y separately published work icon Commonwealth : Essays and Studies periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... vol. 42 no. 2 2020 of Commonwealth est. 1974 Commonwealth : Essays and Studies
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'In postcolonial contexts marked by multiple forms of displacement and replacement, this issue examines the ambivalent value of placelessness. Another word for dislocation and dispossession, placelessness can also be approached as a force resisting the desire to lock things into place, leading to creative re-inscriptions and reinventions. Through its characteristic reticence, short fiction offers a privileged means to register fractures that take place and yet cannot necessarily be traced – events both impossible to negate and impossible to locate. Open and flexible, the short story also accommodates experiments that demonstrate the vital role of storytelling in the making of place.' (Publication abstract)

 

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  • Contents indexed selectively.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction : Introduction, Claire Omhovère , Pascale Tollance , single work essay
'The unprecedented development of the short story in the literatures that emerged in the former colonies of the British Empire has by now become a well-researched literary fact. Postcolonial critics have teased out the relationships between a genre long regarded as a minor one (at least before its Modernist canonization) and the marginal positions of writers who came to the short story as a creative terrain to experiment with spatial compression and the startling insights it affords, from Joyce’s “scrupulous meanness” to Gordimer’s “flash of fireflies.” In postcolonial literatures – using the plural is the least one can do to call attention to the multiple realities the field comprises – the short story seemed a genre well suited to the expression of minor voices. The perspectives of the disenfranchised (all the more so when they were women, children or marginal individuals) came to embody different forms of subjugation in spaces striated by the political and geographical lines inherited from the colonial past. In the context of the colonial appropriation of indigenous places, the short story has also been claimed as a privileged site for questioning the erasure of toponyms, nomadic routes, sacred grounds and the sense of place that pre-colonial forms of spatiality sustained. An interest in the archaeology of place is thus recurrent in postcolonial short fiction, where it meets with an interest in the successive forms of displacement and replacement that put a strain on the articulation between space and place in postcolonial contexts.' (Introduction)
‘Coexisting in the Outside Space in the Shade for the Afternoon’ : Poetics of Loss and Connection in Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light, Anne Le Guellec-Minel , single work criticism

'The theoretical debate about place opposing, on the one hand, the existential necessity for a degree of permanence and continuity between person and place, and on the other, the definition of place as the chance convergence of trajectories proves useful when dealing with the way place and placelessness are imagined in contemporary Aboriginal literature. The article examines how, in Heat and Light, Ellen van Neerven negotiates between a “typically Aboriginal” way of relating to place and her own generation’s worldview.' (Publication abstract)
Place, Placelessness and David Malouf’s Meditation on the Dual Meaning of Possession : Is Haunting or Being Haunted Only about Expiation of Colonial Sins?, Christine Texier-Vandamme , single work criticism

'This article deals with the spectrality of the narrative voice in “Blacksoil Country,” a short story from David Malouf’s collection Dream Stuff (2000) in which a dead child artificially addresses the reader, as if from beyond the grave. The interrelated issues of settlement, place and placelessness are tackled through the analysis of Malouf’s choice to focus on the lost child trope commonly found in Australian settler literature, and the resulting haunted nature of the disembodied narrative voice speaking from an unplaceable source. The effects of this narrative strategy include ventriloquisation, conflation and destabilisation.' (Publication abstract)
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Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction : Introduction Claire Omhovère , Pascale Tollance , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , vol. 42 no. 2 2020; 'The unprecedented development of the short story in the literatures that emerged in the former colonies of the British Empire has by now become a well-researched literary fact. Postcolonial critics have teased out the relationships between a genre long regarded as a minor one (at least before its Modernist canonization) and the marginal positions of writers who came to the short story as a creative terrain to experiment with spatial compression and the startling insights it affords, from Joyce’s “scrupulous meanness” to Gordimer’s “flash of fireflies.” In postcolonial literatures – using the plural is the least one can do to call attention to the multiple realities the field comprises – the short story seemed a genre well suited to the expression of minor voices. The perspectives of the disenfranchised (all the more so when they were women, children or marginal individuals) came to embody different forms of subjugation in spaces striated by the political and geographical lines inherited from the colonial past. In the context of the colonial appropriation of indigenous places, the short story has also been claimed as a privileged site for questioning the erasure of toponyms, nomadic routes, sacred grounds and the sense of place that pre-colonial forms of spatiality sustained. An interest in the archaeology of place is thus recurrent in postcolonial short fiction, where it meets with an interest in the successive forms of displacement and replacement that put a strain on the articulation between space and place in postcolonial contexts.' (Introduction)
Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction : Introduction Claire Omhovère , Pascale Tollance , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , vol. 42 no. 2 2020; 'The unprecedented development of the short story in the literatures that emerged in the former colonies of the British Empire has by now become a well-researched literary fact. Postcolonial critics have teased out the relationships between a genre long regarded as a minor one (at least before its Modernist canonization) and the marginal positions of writers who came to the short story as a creative terrain to experiment with spatial compression and the startling insights it affords, from Joyce’s “scrupulous meanness” to Gordimer’s “flash of fireflies.” In postcolonial literatures – using the plural is the least one can do to call attention to the multiple realities the field comprises – the short story seemed a genre well suited to the expression of minor voices. The perspectives of the disenfranchised (all the more so when they were women, children or marginal individuals) came to embody different forms of subjugation in spaces striated by the political and geographical lines inherited from the colonial past. In the context of the colonial appropriation of indigenous places, the short story has also been claimed as a privileged site for questioning the erasure of toponyms, nomadic routes, sacred grounds and the sense of place that pre-colonial forms of spatiality sustained. An interest in the archaeology of place is thus recurrent in postcolonial short fiction, where it meets with an interest in the successive forms of displacement and replacement that put a strain on the articulation between space and place in postcolonial contexts.' (Introduction)
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