Synopses & Reviews
Through close readings of works by writers like C. L. R. James, Salman Rushdie, Ama Ata Aidoo, Michelle Cliff, and Hanif Kureishi,
Using the Masters Tools examines instances of textual resistance elaborated within imperial/metropolitan epistemologies and ideologies. In her analysis, Anuradha Needham focuses especially on each writers historical location, personal and political affiliations, presumed audiences, and position on gender as integral contextual determinants of the strategies of textual resistance each deploys. Drawing on the extensive scholarship on “subaltern” and anti-colonial resistances in a number of disciplines, this book demonstrates the mutual interactions of (general) theory with (specific) practice such that each is enriched, extended, and refurbished.
Review
"Needham... contributes insights and arguments that are genuinely new. Striking a rare balance between theory and detailed criticism of literary texts..."
--Choice
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-170)and index.
About the Author
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham is Associate Professor of English at Oberlin College.
Table of Contents
I: In, But Not Of, the West: Repetition, Appropriation, Re-Visions of Dominant (Colonial) Knowledge(s) * Inhabiting the Metropole: C. L. R. James “Grand Narratives” of Resistance and Emancipation * Re-Playing the Indian Subcontinent: Salman Rushdies Method(s) of Critique * II: Return(s) to the Native Land: The Politics of Cultural Nationalism * Reversing Europes Gaze: Ama Ata Aidoos Oppositional Art * “Retracing the African Part of Ourselves”: Blackness as Revolutionary Consciousness and Identity in Michelle Cliff * III: In and Of the Metropole * “A New Way of Being British”: Hanif Kureishis (Necessary) Defense of Mixtures and Heterogeneity