Overview
- Asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, Cuba, and the UK, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives.
- Offers new analysis of local literary marketplaces: Post-revolutionary Cuban publishing, the Onitsha Market in Nigeria, Black consciousness bookshops in Britain, and relocated bookshops and libraries during the Partition of India.
- Demonstrates that books and reading offer means of resistance and recovery in postcolonial contexts, and that postcolonial literature foregrounds the significance of literature and art.
Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature (NCWL)
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About this book
This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway. This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“In this remarkable, stimulating and urgent book, Jenni Ramone superbly underscores the power of reading to contest authority’s demands. Insisting upon the local as resistant, unruly and disruptive, Ramone pursues the practice of ‘located’ reading as both a significant literary preoccupation and a meaningful tool of political consciousness-raising. Rigorously interdisciplinary and persistently ground-breaking, Ramone’s study challenges at last the tired cliche that the global literary marketplace has effectively defused postcolonial literatures’ dissident designs.” (John McLeod, University of Leeds, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jenni Ramone is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and co-director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her recent publications include The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing (2017), Salman Rushdie and Translation (2013), and Postcolonial Theories (2011). She specializes in global and postcolonial literatures, the literary marketplace, and literature and maternity, through frameworks of translation, spatial, and architectural theories.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace
Book Subtitle: Located Reading
Authors: Jenni Ramone
Series Title: New Comparisons in World Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56934-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-56933-2Published: 07 August 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-84916-1Due: 21 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-56934-9Published: 06 August 2020
Series ISSN: 2634-6095
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6109
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 261
Topics: Postcolonial/World Literature