The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2760
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 9781107139244
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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T - Theatre and Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The book is the first single volume to comparatively examine the African, Asian diasporic and European cultural lineages contextually inherited by contemporary writers’ fiction, poetry, plays and performance. It results from my scholar-activism and (prescient) decolonial research and pedagogy in African-descent British writers’ work traversing literary and performance-based approaches. Informed by my consequentialist ethics, the book recognises that the cultural power of British Black and Asian literatures resides as much in exploring pressing cultural concerns as in innovative material aesthetics and textual practices - in a context where cultural institutions founded during the British Empire continue to restrict or prevent unconditional access to people whose heritage bears the marks of imperial dispossession. _x000D_
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Using the prevailing aesthetic against itself can open up not only a counter-aesthetic, but also develop a model of counter-discourse and make an intervention into social conditioning. The book’s neo-millennial focus acknowledges writers’ progressive (as increasingly and reforming), movement away from multicultural relentlessness or reconfigurations of British identity as main expressive preoccupations. _x000D_
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Unlike any other volume in this field, Black and Asian scholars (established and emerging) dominate through the combination of local British and international contributors (Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Antipodean and African continents), to demonstrate the impact of and interest in the work globally. _x000D_
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Each contributor’s chapter evolved from my 250-word abstracts, including new representational areas such as LGBTQI+ literature, rurality, mixed-race perspectives, and adoption aesthetics. My editing pointed the overall intellectual compass towards a broad aesthetic spectrum, acknowledging the plurality and variegation of British Black and Asian writing. My substantial ‘Introduction’ chapter functions as research and orientation to the field’s key moments and significant figures, providing analyses in which inter-locking areas of preoccupation thematically, stylistically and generically indicate the rich seam that can be mined for further research.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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