Read more
The papers presented here offer a major challenge to previously conceived ideas about issues like slavery, racism, ethnic relations, nationalism, and cultural identity generating responses, critiques, revisions, counterarguments, and new perspectives. This volume is not only meant to address important matters of the past but also of the present and future as racism, ethnic relations, and cultural identity - with the attendant issues of human rights, freedom, and emancipation - will assume an ever-increasing significance in our globalised but ethically, socially, and culturally divided world. The volume is subdivided into three sections: "Racism and Nationalism" containing papers dealing with issues of racism and nationalism in a broader context, "Slavery: From Past to Present" exploring the concept of slavery in different literary genres and historical periods, "Cultural Identity and Ethnic Relations" dealing with cultural memory, nationalism, and relations between cultural and ethnic groups.
List of contents
Contents: Wolfgang Zach/Ulrich Pallua: Introduction - Wolfgang Benz: The Construction of Modern Antisemitism: From Race Ideology to Genocide - Lucy Collins: «Where are we heading?» Fred D'Aguiar and the Poetics of Race - Yasue Arimitsu: Nation and Literature: Literary Possibilities in a Multicultural Society - Dave Gunning: Ethnicity Politics in Contemporary Black British and British Asian Literature - Thomas Spielbüchler: Ethnicity as a Stumbling Block in Postcolonial Africa - Claude Couture: Racism, Nationalism and Literature: the Case of French Canada - Wolfgang Zach/Ulrich Pallua/Adrian Knapp/Cynthia Rauth: Slavery and Literature: The Abolition Period in Britain. Main Results of a Research Project - Anthony Barthelemy: Fictions of Benevolence: Huckleberry Finn and the Residual Cruelty of Slavery - Donathan Lawrence Brown: In Defense of Slavery & Negative Difference: George Fitzhugh and Negro Slavery - Mary Niall Mitchell: They Called Her «Ida May»: Truth, Fiction, and Race After the Fugitive Slave Act - Andreas Oberprantacher: Bare Life Sovereignty, Biopower and Modern Slavery in Contemporary Political Theory - Andrew Milne-Skinner: Liverpool's Slavery Museum: a Blessing or a Blight? - Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan: Interculturality and (Post)colonialism: Ethnicity, Nationalism, Cultural Memory and Identity - Brigitte Glaser: Crossing Borders: Interracial Relationships in English Colonial Fiction - Laurie R. Cohen: The 'Other' Image of Women Antimilitarists, or Watching Women Duel - Rüdiger Ahrens: Ethical Norms and Ethnic Frictions in the Novels of J. M. Coetzee - Andrea Strolz: A Map to the Middle Passage as Heterotopia: Cultural Memory in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999).
About the author
Wolfgang Zach, Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Innsbruck since 1994, is the Head of the English Department. His main areas of research include «Literatures in English» (esp. transcultural aspects, national stereotypes, racism, slavery, globalization), Irish Literature, English Literature of the 18th Century, and Literary Theory.
Ulrich Pallua is a project collaborator at the University of Innsbruck, currently writing his post-doctoral thesis on «Drama and the British Abolition Period, 1696-1838». His main areas of research include literature about slavery, postcolonial literature, and contemporary literature about Africa.
