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Empty treasure chests dumped from departed ships is a quotation taken from David Dabydeen's poem The Old Map in which the hope of a new world is green but green symbolizes also the gangrene of the sailors. Such rather unsavory paradoxes can be found in the works of contemporary (post)postcolonial writers, who engage in a dialogue with literary history while actively re-shaping contemporary culture. Far from seeking easy reconciliations, the contemporary (post)postcolonial writers rewrite the colonial experiences in relation to art and literary works. The theme of this volume are the works by and about David Dabydeen, a Guianese British writer, poet and literary scholar, whose efforts have always been directed toward re-creating the lives forever lost; those of nameless slaves and coolies of the West Indies. His inspiration, in turn were, among others, the paintings of William Hogarth and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Accordingly, the papers collected in this book address the question of (post)colonialism in a contemporary (post)postcolonial reality.
List of contents
Contents: Liliana Sikorska: David Dabydeen: The man behind the literary success - David Dabydeen: West Indian writers in Britain - Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk: (Post)colonial - multicultural - global. Literature/culture encountering successive challenges - Dominika Buchowska: Reshaping post-colonial identity, challenging caricatures: The art of Chris Ofili - Anna Izabela Ciechon: New maps in V.S. Naipaul's Half a life and Magic seeds - Joanna Jarzab: A modern Noble Savage - The deconstruction of an eighteenth-century idea of a man of nature in David Dabydeen's Disappearance - Monika Szuba: Re-examining the past, renegotiating identities: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) - Liliana Sikorska: Looking at the Light: An Interview with Sorayya Khan.
About the author
Liliana Sikorska, PhD in 1994, D. Litt in 1996; professor of English Literature; visiting scholar at the University of Florida, Brown University and the University of California Los Angeles, visiting professor at the American University, Washington D.C.; Fulbright Professor at Cornell 2010; author and co-author of numerous books on medieval English and Irish literature; head of the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, School of English at Adam Mickiewcz University, Poznan (Poland); head of the Department of English Literature and Culture of English Speaking Countries at the Academy of Management, Warsaw.
