Afro-American Travel Literature and Africanist Discourse (original) (raw)
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Orientalism’s Discourse: Said, Foucault and the Anxiety of Influence
EurAmerica Vol. 45, No. 2 (June 2015), 279-299
This article will reconsider Edward W. Said's notion of "traveling theory" in light of his most influential work Orientalism and its appropriation of Michel Foucault's theory of "discourse," which has prompted criticism from a number of scholars, including James Clifford and Robert J. C. Young. Rather than looking at the question of whether Said misappropriates the work of Foucault, I will, via Harold Bloom's concept of "misprision," argue that he "misreads" the French philosopher in order to add a political valence that is missing or attenuated in the original work. Also, I will show why Said is less concerned with constructing a theory of Orientalism than with speaking truth to power about the distorted image of the Proofreaders: Chih-wei Wu, Hsih-Keng Yen, Fang-Yi Chen * Many thanks to Richard Terdiman for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this work. 280 EURAMERICA non-EuroAmerican other in Western art and culture, and its impact on global politics and history.
The Politics of Literature in Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction and Desire
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies.
2015
Between January and March 1956, the esteemed Paris-based literary periodical La Nouvelle Revue Française published three brief texts that were presented as the Journal de route or travelogue of Nigerien Damouré Zika.
African Intellectual Mobilities: Diasporic Travel and Texts, Past and Present
Colloquium Call for Papers: African Intellectual Mobilities: Diasporic Travel and Texts, Past and Present 7 February 2015, 10:30am–5pm The Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre, University of York Featuring A reading by and interview with Noo Saro-Wiwa, acclaimed author of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, who is working on her second book; A keynote by Alasdair Pettinger, editor of pioneering anthology Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, on the mid-19th-century travels and writings of African-American visitors to Britain and Ireland, Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, and how they might be read in relation to other black travel accounts and articulations. *** This one-day colloquium hosted by the Department of English & Related Literature, University of York, UK, with the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Sweden, is dedicated to exploring historical and contemporary African and diasporic ‘travel writing’ and black travel and textual cultures. The event builds on the growing attention given to the vibrant, but understudied, area of African and diasporic travel texts and contexts, rather than the more established critical arena that interrogates largely white travel accounts about black subjects and territories. While the historical shadow of forced mobility and migration related to Africa is deeply and widely felt, the compass of African and black diasporic travel is extensive and multivariate. Trade, politics, education, mission, advocacy, work, tourism, entertainment, aid, family networks, and media are just some of reasons and manifestations of African and diasporic travel linked to volitional mobility. The scope of narratives, treatments, gazes, and questions, and their role in shaping African intellectual histories, is compelling and deserving of greater critical and readerly consideration. The colloquium seeks to bring together those interested in travel and mobility, and associated writings and creative modes, in relation to Africa, the black diaspora, and other relevant colonial and postcolonial contexts. What can be constituted as African and diasporic travel writing and how do we understand black print cultures linked to mobility? What are the historical and contemporary currents? How have African and black diasporic travel writings been imagined, communicated, consumed? What futures might there be for African intellectual mobility? In addition to the keynote, reading and interview, the colloquium welcomes participation in the form of presentations or papers, but also more informal reports of research-in-progress. Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for consideration, accompanied by a short biography and a note of key questions for engagement by 19 January 2015. Email africanintellectualmobilities@gmail.com for registration and submission of abstracts. Co-organisers: David Attwell, Nicklas Hållén, Janet Remmington
Literature of Travel and the Discourse of Orientalism Edith Wharton's In Morocco as a Case Study
University Mohamed I Conference Proceedings, 2020
Travel is sacred. Travel is a quest. Travel is a passion. Travel is escape. It is a learning process, a distraction, a novelty, a dream fulfilled. It may inspire joy, fear, longing and nostalgia. In parallel with such endless emotions epitomized by travel, travel is the insatiable appetite for discovery and exploration. Quite often, when we study the travel literature of the eighteenth century the general picture, which we have of the continental tour and of tourists, is of a male world. The role of women travelers has often been neglected. Early women travel writers skirted a delicate course. To attract an audience, a woman needed to provide material that was undeniably exciting; to keep an audience, she needed to remain a lady. Considering that travel-and particularly unaccompanied travel-was perceived inappropriate for a lady, women often employed a narrative stance that could be depicted as the decorum of indecorum, a fine balance in which they constrained the conditions of femininity, but did not dare to break them. Most early travel writing began with an apology (i.e, for writing in the first person, for engaging in such inappropriate activity, for annoying the reader with their trivial activities, etc…) that, once again, affirmed their status as ladies and also served to ensure readers they would not be competing with men 1 .
Research in Applied Linguistics, 2019
Edward Said is regarded as the originator of colonial discourse theory. He deploys Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse to accomplish his project in Orientalism and emphasizes Foucault’s notion of discourse and its relation to power, rendering discourse a carceral system. Although Said explicitly expresses the similarity between Orientalism and Foucault’s discourse theory, it seems he implicitly suggests that the carceral quality of Foucault’s idea affects his formulation of Orientalism. This study examines the validity of Said’s understanding of Foucault and shows that Said’s construction of Orientalism is based on an imperfect image of Foucault. Argument here is to postulate that Foucault’s discourse theory provides space for resistance and his theorization of power helps the idea of struggle in discursive practices. Besides, Foucault himself is trapped in a discourse produced by Said. This study casts light on Foucault’s theory of discourse and modifies this misreading.
Michel Foucault (Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory, forthcoming)
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Primarily known as a philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault was an intellectual and activist whose writings have been influential in many disciplines, including psychology, criminology, literary and cultural theory, political science, and the history of medical and social sciences. The constantly shifting foci of his critical investigations and his unorthodox methodologies present considerable difficulties to those who would identify him with theoretical schools such as structuralism, post-structuralism, or postmodernism-labels he rejected. Neither a traditional philosopher nor historian, Foucault wrote texts that can nevertheless be read as critical histories that ask provocative philosophical questions, and which sometimes question the very contours of philosophy. He once described his critical project as taking place "at the outer limits of philosophy, . . . in the direction of a future philosophy" (1997, 42). His works and posthumously published lectures have come to wield enormous influence across the humanities and social sciences, and have been formative in discourses such as new historicism, queer theory, feminism, critical race theory, and the study of biopolitics.
The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa
Research in African Literatures, 2005
This paper focuses on one central trope of Edward S looms large in Said's personal, professional, and politica and epistemological condition, as a spatial and temporal ing, and becoming, and in its material and metaphorica a large part of his early exiled life in Africa, in Egypt, important place where he would frequently return and and popular media provided a critical platform for h mances as Palestine's and the Arab world's leading pu has also been the fate, welcome to some and unwelcom numerous African intellectuals. Said's experiences an illuminate the exilic condition of the postcolonial world tunity to reflect on the dynamics and implications of A About ten years ago I wrote a rather critical review of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993), essentially characterizing it as an unwitting eulogy to empire despite its anti-imperialist claims. While my views of that particular text have not changed, Edward Said's oeuvre is much too large for easy generalizations, too complex to fit into the kind of neat categories beloved in academic analyses, for in a fundamental sense Said was that rarity of late twentieth-century intellectuals, a public intellectual in the best sense of that term, whose expansive writings and life delighted in the pleasures and power of probing the most pressing questions of our age, indeed the enduring questions of the modern era: the politics and poetics of imperialism, nationalism, citizenship, socialism, capitalism, migration, international? ism, globalism, cosmopolitanism, and exile. One might disagree with a particular interpretation or inflection of his argument and narrative, as I still do with Culture and Imperialism and many have done with his various works, including his most famous, the seminal Orientalism, the foundational text of postcolonial studies, but one always remained enthralled by Said's vast
Critical Travels, Discursive Practices: Foucault in Tunis (1966-1968)
2016
In the extensive research on the oeuvre and life of Michel Foucault, the years he spent in Tunisia do not occupy a prominent role. More precisely, they have been mentioned only in passing. David Macey's six-hundred-page English biography, The Lives of Michel Foucault, discusses the time in Tunisia only briefly. 1 In his biography in French, Didier Eribon dedicates some scarce seven pages to the time Foucault worked as visiting professor of philosophy at Tunis University. Eribon introduces his account as follows: "Why Tunis? This was, once again, a strange set of co-occurrences."" The concurring circumstances Eribon refers to were a faculty opening at the Department of Social Sciences at the newly founded university in Tunis and the fact that Foucault's partner, Daniel Defert, was about to travel to the same city to fulfill his volunteer service.' In a comparable way, voices from the other side of the Mediterranean describe Foucault's time in Tunis as an "interlude" before he would return to Paris and become Chair at the College de France. In Foucault in Tunisia (Foucault en Tunisie), a special issue of The Tunisian Journal (Les cahiers de Tunisie), Ben Dana-Mechri gives the following account: "The interlude in Tunis, where Michel Foucault taught from September 1966 to August 1968 shows a philosopher already well respected, almost famous; his teaching influenced a generation of students here, just as it would soon inl1uence [students at] the University at Vincennes and the new department of philosophy he would be in charge of." 4 The university in Tunis was indeed the last of several places where Foucault held visiting appointments before returning to France. He had taught, albeit for shorter periods of time, at the universities in Uppsala (Sweden), Warsaw (Poland), and Hamburg (Germany) prior to his lectureship in Tunisia. Yet his stay at a public university in the Maghreb, which was founded only six years before his arrival and four years 165
Africa in literature and popular novels in English
For such a large region of the world, Africa generally has a poor showing in fiction, both in literary works and in popular novels. It is typically known to many readers by the brutalist thrillers of Wilbur Smith or the comic misrepresentations of Evelyn Waugh. African writers who have had popular success are few and far between, and mostly, such as those Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, are written from the safe perspective of expatriates. If you know and like Africa, this is disappointing, the experiencing is well worth committing to an imaginative framework. What is worse, however, is that ‘serious’ writers who have featured Africa in their novels, such as Greene, Hemingway, Bellow and Updike, treat it with the utmost triviality. Either they recount their visits to kill animals, or they don’t bother to visit at all. The focus is entirely on the white expatriates, with Africans playing only walk-on parts, like the foil in a Platonic dialogue. We might quarrel with the characterisation of Asian characters in Forster’s A Passage to India or Orwell’s Burmese Days but they play an integral role in the narrative. It seemed perfectly acceptable for these writers that Africa simply be the focus of their fictions, freighted with implausible names and inexplicable motivations. It is striking, however, that some of the popular writers who have featured African settings, are far better at giving a flavour of life on the continent. Their African characters appear to have a life of their own, rather than being simply backdrop to the existential angst of a white expatriate. Nearly all the popular writers spent considerable fractions of their personal life in Africa and this is evident from their descriptions. It suggests a paradox, that literary writers, who lurk in university courses and incomprehensible interpretations of modern literary critics are in many ways the worse novelists, unable to depict the world in which their fables are set with any type veracity.