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85 books match the query 'Literature and history' and 4 start with a

cover of Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds

Africanfuturism

African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds

Kimberly Cleveland

Ohio University Press, 2024

In the past few decades, Western studies of Afrofuturism have grown to encompass examples deriving from multiple sites across the diaspora, as well as from the African continent. However, an increasing number of Africans and Africanists have voiced their concerns about grouping African work under the larger umbrella of Afrofuturism without distinction and have emphasized the need to investigate the differences between African American and African production. This book offers an introduction to Africanfuturism—a body of African speculative works that is distinguishable from, albeit related to, US-based Afrofuturism. Kimberly Cleveland uses Africanfuturism as an intellectual lens to explore works that embody combinations of possibilities, challenges, and concerns related to what lies ahead for the continent and its peoples. This book highlights twenty-first-century film, video, painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, novels, short stories, comic books, song lyrics, and architecture by African creatives of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, genders, and generations. Cleveland analyzes the ideas and opinions of African intellectuals and cultural producers, combining interviews with historical research. Each chapter features one of Africanfuturism’s most common themes: space and time exploration, creation of worlds, technology and the digital divide, Sankofa and remix, and mythmaking. This investigation of Africanfuturism is geared toward students, academics, and Afrofuturism enthusiasts, and its included discussion questions facilitate classroom use. The book illuminates Africa’s place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy and how Africanfuturist work builds on the continent’s own traditions of speculative expression. Because these creative works disrupt the history of Western domination in Africa, Cleveland also connects Africanfuturism with the process of decolonization and addresses specific ways in which African creatives (re)center indigenous beliefs, strategies, and approaches in their production. Africanfuturism encourages both imaginative possibilities and potential real-world outcomes, highlighting the rich contributions of Africans to the vision of future worlds.
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cover of After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas

After Spanish Rule

Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas

Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds.

Duke University Press, 2003

Insisting on the critical value of Latin American histories for recasting theories of postcolonialism, After Spanish Rule is the first collection of essays by Latin Americanist historians and anthropologists to engage postcolonial debates from the perspective of the Americas. These essays extend and revise the insights of postcolonial studies in diverse Latin American contexts, ranging from the narratives of eighteenth-century travelers and clerics in the region to the status of indigenous intellectuals in present-day Colombia. The editors argue that the construction of an array of singular histories at the intersection of particular colonialisms and nationalisms must become the critical project of postcolonial history-writing.

Challenging the universalizing tendencies of postcolonial theory as it has developed in the Anglophone academy, the contributors are attentive to the crucial ways in which the histories of Latin American countries—with their creole elites, hybrid middle classes, subordinated ethnic groups, and complicated historical relationships with Spain and the United States—differ from those of other former colonies in the southern hemisphere. Yet, while acknowledging such differences, the volume suggests a host of provocative, critical connections to colonial and postcolonial histories around the world.

Contributors
Thomas Abercrombie
Shahid Amin
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Peter Guardino
Andrés Guerrero
Marixa Lasso
Javier Morillo-Alicea
Joanne Rappaport
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
Mark Thurner

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cover of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s

After the End of History

American Fiction in the 1990s

Cohe, Samuel

University of Iowa Press, 2009

In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature.

At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

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cover of Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality

Artificial Paradise

Science Fiction and American Reality

Sharona Ben-Tov

University of Michigan Press, 1995

"The Artificial Paradise shows how science fiction is a powerful purveyor of cultural myths rooted in the history of the West, myths that shape American attitudes toward nature, technology, and the pursuit of happiness. Sharona Ben-Tov posits the theory that science fiction is an American "national mode of thinking" which seeks to replace nature with technological worlds- paradoxically, in hope of regaining a mythic, magical American Eden. Science fiction imagery- from fifties sci-fi through women's sci-fi and cyberpunk- keeps alive the desires of and anxieties born during the Scientific Revolution, when the Western view of nature changed radically. Ben-Tov discusses sci-fi classics like Dune, The Dispossessed, Neuromancer, Vonnegut's fiction, and the Aliens movie in relation to ancient and modern myths of nature, to scientific projects like the atom bomb, Strategic Defense Initiative, robotics, virtual reality, and to cultural psychology. The book will appeal to those interested in popular culture, literature, and feminist studies. It will also enchant general readers who are interested in science fiction, especially readers who want to understand more about the relationship between technology and society. "The Artificial Paradise sets out to map the cultural anxieties that have beset Western thinking since the Scientific Revolution, and to investigate the ills that flow from the split in Western thinking between nature and culture and subject and object, and how the split is expressed and reinforced in popular culture and particularly in written science fiction. . . . [A] thought-provoking, wide-ranging book written in an admirably lucid style."--Sarah Lefanu, author of Feminism and Science Fiction "The examination of America's uneasy relationship with nature is an illuminating approach which draws together science fiction studies and American studies. The witty and readable style should attract a wide readership."--Brian Attebery, Idaho State University "The Artificial Paradise is at once intellectually provocative, knowledgeable, and literate. As our lives become increasingly determined by technology, we will need to turn to such thinkers as Dr. Ben- Tov to guide us through its dangers and pleasures."--Alan Lightman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sharona Ben-Tov is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English, Bowling Green State University. She is author of During Ceasefire (Harper-Collins), a book of poems.
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