Order and Partialities
Theory, Pedagogy, and the "Postcolonial"
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Looks at the political and cultural issues involved in teaching postcolonial literatures and theories.
Description
Order and Partialities explores the complex and problematic relations among postcolonial literatures and theories, the people who teach them at the university level, and the institutions in which they are taught. Each essay traces a path through these relations; yet each also comments on the fundamental paradox and contradiction within which these relations operate: that they must engage with the powerful, labyrinthine apparatus of Western cultural hegemony—a set of systematic, interpretative procedures corresponding to, and in service of, a regime of ideological expectations and its institutional representatives—in order to disengage themselves from its operations. There is no way to teach these relations without entering, oneself, into the entanglements of postcolonial power.
Kostas Myrsiades is Professor of English at West Chester University and Editor of College Literature. Jerry McGuire is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Managing Editor of College Literature.
Reviews
"This is a rich, diverse resource that presents a variety of views concerning the conception of 'post-colonial literatures' and the teaching of such writings. The articles stand out as complex, detailed, creatively and comprehensively theorized, going beyond narrow readings to show how particular texts can disrupt discourses and logics which continue to secure the Western appropriation of 'the Other. '" — Roger I. Simon, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
"This collection of essays takes on some of the thorniest critical problems in postcolonial studies in highly nuanced and complex ways. The book consistently refuses a simplistic or reductive theoretical unity and coherence, instead capturing the rich and dynamic critical exchanges that characterize the best contemporary postcolonial theory. "— Madhu Dubey, Northwestern University