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Aus dem Inhalt
Aus dem Inhalt:
Introduction
Heike Paul: The Rhetoric and Romance of Mobility: Euro-American Nomadism Past and Present
(Abstract)
Karsten Fitz: Employing the Strategy of Transculturation: Colonial Migration and
Postcolonial Interpretation in Diane Glancy’s Pushing the Bear (Abstract)
Katja Sarkowsky: A Decolonial (Rite of) Passage: Decolonization, Migration and
Gender Construction in Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (Abstract)
Christine Matzke: Musical Passages: Colonial and Post-Colonial Readings of West African
Music (Abstract)
Susanne Mühleisen: From Mother Tongue to Metaphor of New ‘Imagined Communities’:
Creole and Its Migrant Transformations (Abstract)
Mita Banerjee: “Hold Down the Furniture”: Rushdie’s Postcolonialism and
the Diseases of Fixity (Abstract)
Forum:
Theories of American Culture: Comment on Helmbrecht Breinig’s Review of Winfried Fluck’s Das
Kulturelle Imaginäre (Winfried Fluck)
Buchbesprechungen
-
Manfred
Görlach. Even More Englishes. Studies 1996-1997. (Uwe Carls)
-
Bjørg Bækken.
Word Order Patterns in Early Modern
English. (Claudia Claridge)
-
Rainer
Schulze, ed. Making Meaningful Choices in English: On Dimensions, Perspectives,
Methodology and Evidence. (Roswitha
Fischer)
-
Ansgar Nünning,
ed. Metzler-Lexikon Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie. (Monika Fludernik)
-
Ansgar Nünning und Andreas H. Jucker. Orientierung
Anglistik/Amerikanistik. (Christa Jansohn)
-
John
Pier, ed. Recent Trends in Narratological Research. (Antje Kley)
-
Dirk Grossklaus. Natürliche Religion und aufgeklärte
Gesellschaft: Shaftesburys Verhältnis zu den Cambridge Platonists. (Marion
Spies)
-
Anne-Marie
Scholz. ‘An Orgy of Propriety’: Jane Austen and the Emergence and Legacy of
the Female Author in America 1826-1926. (Renate
Brosch)
-
Tim Hilton. John
Ruskin: The Later Years. (Stephen
Prickett)
-
Petra Deistler.
Tradition und Transformation – der
fiktionale Dialog mit dem viktorianischen Zeitalter im (post)modernen
historischen Roman in Grossbritannien. (Julika
Griem)
-
Gudula Moritz.
Im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Deutschland im britischen Roman des ausgehenden
20. Jahrhundert. (Brigitte Glaser)
-
Rudolf
Freiburg and Jan Schnitker, eds. ‘Do
you consider yourself a postmodern author?’ Interviews with Contemporary
English Writers. (Tobias
Döring)
-
Thomas
J. Lyon, ed. The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature.
-
Mattias
Bolkéus Blom. Stories of Old: The Imagined West and the Crisis of Historical
Symbology in the 1970s. (Peter
Bischoff)
-
Paul Smith,
ed. New Essays on
Hemingway's Short Fiction. (Carmen
Birkle)
-
Heike Paul. Mapping
Migration: Women's Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s
to the 1990s. (Mita
Banerjee)
-
Annette Schlichter. Die Figur der verrückten Frau:
Weiblicher Wahnsinn als Kategorie der feministischen Repräsentationskritik. (Catrin
Gersdorf)
-
Eleanor
Byrne and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. (Julia Leyda)
-
Martine Hennard
Dutheil de la Rochère. Origin
and Originality in Rushdies’s Fiction. (Christoph Houswitschka)
-
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Klassiker der Kinder- und
Jugendliteratur. Ein internationales Lexikon. (Christiane Bimberg)
Heike Paul, The Rhetoric and Romance of Mobility: Euro-American Nomadism
Past and Present
This essay investigates figures of mobility, more specifically the nomad/nomadic
subject, in an US-American context. Tracing the precarious presence of this
figure in 17th century early American colonial discourse as well as
19th century US-American imperial romanticism sheds new light on
contemporary cultural theory. Linking the underlying ideological frameworks
decipherable in each instance, the essay points to re-incarnations of
romanticized notions of mobility currently to be found in minority discourse and
feminist as well as postcolonial theories. While these returns often come in the
guise of a vocabulary of (prospective) liberation and subversion, they do
conjure up scenarios of past oppression.
Karsten Fitz, Employing
the Strategy of Transculturation: Colonial Migration and Postcolonial
Interpretation in Diane Glancy’s Pushing
the Bear
This essay examines transculturation as strategy of negotiating history and
culture in Diane Glancy’s novel Pushing the Bear. Instead of depicting
the tragedy of the Trail of Tears – and thus giving prominence, once again, to
a history of suffering of American Indian peoples – Glancy describes how the
Cherokee cope with their historical burden on a daily basis in words, thoughts,
and stories. Against notions of cultural pollution which still loom large when
dealing with American Indian histories and cultures, I consider this novel an
example of how a tribal culture, which has been adapting to change, uses its
transcultural abilities in order to survive and begin again in a different place.
Katja
Sarkowsky,
A Decolonial (Rite of) Passage: Decolonization, Migration and Gender Construction
in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash
Offering a concept of ‘decolonial’ reading as an alternative to the
theoretical and terminological difficulties posed by postcolonial literary
theories as an interpretative framework for Native American literature, this
essay analyzes the importance of migration and gender for the political agenda
put forward in Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash (1985). The spiritual
connection to the land, often coded as ‘feminine,’ and the move away from
the land and what it stands for as a negative counterpoint plays an important
role in many contemporary Native American texts such as Slash. However, I
argue that the novel deploys this dichotomy of rootedness/migration in a number
of highly ambivalent ways. Central for my decolonial reading of the text is the
question of how migration, cultural identity, and gender intertwine. By
demonstrating how the women with whom the protagonist is involved are
constructed as embodiments of the dichotomy of rootedness/migration, I hope to
illustrate the text’s inherent tensions and ambivalences that ultimately also
plague the decolonial agenda of the novel, that is the search for culturally
appropriate forms of resistance and decolonization.
Christine
Matzke,
Musical Passages: Colonial and Post-Colonial Readings of West African Music
A critical exploration into African music and its textual representation can
illuminate discursive operations of colonialism and the subtleties of cultural
resistance. It can also illustrate that phenomena of post-colonial migration are
not necessarily located in, or relate to, the former imperials centres in the
West. This article attempts to trace passages of West African Music as paradigms
of post-/colonial peregrinations through an analysis of ethnomusicological
writings. Drawing attention to the ambiguities of anthropological
representations, it first demonstrates how accounts of indigenous music helped
construct a colonial Other as an intrinsic element of imperial discourse before
investigating ‘hybrid’ musical styles which had the potential of
destabilising colonial identity formation. Finally, it elucidates how West
African music was ‘re-Africanised’ by the African Diaspora in a
‘reversal’ of the middle passage, thus attesting to the dynamics of
migratory culture.
Susanne Mühleisen,
From Mother Tongue to Metaphor of New ‘Imagined Communities’: Creole and Its
Migrant Transformations
This paper examines linguistic changes in relationship to identity formation of
three generations of West Indian presence in Britain. Caribbean English-lexicon
Creole, the mother tongue of the majority of first generation immigrants has
undergone a number of transformations in its five decades of usage in the urban
centres of Britain: (1) linguistic transformations, from a distinct Jamaican,
Trinidadian or Guyanese Creole to a highly variable ‘London Jamaican’; (2)
changes in its functions, from a referential to a symbolic usage; and (3) shifts
in the group of users, from West Indians with genealogical ties to include white
British and Asian youths in performative acts of identity. Creole, it is argued
here, transcends the traditional idea of the language/nation relationship. With
its many different voices and new alignments Creole has become a metaphor for
new ‘imagined communities’.
Mita
Banerjee,
“Hold Down the Furniture”: Rushdie’s Postcolonialism and the Diseases of Fixity
The following paper starts out from the assumption that, in its debunking of
racist exclusivity and cultural purism, postcolonial theory has in fact also
created its own Other. As hybridity and syncretism have been elevated onto the
pedestal of normativity, all forms of cultural belonging have concomitantly
become suspect. Curiously enough, this suspicion, I would argue, is a property
of postcolonial theory as much as of postcolonial fiction. Tracing the loathing
of non-syncretism propounded by literary theory to Salman Rushdie’s fictional
politics, I propose that it is Rushdie’s female characters who have become the
epitome of pre-postmodern/pre-postcolonial certainties. The fact that these
women should be portrayed as unappetizingly hysterical thus emerges as a
fictional punishment for their failure to comply with a universal rootlessness
that both theory and fiction stipulate as essential.
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