Revising resistance : historical violence in the globalized postcolonial imaginary

dc.contributor.advisorHoad, Neville
dc.contributor.committeeMemberCarter, Mia
dc.contributor.committeeMemberHindman, Heather
dc.contributor.committeeMemberCox, James H
dc.creatorGorman-DaRif, Meghan
dc.creator.orcid0000-0003-1187-5411
dc.date.accessioned2019-06-26T14:39:38Z
dc.date.available2019-06-26T14:39:38Z
dc.date.created2018-12
dc.date.issued2018-12
dc.date.submittedDecember 2018
dc.date.updated2019-06-26T14:39:39Z
dc.description.abstractRevising Resistance: Historical Violence in the Globalized Postcolonial Imaginary examines contemporary Anglophone texts from India and Kenya, focusing on their representations of historical revolutionary violence. I show how this literature navigates between postcolonial romanticization and ethnonationalist nostalgia, to chart a revision of historical resistance narratives that emphasizes complexity and solidarity across the lines of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. The fields of history and anthropology have increasingly focused on demythologizing revolutionary violence and on understanding the roots of contemporary large-scale ethnic and terrorist violence. However, this kind of reevaluation has yet to happen in global Anglophone literary criticism, even though literature presents a uniquely productive site of study because of its narrative capacity to link the historical with the contemporary in its representations of the violence of the dispossessed. Through a comparative south-south analysis of the entangled temporalities of more recent literary representations of the Maoist-inspired Naxalite Movement in India and the anticolonial Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, Revising Resistance argues that this canon productively interrogates the national project, ethnic tensions and their histories, and gender roles in the context of war. In excavating the novels’ investments in solidarity, I articulate how narratives can be read to support a project of healing and unification through alternative histories that value complexity and contradiction over flattening narratives of nostalgia on both ends of the political spectrum.
dc.description.departmentEnglish
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/75003
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/2111
dc.language.isoen
dc.subjectResistance literature
dc.subjectRevolutionary violence
dc.subjectKenyan fiction
dc.subjectIndian fiction
dc.subjectGlobal Anglophone fiction
dc.subjectPostcolonial literature
dc.subjectPostcolonial studies
dc.subjectNaxalite Movement
dc.subjectMau Mau Uprising
dc.titleRevising resistance : historical violence in the globalized postcolonial imaginary
dc.typeThesis
dc.type.materialtext
thesis.degree.departmentEnglish
thesis.degree.disciplineEnglish
thesis.degree.grantorThe University of Texas at Austin
thesis.degree.levelDoctoral
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy

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