Bodies and Voices: The Force-Field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies

Book: Bodies and Voices: The Force-Field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Edited by: Merete Falck Borch, Eva Rask Knudsen, Martin Leer and Bruce Clunies Ross (English)
Published by: Rodopi, 2008

Attempting to explore the power of ‘representation’, its forms, as well as its theoretical interpretations, this book consists of a collection of essays on the readings of the body in contemporary literary and socio-anthropological discourse — from slavery, to rape, to female genital mutilation, from clothing, ocular pornography, voice, deformation and transmutation to the imprisoned, dismembered, remembered, abducted or ghostly body — in Africa, Australasia and the Pacific, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Eire. The volume focuses on literature and its genres to understand the potency of mediums, of embodiment and voicing, of dialogue and dialectic.

For example, the book speaks of the importance of “material bodies” and draws connection with the project of contemporary Maori writing, which reflects the agenda of Third-World writing today— to rewrite colonial and pre contact indigenous histories by drawing on lost or forgotten cultural resources. In the case of the Maori writing traditions, these include memory, oral stories, Polynesian mythology and spirituality. As Toni Morrison says, the aim is “To bear witness to a history that is unrecorded, untaught, in mainstream education, and to enlighten our people.” This includes critiquing those nineteenth-century imperialist discourses that draw on stereotypes of the native as Other, as primitive, a savage, or a child.” (Pg. 268)