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28 - Reclaiming the Past

Black and Asian British Genealogies

from (I) - Looking Back, Looking Forward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2019

Susheila Nasta
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Mark U. Stein
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
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Summary

This chapter engages with the formal and thematic reclamation of the past, writing and re-writing of history, and construction of individual and communal genealogies from ancestral to present-day locations in black and Asian British narrative. This comprises adoptions and adaptions of the US–American tradition of the neo-slave narrative (including those by Phillips, Warner, Gilroy, D’Aguiar, and Dabydeen). Revisiting the birth of the Indian nation, her independence from Britain, and the subcontinent’s partition, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children not only offers a magical realist approach to the writing of history, it also explores the very limits of historiography. Historiographical fiction, including many of Caryl Phillips’s works, Smith’s White Teeth, and works by Gurnah, Gilroy, Levy, S. I. Martin and also Marina Warner, absorb, cite, contest, and recirculate a wide archive of pre-texts that range from the colonial to the postcolonial (from Phillips’s Shakespeare to Martin’s Equiano) and comprise various sources which are retrieved, transcoded, and repossessed.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Reclaiming the Past
  • Edited by Susheila Nasta, Queen Mary University of London, Mark U. Stein, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108164146.030
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  • Reclaiming the Past
  • Edited by Susheila Nasta, Queen Mary University of London, Mark U. Stein, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108164146.030
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Reclaiming the Past
  • Edited by Susheila Nasta, Queen Mary University of London, Mark U. Stein, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108164146.030
Available formats
×