By Dennis Walder
This book offers an unique and proficient critique of a common, but usually misunderstood, — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting humans throughout nationwide, historic, and private limitations. Walder analyses the writings of a few of these entangled within the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a typical id and a place of birth, and their struggles to recuperate their histories. via a chain of comparative reflections upon the illustration in literary and comparable cultural sorts of reminiscence, he indicates how admitting the previous into the current via nostalgia permits former colonial or diasporic matters to achieve a deeper realizing of the networks of strength in which they're stuck within the sleek global, and past which it may well but be attainable to maneuver. contemplating authors as various as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in addition to models of "Bushman" music, Walder pursues the usually wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia because it has been represented past, but in addition inside, Europe, with a view to determine a few of these strategies of communal and person event that represent the current and, via implication, the long run.
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Extra info for Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, 31)
Example text
Naipaul’s vision of the struggles of his protagonists and alter egos to fi nd themselves in relation to both past and present involves a level of alienation, violence, and despair that contrasts sharply with Narayan’s quietly affi rmative view of the continuing validity of Hindu mythology in the present, whatever complexities Narayan may reveal in relation to his Anglophone inheritance. It is difficult to imagine Naipaul’s writing supporting a narrator who, like Narayan’s English teacher, ends up communicating with his dead wife, a wife who appears to him in person at the end of his narrative so that, in the epiphanic words of the concluding paragraph of The English Teacher, We stood at the window, gazing on a slender, red streak over the eastern rim of the earth.
G. Sebald. Sebald is not much studied by postcolonial theorists or critics, but the issues his work raises concerning the literary mediation of what I call the ‘hidden endings’ of empire, are highly pertinent. Sebald’s work expresses a preoccupation with memory, nostalgia, and exile grounded in a deep knowledge of the multiple histories, including colonial histories, that haunt us in the present. In works like The Emigrants (1993), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) he shows how the histories of the present are inextricably interwoven with memories from within and beyond Europe to an extent that makes most writing today appear provincial.
A cool breeze lapped our faces. The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy—a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death. The boundaries of Naipaul’s characters never ‘dissolve’—except perhaps as a sign of mental breakdown, for instance in the central (Green Vale) section of his third novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), when the disintegration of the eponymous Biswas’ character takes the reader into another, non-realist realm. But apart from such moments, Naipaul’s characters are distinct in their often precarious apartness; nor does his kind of realism allow for an acceptance of the kind of collective, remembered (rather than merely recalled) 28 Postcolonial Nostalgias fantasy or myth apparent in Narayan (or Caribbean contemporaries such as Wilson Harris).