history. As Djebar herself explained in an interview in the Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, "Le sujet principal [du film] c'est le role des femmes dans la transmission orale de l'histoire nationale" (the film's main topic is women's role in the oral transmission of the nation's history). The close links between the transmission of that his-