Postcolonial Remix is a collaborative, student authored project originating at Alma College. The inaugural authors of 2015 are (in alphabetical order) Alyssa Cooper, Mary Frances Eshleman, Victoria Kelly, and Jacqueline Velez.
Postcolonial. This is an attempt to mark the impact of postcolonial studies within the academe by exploring the intimate interpenetrations between colonies and the metropole, the world and England. Our emphasis on contemporary issues of colonialism and empire redefine how older literary texts may be re-analyzed with a view to their colonial resonances whether pre- or post the European colonial period.
Remix describes our intention to decenter literary analysis through a New Historicist approach of reading backwards. This has led us to reconfigure ways in which major literary texts and literary periods may be transformed by postcolonial approaches. Our focus is on close readings of the interstices of some of the ‘greatest hits’ of English literature (From the 8th century poem Beowulf to the 20th century novel Wide Sargasso Sea) to examine ways in which they have been influenced by and in turn influence colonial projects.
Ania Loomba has suggested that by analyzing “discrete practices of power and imagining them” we can begin to read texts historically (4). By insisting that history is not Europe-centered, but international and global, our decentering affords fresh ways of looking at old texts, making their influence even more important.
By studying the entangled pasts and people of not only England, but Scotland, Ireland, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent and their literatures, we can appreciate the “interconnected and interdependent sites of historical importance, territorial and imaginative, that can disrupt oppositions between metropole and colony” (Wilson 3).
The project was facilitated by Dr. Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey.
Postcolonial. This is an attempt to mark the impact of postcolonial studies within the academe by exploring the intimate interpenetrations between colonies and the metropole, the world and England. Our emphasis on contemporary issues of colonialism and empire redefine how older literary texts may be re-analyzed with a view to their colonial resonances whether pre- or post the European colonial period.
Remix describes our intention to decenter literary analysis through a New Historicist approach of reading backwards. This has led us to reconfigure ways in which major literary texts and literary periods may be transformed by postcolonial approaches. Our focus is on close readings of the interstices of some of the ‘greatest hits’ of English literature (From the 8th century poem Beowulf to the 20th century novel Wide Sargasso Sea) to examine ways in which they have been influenced by and in turn influence colonial projects.
Ania Loomba has suggested that by analyzing “discrete practices of power and imagining them” we can begin to read texts historically (4). By insisting that history is not Europe-centered, but international and global, our decentering affords fresh ways of looking at old texts, making their influence even more important.
By studying the entangled pasts and people of not only England, but Scotland, Ireland, North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent and their literatures, we can appreciate the “interconnected and interdependent sites of historical importance, territorial and imaginative, that can disrupt oppositions between metropole and colony” (Wilson 3).
The project was facilitated by Dr. Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey.
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