This volume presents interdisciplinary linguistic, literary, and cultural studies investigations into the contested concept of ‘community’ in world-wide postcolonial contexts. Five sections contain eighteen papers from the 21st Conference of the Association for the New English Literatures (2010).
Susanne Mühleisen's introduction provides a historical overview of the idea of ‘community’ and delineates the central question of the volume as inquiring into how membership is ‘achieved, manifested, tested and contested’ (xii) in postcolonial diasporas where community boundaries are ambiguous. Robert J. C. Young's paper elaborates on the conflicting conceptualisations of ‘community’. He emphasises the idea of ‘post-identarian’ communities—a ‘community without community’ where affiliations are predicated on shared activity and participation.
The second section leads with Stephanie Hackert's historical discourse analysis of the problematic ideograph of the ‘English native speaker’. She proposes that the native/nonnative speaker binary requires conceptual revision in postcolonial contexts. In her research on the ‘the game of dozens’, Daria Dayter argues how a salient language practice and genre can become constitutive in unifying a community. Creole and pidgin are compared by Mühleisen & Anne Schröder in their study of the factors causing attitudinal shifts. Andrea Moll focuses on the processes of the collective communicative practices of ‘acts of identity’ in creating online communities. By examining the virtual discourse practices on an interactive news website, Eric A. Anchimbe analyses how shared and imagined truths of colonialism and racial injustices constitute in-group and out-group identities. Dagmar Deuber's comparative quantitative-qualitative analysis of Indian tabloids in English and British tabloids illustrates how stylistic choices are used to engender a readership community.
The third section highlights studies in the narrative construction of communities in postcolonial themed texts. In his textual analysis of ‘Confessions of a thug’, Tobias Döring argues that ‘communities can be imagined from within just as from without’ (135). Katja Sarkowsky analyses the ways in which the novel Soucouyant uses extended metaphors to portray individual and collective remembering/forgetting processes in response to shared trauma and guilt in diasporic communities. Similarly, Jochen Petzold explores how the narrative constructions of ‘Hillbrow’, the setting of novels by Ivan Valdislavić and Phaswane Mpe, convey issues of belonging and xenophobia. Aspects of aboriginal storytelling are outlined in Stephan Laqué’s critique of Follow the rabbit-proof fence through demonstrations of the plurimedial features of aboriginal storytelling in juxtaposition to colonialist narratives, as well as the divergent colonial and indigenous meanings of the ‘rabbit-proof fence’ itself. Roman Bartosch draws on ‘literary anthropomorphism’ to illustrate how fictional communities can disrupt essentialist ideas of difference. Susan Arndt's study concludes with a suggested framework for transcultural anglophone studies.
Finally, in the closing sections, the impact of transnational music is examined by Britta Schneider, who addresses issues of reimagining ethnic identities, and Jude Ssepuuma, who examines language change and prestige. Carolyn Cooper's keynote address is reproduced, which discusses the problems of academic authority inherent in ‘in/outsider perspectives’ on homophobia in popular Jamaican music. In response, Caroline Koegler disputes Cooper's views by drawing on ideas of ‘symbolic capital’ and personal authenticators.
This is a dense and broad interdisciplinary anthology offering a range of theoretically contextualised methodologies and analysis on conceptualisations of ‘community’ in postcolonial contexts.
