Violence and Transgression in World Minority Literatures

Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, María Herrera-Sobek, Karin Ikas and Francisco A. Lomelí.

This collection of 23 essays by renowned scholars from all five continents aims at examining the ideas of violence and transgression in colonial and post-colonial literatures through a variety of theoretical approaches. The contributors focus on literatures from more than 16 countries, e.g. the U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, South Africa as well as North African and European countries to elucidate the status of minorities within these countries. Most significantly, they contribute to the critical dialogue among peoples around the world who are motivated to articulate and express implied binaries between domination and subjugation, between mainstream and minority cultures. In this regard, the essays discuss the crossing of many geographical, cultural, textual, political, social, and linguistic borders. Although minority literatures might develop an identity of their own, they very much depend on transgressions between cultures and ethnic groups where also power and violent struggles for predominance might be involved. Post-modernity comes to the foreground through various cultural lenses by facilitating dialogues of respective communities in order to understand more thoroughly the fundamental inequalities concerning ethnicity, religion, otherness, hybridity, language(s), history, gender, folklore, media, and other ways of identity construction. The result of these abstractions is a large transnational forum of deliberations to cope with the serious issues of violence and transgression in the Third Millennium. Beside the editors there are among the authors such well-known names as Luis Leal, Ronald Hatch, Walter Göbel, Erhard Reckwitz, Karl Hölz, Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe, Sue Kossew, Donna Coates, Annie Gagiano, Chris van der Merwe, Kerstin Lubitz, Roberto Cantú and many more. In this volume, which dates back to a conference held Oct. 2-4, 2003, at the Centre for Chicano Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, the readers will find a vivid panorama of the cultural interplays in many countries around the globe. XVII,452 Seiten mit 6 Abb., gebunden (Anglistische Forschungen; Vol. 348/Universitätsverlag Winter 2005)