Insurgent Testimonies

• Main Author: Rizzuto, Nicole (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Fordham University Press 2016
• Subjects: Human rights; literature; commonwealth literature (english) history and criticism; war in literature; politics; literature and society$xenglish-speaking countries; nationalism and literature english-speaking countries; nationalism and literature; imperialism in literature; english literature; literature and society; psychic trauma in literature; justice; administration of; in literature; english literature 20th century history and criticism; commonwealth literature (english); Colonialism; England; Modernism; Modernity; Mugo
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, insurgencies erupted in imperial states and colonies around the world, including Britain's. As Nicole Rizzuto shows, the writings of Ukrainian-born Joseph Conrad, Anglo-Irish Rebecca West, Jamaicans H. G. de Lisser and V. S. Reid, and Kenyan Ng gi wa Thiong'o testify to contested events in colonial modernity in ways that question premises underlying approaches in trauma and memory studies and invite us to reassess divisions and classifications in literary studies that generate such categories as modernist, colonial, postcolonial, national, and world literatures. Departing from tenets of modernist studies and from methods in the field of trauma and memory studies, Rizzuto contends that acute as well as chronic disruptions to imperial and national power and the legal and extra-legal responses they inspired shape the formal practices of literatures from the modernist, colonial, and postcolonial periods. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.