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As if in direct response to The New Yorker's question of "The Power of the Pen: Does Literature Change Anything?" Kimberly Nance takes up the relationship between ethics and literature. With the 40th anniversary of the testimonio occurring in 2006, there has never been a better time to reconsider its role in achieving social justice. The advent of the testimonio--loosely, a political autobiography of a Latin American activist who hopes, through the telling of her life story, to bring about change--was met with a great deal of excitement by scholars who posited it as a radical new form of literature. Those accolades were almost immediately followed by a series of critical problems. In what sense were testimonios "true"? What right did privileged scholars in the U.S. have to engage accounts of suffering with traditional modes of criticism? Were questions of veracity or aesthetics more important? Were these texts autobiography or political screeds? It seemed critics didn't know quite what to make of the testimonio and so, after a brief bout of engagement, disregarded it. Nance, however, argues that any form as prolific as the testimonio is well worth examining and that these questions, rather than being insurmountable, are exactly the questions with which scholars ought to be wrestling. If, as critics claim, that the testimonio is one of the most pervasive contemporary Latin American cultural genres, then it is high time for a comprehensive study of the genre such as Nance's.
This book examines the prominent place a commitment to social justice and equity has occupied in the global history of literary journalism. With international case studies, it explores and theorizes the way literary journalists have addressed inequality and its consequences in their practice. In the process, this volume focuses on the critical attitude the writers of this genre bring to their stories, the immersive reporting they use to gain detailed and intimate knowledge of their subjects, and the array of innovative rhetorical strategies through which they represent those encounters. The contributors explain how these strategies encourage readers to respond to injustices of class, race, indigeneity, gender, mobility, and access to knowledge. Together, they make the case that, throughout its history, literary journalism has proven uniquely well adapted to fusing facts with feeling in a way which makes it a compelling force for social change.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice is a comprehensive and multi- purpose collection on this important topic. With contributors working in various fields, the Companion provides in- depth analyses of both the cumulative and emergent issues, obstacles, praxes, propositions, and theories of social justice. The first section offers a historical overview of major developments and debates in the field, while the following sections look in more detail at the key traditions and show how literature and theory can be applied as analytical tools to real- world inequalities and the impact of doing so. The contributors provide reviews of major theoretical traditions, including Marxism, feminism, Critical Race Theory, disability studies, and queer studies. They also share literary analyses of influential authors including W. E. B. Du Bois, Yang Kui, Edwidge Danticat, Octavia Butler, and Rivers Solomon amongst others. The final section considers future possibilities for theory and action of justice, drawing specifically from theories and knowledges in decolonial, Indigenous, environmental, and posthumanist studies. This authoritative volume draws on the intersections between literary studies and social movements in order to provide scholars, students, and activists alike with a complete collection of the most up- to- date information on both canonical and emerging texts and case studies globally.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between masquerade and social justice in Latin American fiction.
Challenging the notion that Central American literature is a marginal space within Latin American literary and world literary production, this collection positions and discusses Central American literature within the recently revived debates on world literature. This groundbreaking volume draws on new scholarship on global, transnational, postcolonial, translational, and sociological perspectives on the region's literature, expanding and challenging these debates by focusing on the heterogenous literatures of Central America and its diasporas. Contributors discuss poems, testimonios, novels, and short stories in relation to center-periphery, cosmopolitan, and Internationalist paradigms. Central American Literatures as World Literature explores the multiple ways in which Central American literature goes beyond or against the confines of the nation-state, especially through the indigenous, Black, and migrant voices.
In the richly interdisciplinary study, Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms, Cara Fabre argues that popular culture in its many forms contributes to common assumptions about the causes, and personal and social implications, of addiction. Recent fictional depictions of addiction significantly refute the idea that addiction is caused by poor individual choices or solely by disease through the connections the authors draw between substance use and poverty, colonialism, and gender-based violence. With particular interest in the pervasive myth of the “Drunken Indian", Fabre asserts that these novels reimagine addiction as social suffering rather than individual pathology or moral failure. Fabre builds on the growing body of humanities research that brings literature into active engagement with other fields of study including biomedical and cognitive behavioural models of addiction, medical and health policies of harm reduction, and the practices of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book further engages with critical pedagogical strategies to teach critical awareness of stereotypes of addiction and to encourage the potential of literary analysis as a form of social activism.
Looking at the work of Junot Díaz, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and other Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Through storytelling, these writers create community and a sense of peoplehood that includes non-citizen Latino/as. This volume also foregrounds the narratives of unauthorized migrants themselves, showing how their stories are emerging into the public sphere. Immigration and citizenship are multifaceted issues, and the voices are myriad. They challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. Yet these texts all seek to affect political discourse by advancing the possibility of empathy across lines of ethnicity and citizenship status. As border enforcement strategies escalate along with political rhetoric, detentions, and deaths, these counternarratives are more significant than ever before, and their perspectives cannot be ignored. What we are witnessing, argues Caminero-Santangelo, is a mass mobilization of stories. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
This hugely popular A-Z guide provides a comprehensive overview of the issues which characterize post-colonialism: explaining what it is, where it is encountered and the crucial part it plays in debates about race, gender, politics, language and identity. For this third edition over thirty new entries have been added including: Cosmopolitanism Development Fundamentalism Nostalgia Post-colonial cinema Sustainability Trafficking World Englishes. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts remains an essential guide for anyone studying this vibrant field.
Without proper training on the intricacies of race and culture, pre-service and in-service teachers may unwittingly continue outdated and ineffective pedagogies. As the demographics of student bodies shift to include more diverse backgrounds, fluency in the discourse of social justice becomes necessary. The Handbook of Research on Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence and Social Justice in Teacher Education elucidates the benefits, challenges, and strategies necessary to prepare teachers to meet the needs of a diverse student body. Featuring the newest research and pedagogical tools written by diverse scholars in the field of teacher training, this expertly crafted handbook is ideal for teachers, administrators, students of education, and policymakers.