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Into our labours : work and literary form in world literature
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Lazarus, Neil (2017) Into our labours : work and literary form in world literature. In: Ramsey-Kurz, Helga and Kennedy, Melissa, (eds.) Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction. Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English (201). Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, pp. 15-37. ISBN 9789004352605
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Official URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/uncommon-wealths-in...
Abstract
Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction engages urgently with wealth, testing current assumptions of inequality in order to push beyond reductive contemporary readings of the gaping abyss between rich and poor. Shifting away from longstanding debates in postcolonial criticism focused on poverty and abjection, the book marshals fresh perspectives on material, spiritual, and cultural prosperity as found in the literatures of formerly colonized spaces.
The chapters ‘follow the money’ to illuminate postcolonial fiction’s awareness of the ambiguities of ‘wealth’, acquired under colonial capitalism and transmuted in contemporary neoliberalism. They weigh idealistic projections of individual and collective wellbeing against the stark realities of capital accumulation and excessive consumption. They remain alert to the polysemy suggested by “Uncommon Wealths,” both registering the imperial economic urge to ensure common wealth and referencing the unconventional or non-Western, the unusual, even fictitious and contrasting privately coveted and exclusively owned wealth with visions of a shared good.
Arranged into four sections centred on aesthetics, injustice, indigeneity, and cultural location, the individual chapters show how writers of postcolonial fiction, including Aravind Adiga, Amit Chau-dhuri, Anita Desai, Patricia Grace, Mohsin Hamid, Stanley Gazemba, Tomson Highway, Lebogang Matseke, Zakes Mda, Michael Ondaatje, Kim Scott, and Alexis Wright, employ prosperity and affluence as a lens through which to re-examine issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and family, the cultural value of heritage, land, and social cohesion, and such conflicting imperatives as economic growth, individual fulfilment, social and environmental responsibility, and just distribution.
| Item Type: | Book Item | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism | ||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc., Formalism (Literary analysis), Labor in literature, Work in literature, Literature and history, Literature and society | ||||
| Series Name: | Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English | ||||
| Publisher: | Brill Rodopi | ||||
| Place of Publication: | Leiden; Boston | ||||
| ISBN: | 9789004352605 | ||||
| Book Title: | Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction | ||||
| Editor: | Ramsey-Kurz, Helga and Kennedy, Melissa | ||||
| Official Date: | November 2017 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Number: | 201 | ||||
| Number of Pages: | 323 | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 15-37 | ||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 13 December 2017 | ||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 30 November 2019 | ||||
| Related URLs: |
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