Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory

by Dennis Walder (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2012

  $67.82

  This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition - nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of Bushman song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

• New

  Hardcover
  2010

  $156.26

  Examining prose, poetry and drama by writers including Achebe, Naipaul, Coetzee, Walcott, Krog, Fugard, and versions of Shakespeare, this title pursues the often ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented within and beyond Europe.