Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight.
Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways.
Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.
Bringing together thirty-seven essays that have helped define the study of colonial and postcolonial cultures, this expansive and thoughtfully organized anthology offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of this rapidly developing field.
Canonical articles, most unexcerpted, explore postcolonialism’s key themes—power and knowledge—while articles by contemporary scholars expand the discipline to include discussions of the discovery of the New World, Native American and indigenous identities in Latin America and the Pacific, settler colonies in Africa and Australia, English colonialism in Ireland, and feminism in Nigeria and Egypt. The inclusion of a broad sampling of histories and theories attests to multiple, even competing postcolonialisms, while the skillful organization of the volume provides a useful map of the field in terms of recognizable patterns, shared family resemblances, and common genealogies.
The book is divided into nine sections: Ideologies of Imperialism, The Critique of Colonial Discourse, The Politics of Language and Literary Studies, Nationalisms and Nativisms, Hybrid Identities, Gender and Sexualities, Reading the Subaltern, Comparative (Post)colonialisms, and Globalization and Postcoloniality. Detailed introductions to each section serve to develop key themes, encourage debate, and contextualize the wide-ranging voices that contribute to the topic.
The most cogent and teachable collection of postcolonial texts yet compiled, this anthology is equally suitable for undergraduate students and seasoned scholars.
This volume offers the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of Puerto Rican poetry available in English. It includes the work of sixty-four poets, as well as many previously inaccessible selections from Puerto Rico's tradition of popular verse forms—coplas, décimas, bombas—produced by anonymous writers. All are presented in English, contextualized and individually introduced by Roberto Márquez, a distinguished translator and literary scholar.
Book I, “Before Columbus and After, 1400–1820,” focuses on the foundational origins of Puerto Rican poetry and the clash of competing visions embodied in the rich and heterogeneous corpus of anonymous popular verse forms. Book II, “The Creole Matrix: Notions of Nation, 1821–1950s,” concentrates on the period in which a distinctively Puerto Rican consciousness emerged and the island's subsequent experience as a U. S. colony in the decades after the Spanish-Cuban-American War up to formal establishment of Commonwealth status. Books III and IV are devoted, respectively, to the era of insular “Critique, Revolt, and Renewal” in the mid-twentieth century, and to the “New Creoles, New Definitions” that developed in the late twentieth century, including the distinct and parallel growth of Puerto Rican poetry in the mainland United States.
In addition to a general introduction and concise biographical profiles of each poet, Márquez provides a detailed “Chronology” of the history of the island that has shaped the poets and informed their work. The resulting volume is a major contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Puerto Rican literature and the heterogeneous society in which it has been produced.
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