The theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent years vitalized postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we understand ‘culture’ and developing new ways of thinking beyond the confines of the nation state. The articles in this volume look at recent developments in diasporic literature and theory, alluding to the work of seminal diaspora theoreticians, but also interrogating such thinkers in the light of recent cultural production (including literature, film and visual art) as well as recent world events. The articles are organized in pairs, offering alternative perspectives on crucial aspects of diaspora theory today: Celebration or Melancholy?; Gender Biases and the Canon of Diasporic Literature; Diasporas of Violence and Terror; Time, Place and Diasporic “Home”; and Border Crossings. A number of the articles are illustrated by discussions of particular authors, such as Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, and Michael Ondaatje, and the range of reference found in this volume covers writing from many parts of the world including contemporary Chicana visual art, Asian diaspora writers, and Black British, Afro-Caribbean, Native North American, and African writing.

Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.

Over the century that has passed since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe. What happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries and begin to negotiate new experience gained in the process of migration? Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, countering its conventional reception as a subsidiary branch of national literature and reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland and origins to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, World Literature and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland. These diverse discussions are framed by a focused examination of diaspora as a methodological perspective and its relevance for the modern human condition.

This volume considers literary fiction by Muslim writers, dealing with the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim cultures and exploring liberal orthodoxies such as secularism and multiculturalism. It covers writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie in essays by experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures in English.

The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: • Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; • The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; • The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

One of the most fascinating, rapidly developing, and difficult areas of literary and cultural studies today is postcolonialism. Focused on postcolonialism and designed especially for those studying postcolonial studies, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah introduces key subject areas of concern such as culture and identity in a clear accessible and organised fashion. It provides an overview of the development of postcolonialism as a discipline and takes a close look at its important authors, Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and their selected oeuvres, Fury, Midnight’s Children, By the Sea and Memory of Departure. With a palimpsestic analysis of culture and identity as crucial features of postcolonial texts, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah argues how postcolonialism functions in allowing the formation of a new perspective on the contemporary world. Besides, it offers an alternative perspective on their works, one that promotes the importance of the issue of postcolonial agency. This book will prove invaluable to anyone studying English Language and Literature, Migration Studies, and Cultural Studies. Contents Introduction: the borders of culture and identity A critical approach to culture and identity under the light of postcolonial theory The contributons of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie to postcolonial literature Non- homes in postcolonial culture (Un)belonging postcolonial identity Conclusion: towards a new understanding of culture and identity Bibliography

This book, framed through the notion of double consciousness, brings postcolonial constructs to sociopolitical and pedagogical studies of youth that have yet to find serious traction in education. Significantly, this book contributes to a growing interest among educational and curriculum scholars in engaging the pedagogical role of literature in the theorization of an inclusive curriculum. Therefore, this study not only recognizes the potential of immigrant literature in provoking critical conversation on changes young people undergo in diaspora, but also explores how the curriculum is informed by the diasporic condition itself as demonstrated by this negotiation of foreignness between the student and selected texts.

As the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naïve, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words—incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of ‘the people,’ often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent.

This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.