Poetics of Displacement in Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) (original) (raw)
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In Every Holt and Heath: Spatial Counter-Actions in Contemporary British Literature on Migrants
Le Simplegadi
Abstract II: Focusing on the literature on globalisation's migrants in contemporary Britain, this article examines the forms of spatial seclusion imprisoning these new slaves -be they refugees, asylum seekers or 'economic migrants'. More specifically, the contribution concentrates on the institutional forms of spatial imprisonment, highlighting their similarities with illegal exploitation. Works like Kay Adshead's play The Bogus Woman and collections on refugees such as Refugee Tales, Over Land, Over Sea and A Country of Refuge point to the ways in which migrants are brutally detained and at how subtler forms of institutionally-induced detention are disseminated through the country, while proposing counter-actions which aim at reimagining contested spaces. On this final aspect, the article identifies four main strategies: meta-literary, metaphorical, re-imaginative and re-appropriative.
The article demonstrates how arrival in London is depicted in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954) as elusive or postponed. Using spatial theories put forward by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau and the 1960s radical thinkers the Situationists, the article focuses on the concept of dérive and the threshold in both texts. It demonstrates that initially, as the English controlled the conditions of hospitality, Lamming and Selvon's protagonists are unable to traverse spatial and cultural thresholds and embrace their citizenship in London, which leads to a profound sense of loss. Using the central concept of dérive, or drifting, as defined by Derrida and the Situationists, the article then traces the divergent trajectories of Selvon and Lamming's protagonists, arguing that in The Lonely Londoners we see a movement away from this state of paralysis at the threshold towards limited but creative, playful and subversive movement, while in Lamming's text the emigrants struggle to find ways of redefining the dominant order. 'It was a punishing wind that drove us from looking at the landscape', wrote George Lamming, describing his first glimpse of the grey shores of Southampton in 1950. His fellow passenger, Sam Selvon, turned to him on the deck and asked: 'Is who send we up in this place?' (Lamming 2005: 212). Postwar migrants travelling from the Caribbean to Europe in the 1950s expressed the anticipation and anguish of exile through the development of unique new genres of literature and poetry. Narrative portrayals of moments of arrival
Representations of London life abound in contemporary British Black and Asian migrant fiction. Some are bleak, some conjure up images of an urban idyll, while others are frenetic and disturbed. Yet all of these fictional representations of London endeavour to make the city legible to us, to make it possible for us to find a way to read the city and understand something of its structure, protagonists, and plot. Depending on individual perspective, London can assume very different characters or personalities. This is an idea that ties in well with central concepts taken from those working in the area of Psychogeography. As Will Self has observed, Psychogeography is 'concerned with the personality of place itself'. 1 Psychogeographical ideas, therefore, may prove relevant to this exploration of literary representations of the relationship between London and the migrant. To what extent do our physical surroundings influence our emotional responses and behaviour? Psychogeography emphasises the connection between place and psychology. London, along with Paris, is acknowledged as one of the ultimate psychogeographical cities. It is also the setting for significant literary explorations of British Black and Asian migration. This paper will seek to apply key ideas of Psychogeography to the study of literary representations of migrant experience in the postcolonial metropolitan centre by authors including Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and John Healy. The character of the city of London in the postcolonial era is a key consideration when exploring literary representations of the Black and South Asian Diaspora. The writers in question explore the intricate connections between space, place, objects, emotion, and memory, and superimpose these themes onto fundamental explorations of postcolonial experience in contemporary Britain.
Revista Jangada - Crítica, Literatura, Artes, 2017
In the poststructuralist turn, a less unified and universalizing concept of space as merely a meaningless stage is proposed. Such notion, as Michel Foucault announced in the 1970s, will no longer be perceived by its fixity or a simply referential aspect, acquiring, among different forums of discussion in the Humanities, a dynamic character. In parallel fashion, studies concerning the constitution of subjectivity point towards its oscillating status, showing how the subject is the product of multiple discourses, which makes any demarcating of solid frontiers, a hard task.The present work aims at analyzing the novel Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, under the light of spatial criticism, as well as Gender theory, deconstructing essentialisms around women. In this novel, Atwood gives voice to the historical figure Grace Marks, young Irish immigrant in the XIX century, which becomes mentor and accomplice of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress and governess of the house, Nancy Montgomery. The author constructs a self-aware character-narrator who will know how to manipulate, through language, the many contexts in which she finds herself in, reversing the hierarchy of discourse, re-signifying her allegedly inferior position. Works by Philip Wegner and Neil Smith around the notion of space, Lorna McLean and Marilyn Barber about the Irish immigration in Canada, as well as Linda Hutcheon, Chris Weedon, and Jane Flax’s theories will be the theoretical apparatus of this investigation.
The focus is on Atwood's most recent poetry collections; Morning in the Burned House (1995) and The Door (2007), in addition to the prose poems volume The Tent (2006). They have in common, albeit with a different emphasis, a preoccupation with mortality and with the writing of poetry itself. They also share a special concern for space. This reading considers space and landscape to function as metonyms. Space here is far from being passive; instead it is constantly in the process of being constructed. The disorientation that the poetic personae experience in these texts follows a labyrinthine pattern where heterogeneity and multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality prevail. In this perspective, the identity of a place becomes open and provisional, including that of a place called home.
"In this article I look into the letters and paintings of the expatriate Welsh artist Gwen John, tracing her spatial practices in the urban spaces of modernity. Drawing on Foucault's, Deleuze's and Guattari's analytics, I argue that John's spatial narratives chart heterotopias and holey spaces that challenge the hegemonic spaces of modernity, temporarily giving shelter to what Braidotti has theorized as female nomadic subjects. John's fluid spatiality is thus conceived as an event that interrogates static conceptualizations of spaces and identities and foregrounds difference, movement and forces of desire as constitutive of the real. En este artículo observo las cartas y pinturas de la artista galesa inmigrante Gwen John, siguiendo sus prácticas espaciales en los espacios urbanos de modernidad. Basándome en los métodos de análisis de Foucault, Deleuze y Guattari, sostengo que las narrativas espaciales de John diagraman heterotopías y los espacios agujereados desafían a los espacios hegemónicos de la modernidad, dando refugio, temporalmente, a lo que Braidotti ha teorizado como sujetos nómades femeninos. La espacialidad fluida de John es por lo tanto concebida como un evento que cuestiona a las conceptualizaciones estáticas de los espacios y las identidades, y resalta la diferencia, el movimiento y las fuerzas del deseco como constitutivas de lo real. Key words: desire,, epistolary narratives, nomadic subjects, Gwen John, heterotopias, holey spaces"
Jangada: crítica | literatura | artes, 2018
ABSTRACT: In the poststructuralist turn, a less unified and universalizing concept of space as merely a meaningless stage is proposed. Such notion, as Michel Foucault announced in the 1970s, will no longer be perceived by its fixity or a simply referential aspect, acquiring, among different forums of discussion in the Humanities, a dynamic character. In parallel fashion, studies concerning the constitution of subjectivity point towards its oscillating status, showing how the subject is the product of multiple discourses, which makes any demarcating of solid frontiers, a hard task. The present work aims at analyzing the novel Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, under the light of spatial criticism, as well as Gender theory, deconstructing essentialisms around women. In this novel, Atwood gives voice to the historical figure Grace Marks, young Irish immigrant in the XIX century, which becomes mentor and accomplice of the murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress and ...
Homecomings: Poetic reformulations of dwelling in Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald, and Lavinia Greenlaw
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2016
In the study The Last of England?, Randall Stevenson refers to the idea of landscape as "the mainstay of poetic imagination" (Stevenson 2004:3). With the rise of the postmodern idiom, our relationship to the "scapes" that surround us has become increasingly problematic and the idea of place is also increasingly deferred and displaced. This article examines the relationship between self and "scapes" in the poetries of Jo Shapcott, Alice Oswald and Lavinia Greenlaw, who are all concerned with various "scapes" and who present different, yet connected, strategies for negotiating our relationships to them.
Margaret Atwood’s Alternative Spaces : “ Wilderness Tips ” and “ Death by Landscape ”
2006
Post-colonial writing abounds with spatial images and references such as maps and boundaries, displacement and homecoming. Colonial and postcolonial geographies have been referred to as politicised and ideologised, violent and erasing, restrictive and exclusionary, imaginative, overlapping and discrete. Bearing in mind Edward Said’s famous proposition in Orientalism, that “geography is produced out of the relationships between people” (Said, 273), it can be argued that space and place are also involved in colonial interactions and undergo various changes due to them.