Postcolonial Romanticisms

Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance describes the production of a new and particular kind of postcolonial text and resituates the notion of literary influence in the context of postcolonial literatures. This book addresses the ways in which Derek Walcott, Garrett Hongo, and Jamaica Kincaid have appropriated aspects of «colonial» culture and how they deploy the tropes of British Romanticism in their own texts. Postcolonial Romanticisms argues that Walcott, Hongo, and Kincaid radically reimagine and rewrite the various traditions that have figured their island landscapes as unhistoricized, unoccupied, and marginal. The landscapes that they write about are necessarily politicized; their own subjectivities are intimately implicated in both the natural beauty as well as the traumatic history of place; they confront and engage to varying degrees the history of their postcolonial geographies, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on the individual. These postcolonial writers confront what Derek Walcott calls the «shards of an ancient pastoral», the literal and literary remains of colonial cultural authority that clutter their landscapes. Postcolonial Romanticisms is ideally suited for courses in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies, specifically courses in world literature, global literature, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary poetry, and eco-literary studies.

Roy Osamu Kamada is Assistant Professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Davis. He has taught literature and creative writing at Emerson College, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Davis, and for the Kearny St. Workshop. His work has appeared in The Diasporic Imagination: Identifying Asian-American Representations in America and Ecological Poetry: A Critical Introduction. He is currently working on a project tentatively titled, Uncanny Cosmopoli-tanisms: Haunting, Disjuncture, and the Postcolonial.

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