No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization

Sonali Perera

Published by Columbia University Press 2014

No Country

Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization

Sonali Perera

https://doi.org/10.7312/pere15194

Overview
Contents

About this book

No Country argues for a rethinking of the genre of working-class literature. Sonali Perera expands our understanding of of working-class fiction by considering a range of international and non-canonical texts, identifying textual, political, and historical linkages often overlooked by Eurocentric and postcolonial scholarship.

Author / Editor information

Sonali Perera is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York, where she teaches courses in postcolonial literature and theory, working-class literature, feminist theory, and globalization studies.

Reviews

A welcome addition and a worthwhile read.

Ahilan Kadirgamar:
Perera's critical and careful reading of literature is a challenge to all those who read literature politically, and seek to grapple with the larger questions of equality and justice in our uneven and unequal world.

Ulka Anjaria:
This carefully argued book will interest scholars of contemporary transnational literature, Marxist approaches to literature, and African and South Asian literary studies; to my mind, however, its greatest impact will be on a younger generation of postcolonial critics, including graduate students, whose education has been so saturated with the theoretical truisms of postcolonial theory in its high phase that it is very difficult to imagine fresh readings of new and older texts outside of them. With such as the case I suspect that many younger scholars would rather give up on postcolonial studies altogether, dismissing it, as some have already done, as an outdated theoretical paradigm. This book challenges that claim.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University:
Sonali Perera's No Country offers a powerful new theorizing of working-class literature in a global dimension. Gender inflections are given in unprecedented detail, through deeply learned and meticulously documented close readings of an astonishingly diversified collection of texts. Perera's readings of Marx are relevant to contemporary realities.

Srinivas Aravamudan, Duke University, author of Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language:
Caught in the stampede toward globalism, literary scholars have overlooked the rich archives of working-class internationalism. Sonali Perera's study is a bracing corrective to this trend, putting South Asian voices in dialogue with transcontinental interlocutors. Inspired by Raymond Williams, No Country leads us to a world literature that includes its many proletarian offshoots.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction. World Literature or Working-Class Literature in the Age of Globalization? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Colonialism, race, and class. Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie as a Literary Representation of the Subaltern Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. PostcolonIal Sri Lanka and “Black struggles For socialism”. Socialist Ethics in Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s . When Memory Dies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Gender, genre, and globalization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
4. Socialized labor and the critique of identity politics. Bessie Head’s A Question of Power Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
Epilogue: Working-Class Writing and the Social imagination Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 248

eBook

Published: February 11, 2014
ISBN: 9780231525442