Books on the topic 'Writing domination'

This chapter discusses Indonesian historical writing after independence. At the time Indonesia became independent, knowledge of academic history-writing was virtually non-existent. Indonesian elites then faced the postcolonial predicament of having to adopt Western nationalistic approaches to history in order to oppose the Dutch version of the archipelago’s history that had legitimized colonial domination. Soon after independence, the military took over and dominated the writing of history in Indonesia for several decades. Challenges to the military’s view of history came from artistic representations of history, and from historians—trained in the social sciences—who emphasized a multidimensional approach balancing central and local perspectives. However, it was only after 2002 that historians could openly criticize the role of the military.

This chapter examines the development of Arab British fiction. It begins with an overview of the making of Arab British fiction, citing anti-colonialism, Orientalism, and hybridization as the main elements of Anglophone Arab writing up to the close of the twentieth century. It then considers British novels about Egypt in which paternalistic “genuine love” for, and “wise understanding” of, the politics of Egypt overlaid colonial attitudes. It also analyzes Arab British fiction in relation to the colonial experience Arabs received from British domination in Arab lands, which lasted from the end of World War I to the early 1950s. Finally, it discusses postcolonial crosscurrents in the works of Arab British women, along with the predicament of exile and Diasporic consciousness in male Arab British fiction.

Ed Sullivan dominated Sunday night primetime television for a quarter of a century with his extremely popular and inclusive variety show (first called Toast of the Town, then The Ed Sullivan Show). A former (and concurrent) Broadway columnist, Sullivan adored the mythology of Broadway and promoted its history—in song and performance—on practically every broadcast. Expanding on the reach of radio, television allowed for millions of Americans to get their first glimpse of Broadway magic through Sullivan’s promotion of current shows and tributes to giants of the past. The musical Bye Bye Birdie paid homage to the great impresario of the television age by writing him into the show. Sullivan’s domination of the airwaves also nearly parallels the so-called Golden Age of the Broadway musical.

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. This book explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures, the book shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, the author reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, the book analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.

This chapter examines the use of the trope of hunger in Lindsey Collen's There is a Tide (1990) and Mutiny (2001) to dispel the myth of Mauritius as a model of paradise that permeates historical, travel, and literary writing. In these texts, the plight of characters debilitated by lack of nourishment, literally and metaphorically, and symbolically consumed by the ravenous, parasitic apotheoses of capitalist market relations points to cannibalism as the ultimate act of domination. Specifically, Collen draws an analogy between the historic slavery that had been the economic basis of the island as a plantation colony, and contemporary economic processes that commodify bodies in the production of consumable goods. In this general scenario of cannibalistic cravings that threaten the autonomy of physical and national bodies, the predicament of the Chagossians (or Chagos Islanders)—forcibly displaced to Mauritius after their island was expropriated and turned into a strategic lynchpin for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and the wider Indian Ocean region—evokes territorial appropriation as spatial cannibalism par excellence. The chapter also highlights the newer forms of cannibal intent that continue to define islands' contact and subsequent negotiations with consumer culture.

This book is a visionary illustration of the life-transforming soul-work of body of pro-womanists. Its purpose promotes writings by women and men of color having come together in solidarity as models of activist-consciousness. The contributors to this collection embody shades of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, and nation-state affiliations centered in womanist “universal[ism].” Including writings by teachers/professors, students, and creative artists (poets as well as actors/directors)—they collectively exemplify an unwavering defense of human rights and social justice. Communicating the self-liberatory value of the meaning(s) of womanism in their writings, the contributors counter ideologies of separatism, domination, and systemic oppression. Collectively, they promote activist comradeship in resistance to wall-building ideas of exclusionism. In sum, this volume represents the unwavering commitment of individuals courageously willing to cross borders of personal, social, political, and spiritual difference(s) to create bridges for liberatory alliances.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 seems to mark a turning point in both geopolitical and literary histories. The victorious American empire ascended and began its cultural domination of the globe in the twentieth century, while the once-mighty Spanish empire declined and became a minor state in the world republic of letters. But what if this narrative relies on several faulty assumptions? Following networks of American and Spanish writers, translators, and movements, Gayle Rogers uncovers the arguments that forged the politics and aesthetics of modernism. He revisits the role of empire—from its institutions to its cognitive effects—in shaping a nation’s literature and culture. Ranging from universities to comparative practices, from Ezra Pound’s failed ambitions as a Hispanist to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s multilingual maps of modernismo, Rogers illuminates modernists’ profound engagements with the formative dynamics of exceptionalist American and Spanish literary studies. He reads the provocative, often counterintuitive arguments of John Dos Passos, who held that “American literature” could only flourish if the expanding U.S. empire collapsed like Spain’s did. And he also details both a controversial theorization of a Harlem–Havana–Madrid nexus for black modernist writing and Ernest Hemingway’s unorthodox development of a version of cubist Spanglish in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bringing together revisionary literary historiography and rich textual analyses, Rogers offers a striking account of why foreign literatures mattered so much to two dramatically changing countries at a pivotal moment in history.

Isabel Allende garnered immediate attention and international acclaim with the 1982 publication of House of Spirits. Allende drew favorable comparisons to male Latin American writers who were dominating a boom movement that mixed political and magical themes. Yet her engaging epic became a bestseller based on its artistic merit, regardless of gender issues, and her ensuing output of fiction and nonfiction continued to establish her esteemed place in the literary ranks. This Critical Companion introduces readers to Allende's writings with accessible literary analysis of her six novels, featuring discussions of plot, character development, thematic concerns and style, historical contexts, and alternative critical perspectives. A fascinating biographical chapter traces Allende's journey from wife, mother, and journalist in Chile to internationally acclaimed author. Her life story—as stimulating as her novels—offer students and readers a better understanding of the historical and political forces that informed her work. The Literary Heritage chapter provides will deepen readers' appreciation for Allende's contributions to, and place in, the Latin American literary tradition. A select bibliography includes reviews and resources that will be especially useful for student research projects.

Roman political leaders used distance from Rome as a key political tool to assert pre-eminence. Through the case studies of Caesar’s hegemony, Augustus’s autocracy, and Tiberius’s reign, this book examines how these figures’ experiences and manipulations of absence established a multipolar focus of political life centred less on the city of Rome, and more on the idea of a single leader. The Roman expansion over Italy and the Mediterranean put the political system under considerable stress, and eventually resulted in a dispersal of leadership and a decentralization of power. Absent generals rivalled their peers in Rome for influence and threatened to surpass them from the provinces. Roman leaders, from Sulla to Tiberius, used absence as a mechanism to act autonomously, but it came at the cost of losing influence and control at the centre. In order to hold influence while being split off from the decision-making powers of the geographical nucleus that was Rome, communication channels to mitigate necessary absences were developed during this period, such as travel, intermediate meetings, letters (propaganda writings) and a complex network of mediators, ultimately forming the circle from which the imperial court emerged. Absent leadership, as it developed throughout the Late Republic, a hitherto neglected issue, eventually became a valuable asset in the institutionalising process of the autocracy of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius. Rome’s growth brought about a greater challenge to the basic realities of communication, representation, travel and warfare. The constraints of empire gave rise to extraordinary commands held by its foremost generals. These absent leaders began dominating the capital from the provinces, from which C. Julius Caesar emerged as an autocrat after a period of civil war. Whereas presence had defined the Republic, absence clearly was shaping the Principate. In its constitutive phase, the power structure of the monarchy was decisively shaped at the structural and institutional level by the emperor’s absence, a development that can be summed up in vertical hierarchisation through spatial distancing. The art of governing Rome and ruling the empire evolved with Augustus’s and Tiberius’s distance from the centre. In order to show how all parties tried to mediate the geographical distance between the leading figures and the capital in the transitional period between the Republic and the Empire, a range of tools were recurred to and developed to mitigate their necessary absences. This book analyses mobility, correspondence, patronage, and advocacy, maps the paths not taken, and concludes on the degree to which expedients became formalised and institutionalised. The variables of temporality and spatiality in the empire therefore posed a constant challenge to the ruler, whose presence in Rome always revealed his power and powerlessness at the same time. This was Rome’s paradox of proximity.