New Book: Lying on the postcolonial couch by Rukmini Bhaya Nair

A revealing look into the long afterlife of colonial conquest, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch offers an original, overarching concept that informs-and helps to explain-the workings of postcoloniality. This concept, "indifference," is a play on the key critical term "difference." Indifference is a cognitive stance invented during the colonial period for the purpose of organizing the complex domain of the Indian subcontinent, one that created its own brand of poetics. Considering postcoloniality as a symptomatic condition, this book proposes a cure involving a return to buried memories of colonial trauma before the phenomenon itself succumbs to the absolute indifference of the slowly gathering amnesia of the new millennium.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair traces a paper trail beginning in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey, winding through the contentious Mutiny of 1857, and ending with Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses predicament. Along this trail, she uncovers hidden residues of feeling, from guilt and mistrust to wonder and pleasure, and analyzes the linguistic pillars that hold up the institution of bureaucratic indifference that she exposes.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is professor of English and linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

You can find this book and more at the UNT Dallas Library. 

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Rosa Parks Paper Digital Archive: Library of Congress

The Library of Congress announced this month that it has digitized the Papers of Rosa Parks collection. The collection is now accessible as a digital archive available anywhere in the world via the Library of Congress website.

The collection includes 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs. Items span over a century of history but the majority of items center on the 1950's to the 1990's. 

The video goes into greater detail concerning the items accessible through the collection.

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New Book: Tropicopolitans by Srinivas Aravamudan

 In Tropicopolitans Srinivas Aravamudan reconstructs the colonial imagination of the eighteenth century. By exploring representations of peoples and cultures subjected to colonial discourse, he makes a case for the agency—or the capacity to resist domination—of those oppressed. Aravamudan’s analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution reveals the development of anticolonial consciousness prior to the nineteenth century.

“Tropicalization” is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, Addison’s Cato, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Drapier’s Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson’s Rasselas, Beckford’s Vathek, Montagu’s travel letters, Equiano’s autobiography, Burke’s political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency.

Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory.

You can find this book at the UNT Dallas Library.

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Rembrandt Peale's George Washington Porthole Portrait Added to the UNT Dallas Library Collection

The UNT Dallas Library received a life portrait of George Washington at the February 19th Faculty Alliance meeting.

The portrait of Washington, sometimes referred to as the Porthole portrait, was painted by Philadelphian painter Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860). Peale was well known during his lifetime for his portraiture and replicas. His most prominent work was the Porthole portrait which he began in 1795 when he was only 17 years old. Washington sat for nine hours over three days for the portrait, however Peale felt he failed to capture the spirit of Washington during Washington's lifetime. He struggled for over two decades to capture his vision on canvas finally completing the portrait in 1823. The final portrait combines both an accurate portrayal and the ideal mystique of the man who lead the country during both war and peace and who helped establish the firm foundation upon which the government stands today. 

The original hangs in the old Senate Chamber of the United States Capitol, but you can view our copy at the UNT Dallas Library service desk located on the ground floor of building 7400 Founders Hall.

Interested in art? Why not try searching ARTSTOR one of the many art related databases provided to you from the UNT Dallas Library.

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New Book:The Reader, the Text, the Poem by Louise Michelle Rosenblatt

Louise M. Rosenblatt’s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fields—literary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading process—evoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.

You can find this book and more at the UNT Dallas Library.

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