Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure u201charamu201c flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child-agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self-reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature. Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self-imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Haiu2019s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible. This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.
Show moreWhy should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure u201charamu201c flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child-agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self-reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature. Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self-imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Haiu2019s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible. This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.
Show moreWhy should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire?
Ambreen Hai is an associate professor of English literature and language at Smith College, where she teaches literary theory and Anglophone postcolonial and British literature. Her previous publications include articles on Kipling, Forster, Rushdie, Sidwa, Suleri, and Dangarembga.
“This book enriches our appreciation of three of the most important
writers of the twentieth century, while forwarding an original
thesis with potential applicability to many postcolonial
writers.“
“The literary-critical readings that form the core of (Making Words
Matter) are superb, and both literary scholars and those from
disciplines in the social sciences will find the analyses elegant
and rigorous.”
*The Journal of Asian Studies*
“Hai’s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to
combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and
theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is
sophisticated, lucid, and accessible. Making Words Matter is the
first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues
and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial
literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with
earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read
both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light.”
*SirReadaLot.org*
“This book is the most assiduous to date, and may one day be
recognized as the most assiduous ever, on the central
colonial/postcolonial dynamic of word and body, the body making
words, and making them matter, and—the tables turned—words
themselves having a hand in materially creating and substantially
shaping, though sometimes disfiguring and even destroying, bodies
of various kinds.”
*Author of The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate
of Liberalism*
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