Author : Clifford Thomas Manlove
Release : 1999
Genre : Literature
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis Eyes that Colonize and Post-colonial Resistance to the Transatlantic Gaze in Literature by : Clifford Thomas Manlove

Download or read book Eyes that Colonize and Post-colonial Resistance to the Transatlantic Gaze in Literature written by Clifford Thomas Manlove. This book was released on 1999. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Eyes that Colonize and Post-Colonial Resistance to the Transatlantic Gaze," reads colonial alongside post-colonial anglophone narratives. Its first and second chapters compare theoretical (focusing upon a related series of work by Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault on the gaze) and post-colonial visual aesthetics (best outlined by Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha) to reconsider theories of the gaze and vision that represent an active, powerful seer against a passive, objectified seen (attributed to Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"). Analyzing the literary dimension of this gaze reveals the visible, and invisible, transactions that unify otherwise distant corners of the transatlantic basin. My third chapter examines the visibly divided, yet entwined, relationship of Europe to Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions . In the fourth chapter, I move from this "Old World" tension to prescient pictures of the "New." Here I contrast travel narratives by Henry James (The American Scene) and V.S. Naipaul (A Turn in the South) on Charleston, South Carolina. Despite differences in nationality and race, both see Charleston not only as quintessentially southern, they see it as simultaneously Caribbean and European as well. The Caribbean too displays an uneasy identification with images of Africa ("tradition") and the American South "modernity"). In Chapter Five, I conclude "Eyes that Colonize" by analyzing the utopian impulse that continues to drive colonial visions of the world; that is the desire New World colonists have to mirror the Old in the New. Derived from an Anglo-American branch of dystopian fiction, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed : An Ambiguous Utopia, and Samuel R. Delany's Triton : An Ambiguous Heterotopia each suggest that the will to modernity instead secretly, unconsciously wishes to remake itself in the image of the colonized, the formerly "savage."