Social invisibility and diasporas in Anglophone literature and culture : the fractal gaze / Françoise Král, Professor, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, France.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kral, Françoise, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Commonwealth literature (English)--History and criticism.

Commonwealth literature (English).

Social classes in literature.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Cultural fusion in literature.

Women and literature--Commonwealth countries.

Women and literature.

Commonwealth countries.

Physical Description:

xi, 230 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, [2014]

Summary:

In "Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture", this book theorizes the differential visibility of diasporic communities and the way their in/visibility has evolved at the turn of the 21st century, partly as a consequence of the development of new media. Its transdisciplinary focus combines social sciences and, in particular, sociology with media studies and examines a large spectrum of issues related to in/visibility through the prism of a corpus of contemporary cultural productions, which include films by major film directors (Mira Nair, Gurinder Chadha), visual artists (Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum, Keith Piper) and novelists (Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie and Sam Selvon) as well as emerging voices (Hari Kunzru, Kiran Desai). The book maps the trajectory of diasporas in and out of social visibility and focuses more specifically on the less visible migrants, whose voices are often unheard or silenced. This paradoxical invisibility in our days of hypervisibility is interpreted by the author as an epiphenomenon of the increasingly differential visibility which is brought about in a world where the media have become ubiquitous and where visibility has become fractal.

Contents:

Part I: Theorizing invisibility studies. 1. Mapping the Invisible: Critical Perspectives on Invisibility ; 2. Space, Discourse and Visibility: Towards a Phenomenology of Invisibility

Part II: Artistic scenes of visibility. 3. Visibility, Representation and Agency in the Visual Arts: the Body in Question ; 4. Films and Mass Visibility

Part III: sites of invisibility. 5. Nation Building and Home Thinking ; 6. Invisibility and the Fractal City.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 208-226) and index.

ISBN:

9781349486380

1349486388

OCLC:

1037021829