Working
and Writing for Tomorrow: Essays in Honour of Itala Vivan
edited
by Annalisa Oboe, Claudia Gualtieri and Roger Bromley
Year of Publication: 2008
The rationale behind this collection of essays is provided by the Saidian notion of the intellectual as a political activist, a cultural interpreter, and a traveller through cultures and worldviews. As the title of the book suggests, being an academic today entails working in the ethical/political field of education and writing (in the sense of doing research and disseminating knowledge) with the sense of being in the world and having a project for tomorrow in mind: a future of beneficial dialogical encounters, critical awareness, and mutual understanding. The key notion of encounter—physical, intellectual, cultural—necessarily permeates the intellectual’s interest in socio-cultural phenomena and transformations, and also the work of this volume’s contributors.
The contributions deal with English, Black-British, North-American, Caribbean, and African literatures and cultures, and postcolonial theory and writing. Their main temporal focus is on the present: they are variously concerned with the here and now, as they analyse complex representations of culture in specific geographic and historical contexts. Special attention to ongoing processes of identity formation and to power relations between hegemonic and marginal discourses and positions is found throughout the collection, so that interesting reading paths across cultural borders can be followed.
This collection is offered as a festschrift on the occasion of Itala Vivan’s retirement from her position as Professor of English Literature and Postcolonial and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan, Italy, and it wishes to celebrate her intense scholarly activity, always carried out with the future in mind.
RETAIL
DETAIL
ISBN
978-1-905510-17-7
(Paperback, 288 pages)
£19.99
(posted free by air to anywhere in the world)
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Annalisa Oboe is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Padua, Italy. Her publications include Fiction, History and Nation in South Africa (1994) and the edited volumes Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections (2008); Approaching Sea Changes: Metamorphoses and Migrations across the Atlantic (2005); and Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo (2003).
Claudia Gualtieri (MA and Ph.D Leeds, UK) specialised in colonial and postcolonial studies. She now lives in Italy and teaches Cultures of the English-Speaking Countries in the Department of Contemporary Languages and Cultures of the University of Milan. She published a number of essays on colonial travel writing, postcolonial cultures and she is the author of Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing (2002).
Roger Bromley holds the Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent History (1988), Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (2000), From Alice to Buena Vista: the Films of Wim Wenders (2001), and co-editor of A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (1995) and A Reader in Cultural Studies (1999).