Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces (Rethinking the Island)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.23 (667 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1783486457 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 226 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-02-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment, Princeton University)This is a splendid contribution to postcolonial studies in so many ways. Highly recommended. (Andrew van der Vlies, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Queen Mary University of London)Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism is an insistently insightful book that crosses disciplines and geographies with impressive ease. This is an original and important study. Helen Kapstein brings postcolonial studies, the environmental humanities, and tourist studies into dynamic conversation. and Thomas A. In Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism, Helen Kapstein offers a deft and engaging assessment of their role as metaphor, metonym, and material space in a range of postcolonial (and postimperial) literary texts and cultural objects. (Dohra Ahmad, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of English, St John's University, USA)Islands have boundaries that are clear yet con
Helen Kapstein is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY.
Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism examines how real and literary islands have helped to shape the idea of the nation in a postcolonial world. The island space seems to offer the ideal replica of the nation, and tourist practices promise the liberation of leisure, the gaze, and mobility. It argues that each text expresses a profound discomfort with national form by undoing the form of the island through a variety of narrative strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres. Starting with the first literary tourist, Robinson Crusoe, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism goes on to show how authors such as JM Coetzee, Romesh Gunesekera, and Julian Barnes have explored the outlines and implications of islandness. By throwing the category of the island into crisis, these texts let uncertainties about the postcolonial nation and its violent practices emerge as doubt in the narratives themselves. In appropriating island tourism, the new nation tends to recapitulate the failures and crises of the colonial nation before it. However, the very reliance on the constantly shifting and eroding island form exposes an anxiety about boundaries and limits on the part of the postcolonial nation. Finally, in its selection of texts that shuttle between South Africa, Great Britain, and Sri Lanka, equalizing the former colon