Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War Two, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. Dohra Ahmad adds to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the twentieth century, Ahmad shows, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts-novels, poems, contemplative essays-in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Landscapes of Hope goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W.E B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.
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ONE: DEVELOPING NATIONS; TWO: A PERIODICAL NATION; THREE: WORLDS OF COLOR
In this striking new configuration, Ahmad combines theoretical inquiry into utopian writing with historical attention to exiled Indians in America. The result transforms our view of writing in the U.S. from Bellamy and Howells to Du Bois and Richard Wright.
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"In this striking new configuration, Ahmad combines theoretical inquiry into utopian writing with historical attention to exiled Indians in America. The result transforms our view of writing in the U.S. from Bellamy and Howells to Du Bois and Richard Wright."-Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
"In Landscapes of Hope Dohra Ahmad transforms our whole conceptualization of anti-colonial writing. She shows how, in developing transnational forms of resistance, diasporic and exiled activists simultaneously crossed the boundaries of writing itself. Their utopic visions of their people released from the burden of colonial rule informed their fiction, their periodicals and their speeches alike. Ahmad brilliantly reconceptualizes the very scope of
anti-colonial writing and asks us to rethink the ways in which we have imagined it in the past. Landscapes of Hope marks a major contribution to postcolonial studies and opens the door to its future."-Robert J. C.
Young, New York University
"With its nuanced exploration of the parallels and encounters between Indian nationalists in the US and African American internationalists, Landscapes of Hope is an important contribution to the history of Afro-Asian radicalism. Anti-colonialism, Ahmad reminds us, emerges in the "realm of the conditional": it finds its angle of critique and its redemptive vision in utopianism. Her remarkably thorough portrait of Lajpat Rai's New York-based journal
Young India also reminds us that anti-colonialism is contrapuntal and cross-diasporic: never a single nationalist discourse emerging in isolation, but instead an interweaving of struggles that take shape crucially
in view of one another."-Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University
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Selling point: Presents a new perspective on anti-colonial writing in America, uniquely situating it in the category of utopian fiction
Selling point: Draws on original, archival research to shed light on the collaborations between anti-colonial activists and African-American leaders and artists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins
Selling point: Illuminates the highly understudied history of Indian nationalism in the United States
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Dohra Ahmad teaches postcolonial literature at St. John's University. She is the editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (W. W. Norton, 2007); her essays have appeared in English Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
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Selling point: Presents a new perspective on anti-colonial writing in America, uniquely situating it in the category of utopian fiction
Selling point: Draws on original, archival research to shed light on the collaborations between anti-colonial activists and African-American leaders and artists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins
Selling point: Illuminates the highly understudied history of Indian nationalism in the United States
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780195332766
Publisert
2009
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press Inc
Vekt
522 gr
Høyde
157 mm
Bredde
234 mm
Dybde
28 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
264
Forfatter