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This essay reviews Hilton Als’ 2019 exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery. The show visually displays Baldwin in two parts: “A Walker in the City” examines his biography and “Colonialism” examines “what Baldwin himself was unable to do” by displaying the work of contemporary artists and filmmakers whose works resonate with Baldwin’s critiques of masculinity, race, and American empire. Mirakhor explores how Als’ quest to restore Baldwin is part of a long and deep literary and personal conversation that Als has been having since he was in his teens, and in this instance, exploring why and how it has culminated via the visual, instead of the literary. As Mirakhor observes, to be in the exhibit is not to just observe how Als has formed and figured Baldwin, but to see how Baldwin has informed and made Als, one of our most lyrical and impassioned contemporary writers and thinkers.
/or negotiate the dual epistemological commitment to comparatism and universalism that, as Uday Singh Mehta argues, underpinned liberal justifications of empire and its deferral of self-determination for colonised subjects. 11 I consider, in particular, how liberalism’s unevenness informs the ‘political stakes of relational thinking’, a question that has permeated understandings of anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism ever since the recognition of comparison’s origins in racialised developmental categories. 12 Three main schools of thought have emerged from debates
and their production, while M. Mills, J. Burton, P. Price, R. Dalrymple, T. Turville-Petre, S. Crane and V. B. Richmond elaborate Guy’s structure, its connections to hagiography and social MUP_McDonald_11_Chap10 217 11/18/03, 17:06 218 Rebecca Wilcox politics, and its analogues in visual art and non-romance literature.4 Yet, despite their interest in the romance, critics have almost entirely ignored one of the central themes in Guy: the hero’s domination of Eastern empires, both Christian and Saracen. This neglect has limited criticism of Guy to fairly local
-frontier empire, who participate in ‘controlled’ forms of recreational hunting, like the safari, ‘in the wake of conquest’. 20 But in Lee’s Australian novel, Captain Spencer precedes this post-frontier moment. He has recently fought in the second Anglo-Sikh War, in 1848–49; to recuperate, he takes a ship to Australia, accompanied by his horse, dog, and a talking parrot. Spencer’s journey to Australia is a detour from an ongoing military occupation in the interests of empire that has exhausted him. Shipwrecked on the west Australian coast, he seems to have no sense of purpose
, there are very good historical reasons for Scotland and Ireland being averse to one another, to do with Empire and Union, and I have written elsewhere on that aversion (Maley 2000a; 2000b). Here, I want to accentuate the positive. In this essay I shall explore the missing middle of the vernacular in Irish writing, drawing on Edna Longley’s perceptive remarks about Tom Paulin’s poetic project and the vexed issue of UlsterScots. I propose to take in other kinds of writing than just poetry, though the chief part of what I have to say does relate to verses. A few years
imperial relationship’ to which comparative accounts can still be susceptible. 17 While acknowledging the importance of pioneering work on cross-cultural, transnational, and lateral literary exchanges within empire by Elleke Boehmer and others, we primarily focus in this collection on southern subjectivities, orientations, and perspectives – what we call ‘worldings’ – rather than on south–south exchange, seeing the collection as the first step towards a more fully integrated hemispheric account of southern literary history – one that must take into account epistemic
shaped by the spatial, temporal, and material limitations of the voyage. As they move across the globe, they disseminate not only news of what happens on a particular voyage, but also the cultural form of the periodical. 6 As Jude Piesse has argued, land-based periodicals in this period are marked by a mobile subjectivity: they circulate widely throughout the British Empire, and within a settler colonial context they ‘not only reflected mobility, but were actively involved in producing it’. 7 Shipboard periodicals might be said to go one step further: not only do
according to northern conventions. 1 As Worlding the South explores, southern hemisphere histories are threaded through with many tenuous and yet still tenacious human conjunctions like the Pequod ’s – conjunctions often realised in or crystallised through maps, books, letters, panoramas, and other kinds of inscription and installation. These verbal, textual, and cartographic networks the book’s contributors study in abundant, fascinating detail. As against the monolithic constructs of empire and nation of much nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial history, the
postmodern? (1996: 24–5) But pomophobia does not always of necessity manifest itself in crass, catastrophically violent, fascistic reassertions of the ancient self/other binary. Its presence may be latent in a culture as, I find, it is in Britain, particularly in English culture but perhaps also, so I would like to argue, in Scottish culture. Since the collapse of the Empire, the British nation has been suffering from a severe cultural identity crisis, considerably exacerbated by the fact that it now sees its socio-economic status, cultural prestige and national identity
discourse only as the West’s immaterial opposite. From the legacy of Huxley, Hesse and Isherwood, the British, from the Beatles to Iris Murdoch (for example, Bruno’s Dream, 1969), sought enlightenment in India just as many of their ancestors claimed to export it there. But to most British people, the sun had set on not just the Empire but the Commonwealth too. At the end of the decade, the editorial of a special sixtieth anniversary edition of The Round Table lamented that [the] fading of the vision of Empire-Commonwealth as an instrument of British world power has