Trans-Atlantic Parochialism

Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture (review)

Recent years have seen enormous attention devoted to the history of sexuality in the Western world. But how has the West conceived of non-western societies been influenced by these other traditions? The Geography of Perversion and Desire is the first historical study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment through modern times, is closely interrelated with modern constructions of homosexual identity. Travel reports and early ethnographic accounts of cross-gender roles in the Americas, Africa, and Asia corroborated the 18th century construction of the sodomite identity. Similarly, the late 19th-century construction of the third sex provoked much anthropological speculation on to genetic versus societal nature of male-to-male sexual relations, a precursor of current essentialist versus constructionist debates. An invaluable contribution to the ongoing debates on cultural and sexual otherness, this volume unravels how the categories of the modern sodomite and later homosexual were inextricably intertwined with essentialist definitions of racial identity. In encyclopedic detail, Bleys traces how cross-cultural records were collected, created, structured, manipulated, excerpted, reformulated, and omitted in interaction with changing beliefs about male-to-male sexuality. Focusing in such subjects as puritanism, sodomy, and ethnicity in colonial North America; cross-gender behavior and hermaphrodditism; the semiotics of genitalia; and the parameters of sexual science, The Geography of Perversion and Desire is a breathtakingly thorough, cross cultural history of sexual categories. Drawing on travel reports and early ethnographic accounts, The Geography of Perversion and Desire presents the first historical study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation of cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment to modern times, is closely interrelated with modern constructions of homosexual identity.

The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918

Bibliography

Submerged Captivities

Plausible Deniability

"Whilst others scarcely put a toe in the water, in The Black Atlantic Gilroy goes in deep and returns with riches." Guardian Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, Caribbean Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism trapped in their respective camps, this bold book sounds like a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once; a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also enriches our understanding of modernism.

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

1st edition contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Criticism in the contact zone Part I Science and sentiment, 1750-1800 Science, planetary consciousness, interiors Narrating the anti-conquest Anti-conquest II: The mystique of reciprocity Eros and Abolition Part II The reinvention of America, 1800-50 Alexander von Humboldt and the reinvention of America Reinventing America II: The capitalist vanguard and the exploratrices sociales Reinventing America/Reinventing Europe: Creole self-fashioning Part III Imperial Stylistics, 1860-1980 From the Victoria N'yanza to the Sheraton San Salvador Notes Index

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation

On the Postcolony

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of post colonial studies writing today. In "On the Postcolony" he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of post colonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays - his first book to be published in English - develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', in which he developed his notion of the 'banality of power' in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity - violence, wonder, and laughter - to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and post colonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

The white man's burden, darkest Africa, the seduction of the primitive: such phrases were widespread in the language Western empires used to talk about their colonial enterprises. How this language itself served imperial purposes--and how it survives today in writing about the Third World--are the subject of David Spurr's book, a revealing account of the rhetorical strategies that have defined Western thinking about the non-Western world.

Despite historical differences among British, French, and American versions of colonialism, their rhetoric had much in common. The Rhetoric of Empire identifies these shared features—images, figures of speech, and characteristic lines of argument—and explores them in a wide variety of sources. A former correspondent for the United Press International, the author is equally at home with journalism or critical theory, travel writing or official documents, and his discussion is remarkably comprehensive. Ranging from T. E. Lawrence and Isak Dineson to Hemingway and Naipaul, from Time and the New Yorker to the National Geographic and Le Monde , from journalists such as Didion and Sontag to colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard and Albert Sarraut, this analysis suggests the degree to which certain rhetorical tactics penetrate the popular as well as official colonial and postcolonial discourse. 

Finally, Spurr considers the question: Can the language itself—and with it, Western forms of interpretation--be freed of the exercise of colonial power? This ambitious book is an answer of sorts. By exposing the rhetoric of empire, Spurr begins to loosen its hold over discourse about—and between—different cultures.

Trans-Atlantic Parochialism

Citations

Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture (review)

The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918

Bibliography

Submerged Captivities

Plausible Deniability

References

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation

On the Postcolony

On the Postcolony

The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration

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