English Literature Research Areas
Transnational & Postcolonial Literature
From the English Department:
This area is committed to the study of literatures emerging from populations and communities that traverse national boundaries, as well as geographical areas that have been shaped in formative ways by the historical experiences of imperialism/colonialism. We offer courses in the areas of empire and imperialism, Black Atlantic, transatlantic, inter-American, Asia Pacific Rim, South Asian, African, Caribbean, Chicana/o-Latina/o, and first peoples literatures and cultures.
Faculty who teach these courses are concerned to explore issues such as: cultural flows and migrations, exile and diaspora, nationalisms and sexualities, the relationship of minorities to national culture, the emergence of national and transnational religious fundamentalisms, women's struggles against fundamentalism, and various forms of creolizations, secularisms, syncretisms, and cosmopolitanisms.
Collections and Companions
Click on the "i" info icon after each book title to view a brief description about the following books from the University of Iowa Libraries' catalog:
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Indigenous Societies in the Post-Colonial World
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This edited book provides perceptions on “indigeneity” through a global perspective. Emphasizing the contemporary and postcolonial debates on indigenous, it delves into diversity and dissonance within indigenous concepts. Through its chapters based on theoretical and empirical studies from Asian, African, and American perceptions of indigenous societies, it brings out complexity, resilience, and response of “indigenous” in the post-colonial global society.
ISBN: 9789811987229Publication Date: 2023 -
Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture
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This open access edited collection explores various aspects of how oceanic im/ mobilities have been framed and articulated in the literary and cultural imagination. It covers the entanglements of maritime mobility and immobility as they are articulated and problematized in selected literature and cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. In particular, it brings cultural mobility studies into conversation with the maritime and oceanic humanities. The contributors examine the interface between the traditional Eurocentric imagination of the sea as romantic and metaphorical, and the materiality of the sea as a deathbed for racialized and illegalized humans as well as non-human populations
ISBN: 9783030912741Publication Date: 2023-03-26 -
Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration
"Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement" is a collection of thirteen chapters that explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with Jose Marti and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Diaz. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsiders to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries. The chapters consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic and national migrations. "
ISBN: 9781282909847Publication Date: 2010-01-01 -
The Empire Writes Back
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The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language. This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.
ISBN: 9780415280204Publication Date: 2002-10-25 -
The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature
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For two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.
ISBN: 9781107448384Publication Date: 2017-02-13 -
Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature
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This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging.nbsp;In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interestnbsp;students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.
ISBN: 9780415735582Publication Date: 2014-09-16 -
Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century
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This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America's most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.
ISBN: 9783110480818Publication Date: 2018-06-11 -
Chapter 9: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies, and Indigenous Literature in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
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The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism provides a broad survey of the longstanding relationship between literature and the environment. The moment for such an offering is opportune in many respects: multiple environmental crises are increasingly inescapable at both transnational and local levels; the role of the humanities in addition to technology and politics is increasingly recognized as central for exploring and finding solutions; and the subject of ecocriticism has reached a kind of critical mass, both within its Anglo-American heartlands and beyond. From its origins in the study of American Nature Writing and British Romanticism, ecocriticism has developed along numerous theoretical, historical, cultural and geographical axes, the most contemporary and exciting of which will be represented in the Handbook. The contributors include eminent founders of the field, including Cheryll Glotfelty and Jonathan Bate, a number of key "second-wave" ecocritics, and the best up-and-coming scholars. Topics covered include: Green Shakespeare-the Bard's subversive uses of the pastoral; John Clare's sacred relationship with the land; Thoreau's profound political passion; the natural landscape as symbol of postcolonial resistance in works by Lessing, Naipaul, and Coetzee; the relation between feminism and environmentalism; language and the concept of biosemiotics; and concerns over pollution and toxicity in films like Erin Brockovitch, Michael Clayton, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
ISBN: 9780199742929Publication Date: 2014-08-05 -
Captivating Westerns
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Tracing the transnational influences of what has been known as a uniquely American genre, "the Western," Susan Kollin's Captivating Westerns analyzes key moments in the history of multicultural encounters between the Middle East and the American West. In particular, the book examines how experiences of contact and conflict have played a role in defining the western United States as a crucial American landscape. Kollin interprets the popular western as a powerful national narrative and presents the cowboy hero as a captivating figure who upholds traditional American notions of freedom and promise, not just in the region but across the globe. Captivating Westerns revisits popular uses of the western plot and cowboy hero in understanding American global power in the post-9/11 period. Although various attempts to build a case for the war on terror have referenced this quintessential American region, genre, and hero, they have largely overlooked the ways in which these celebrated spaces, icons, and forms, rather than being uniquely American, are instead the result of numerous encounters with and influences from the Middle East. By tracing this history of contact, encounter, and borrowing, this study expands the scope of transnational studies of the cowboy and the western and in so doing discloses the powerful and productive influence of the Middle East on the American West.
ISBN: 9780803226999Publication Date: 2015-10-01 -
Race in Translation
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While the term "culture wars" often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones--the U.S., France, and Brazil. Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning "multiculturalism" and "identity politics." At once a report from various "fronts" in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.
ISBN: 9780814798379Publication Date: 2012-05-28 -
Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture
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Explores postcolonial discourse from the standpoint of feminism and writers in minority languages. This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell'Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi's analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.
ISBN: 9780791462010Publication Date: 2004-11-18
Contextual Resources
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Empire Online This link opens in a new windowThis resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and it's theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.
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India, Raj & Empire This link opens in a new windowDrawing upon the rich and diverse manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland this resource will be ofvalue to all those teaching or researching into the History of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947.
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Colonial State Papers This link opens in a new windowColonial State Papers provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
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British Online Archives: Colonial and Missionary Records This link opens in a new windowIncludes the following collections: African Blue Books, 1821-1953; Early colonial and missionary records from West Africa; Papers of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1694-1709; Universities' Mission to Central Africa; Papers relating to the Jamaican estates of the Goulburn family of Betchworth House; Records of the Committee on Women's Work, 1861 - 1967; South American Missionary Society records, 1844-1919; Archives of the Associates of Dr Bray to 1900; Indian papers of Colonel Clive and Brigadier-General Carnac, 1752-1774; Indian papers of the 4th Earl of Minto; Papers of Sir Mark Sykes, 1879-1919: the Sykes-Picot Agreement & the Middle East; and United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) records for the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, South Asia, and West Indies.
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Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 This link opens in a new windowConfidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 covers the whole of the modern period of European colonization of Africa: from coastal trading in the early nineteenth century, through the Conference of Berlin of 1884 and the subsequent Scramble for Africa, to the abuses of the Congo Free State, fights against tropical disease, Italy’s defeat by the Abyssinians, World War II, apartheid in South Africa and colonial moves towards independence. The Confidential Print series, issued by the British Government between c. 1820 and 1970, originated out of a need to preserve the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Documents range from single-page letters or telegrams to comprehensive dispatches, investigative reports and texts of treaties.
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Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new windowMulti-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally beginning in spring 2012. The content is sourced from the world’s preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. Collections I - XII.
Suggested Terms for Searching InfoHawk+ or Databases
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Decolonization in literature
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Caribbean literature -- criticism
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Postcolonialism in literature
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Colonies in literature
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Imperialism in literature
Call numbers being with PJ (Oriental Languages and Literature), PK (Indo-Iranian Languages and Literature), PN (General Literature), PQ (French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Literature) and PS (American Literature) 3515 are located on the West Side of the 4th Floor.
Call numbers beginning with PS3517 (American Literature), PT (Dutch, Afrikaans, Scandinavian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish Literature) are located on the West side of the second floor.
Databases
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African Writers Series (Jan 2021 now found in Literature Online) This link opens in a new windowAS OF JAN 2021 CONTENT NOW FOUND ONLY IN PROQUEST LITERATURE ONLINE ONLY; The publication of this historic collection in online form restores access to a substantial body of literature, much of which is out of print and only accessible in specialist research libraries, opening up new possibilities for scholarship and teaching in the fields of African and literary studies.
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Caribbean Literature This link opens in a new windowCaribbean literature is a searchable collection of poetry and fiction produced in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the titles selected are numerous rare and hard-to-find works written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages. Future releases will also feature journals, reference works, and interviews with key writers. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of classic, rare, and contemporary literature. The database currently has over 7,000 pages.
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Latino Literature This link opens in a new windowThe majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish; more than 6,000 pages of bilingual text; and many Spanglish works. There are approximately 60,000 pages of fiction; 32,000 pages of poetry; and 450 plays, 200 of which are previously unpublished
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Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) This link opens in a new windowRECOMMEND USING CHROME; This on-line version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains more than 410,000 records on all subjects (especially humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.
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JSTOR (Journal Storage) This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each titles. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below
Note that this database comprises mostly back issues: for most titles the JSTOR database does NOT include full text of the most recent 3 to 5 years.
Journals
Click on the "i" info icon after the title to view a brief description about the following literary journals:
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ariel: A Review of International English Literature ariel is a journal focused on the critical and scholarly study of literatures in English around the world. The journal publishes original articles in postcolonial studies exploring colonial power and resistance as well as innovative scholarship on globalization, new forms and sites of exploitation, colonization, and decolonization in an age of transnational capitalism, displacement and diaspora studies, global ecocriticism, cultural and cross-cultural translation, and related areas.
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Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa is published bi-annually by Routledge. Current Writing focuses on recent writing and re-publication of texts on southern African and (from a 'southern' perspective) commonwealth and/or postcolonial literature and literary-culture. Works of the past and near-past must be assessed and evaluated through the lens of current reception.
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MELUS: Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Founded in 1973, MELUS endeavors to expand the definition of new, more broadly conceived US literature through the study and teaching of Latino, Native American, African American, Asian and Pacific American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works, their authors, and their cultural contexts.
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Studies in American Indian Literatures Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) is the only journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. With a wide scope of scholars and creative contributors, this journal is on the cutting edge of activity in the field. SAIL invites the submission of scholarly, critical pedagogical, and theoretical manuscripts focused on any aspect of American Indian literatures as well as the submission of bibliographical essays, review essays, and interviews. SAIL defines "literatures" broadly to include all written, spoken, and visual texts created by Native peoples.
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing The Journal of Postcolonial Writing is an academic journal devoted to the study of literary and cultural texts produced in various postcolonial locations around the world. It explores the interface between postcolonial writing, postcolonial and related critical theories, and the economic, political and cultural forces that shape contemporary global developments. In addition to criticism focused on literary fiction, drama and poetry, we publish theoretically-informed articles on a variety of genres and media, including film, performance and other cultural practices, which address issues of relevance to postcolonial studies.
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English Studies in Africa Since it was established in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1958, English Studies in Africa has published a number of key interventions in literary studies. The journal has emphasized, as its name attests, the study of world literature in English within African contexts, at the same time as it set about promoting the study of African literature worldwide...English Studies in Africa is unique in its willingness to publish articles on any literary, educational or language topic that the editors adjudge will be of interest to its diverse readership
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Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies From the Soninke legend behind its name, “wagadu” has become the metaphor for women’s roles within families, communities, locally and globally. Wagadu has come to be the symbol of the sacrifice women continue to make for a better world. Wagadu has become the metaphor for the role of women in the family, community, country, and planet.
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Journal of West Indian Literature THE JOURNAL OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE has been published twice-yearly by Literatures in English, University of the West Indies since 1986. It reflects our continued commitment to provide a regional and extra-regional forum for the dissemination and discussion of Caribbean literary and artistic culture.
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Journal of Transnational American studies The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) is a peer-reviewed online journal that seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary study of American cultures in a transnational context. Founded in 2009 by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Takayuki Tatsumi, and Alfred Hornung, JTAS functions as an open-access forum for Americanists in the global academic community, where scholars are increasingly interrogating borders both within and outside the nation and focusing on the multiple intersections and exchanges that flow across those borders. JTAS is a new critical conduit that seeks to bring together innovative transnational work from diverse but often disconnected sites in the US and abroad.
Web Resources
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Digital Library of the CaribbeanIn essence, dLOC is a collection of collections and is known for its partner collections, its Caribbean Maps and Caribbean Newspaper collections. Our user community includes scholars, students, teachers, independent researchers, and indeed anyone with a curiosity about the Caribbean. Together, the dLOC community works to promote and perform educational outreach in Caribbean Studies, to develop new works of digital scholarship, and to pursue other research and teaching initiatives.
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Early Caribbean Digital Archive (Northeastern University)An open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images. Texts include travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries that have not been brought together before as a single collection focused on the Caribbean. Plantation slavery and settler colonialism are defining aspects of the early Caribbean—both sit at the origin of the modern capitalist world. The texts and images collected here tell the story of European imperial domination, and of the enslaved African and Indigenous American people whose lives, labor, and land shaped the culture and development of the Atlantic world.
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Voice of the Shuttle: Other Literatures in EnglishThe Voice of the Shuttle began in late 1994 as an introduction to the Web for humanists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. VoS became publicly accessible on March 21, 1995, when the Humanitas server on which it resided opened to global Web access. From its origin to October, 1999, VoS stayed at the same address on the Humanitas server. It grew in that period to over 70 pages of links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet. Its mission has been to provide a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media. VoS emphasizes both primary and secondary (or theoretical) resources, and defines its audience as people who have something to learn from a higher-education, professional approach to the humanities.
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Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American LiteratureIn an age of globalisation, it has become increasingly difficult to characterise the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders. Many of the titles in this 34 book series are available in the UI Libraries! The series seeks to provide more cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives on American literature, by offering an in-depth analyses of American writers and writing literature by internationally based scholars critical studies that foster awareness of the ways in which American writing engages with writers and cultures north and south of its territorial boundaries, as well as with the writers and cultures across the Atlantic and Pacific.