Ben Etherington
Biographic Data
| ID | 193253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Etherington |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Etherington |
| SIGNATURE | BEN ETHERINGTON |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9588-0175 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Mervyn Morris
This essay considers Mervyn Morris's sustained efforts to decolonize practical criticism. It starts by revisiting the canonical references that play a central role in Morris's early critical intervention, "On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously." These have often been misconstrued by critics who mistake the nature of critical polemic as conducted within the terms of mid-century anglophone criticism. The essay then considers the civic nature of Morr…
Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time , by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann
Caribbean literature of the 1940s has often been overlooked.It came between the first stirrings of the anticolonial public sphere in the 1930s and the rise of Caribbean authors to global prominence in the 1950s.In Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, Katerina Gonzales Seligmann spotlights the 1940s by reading across the literary communities of the Francophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone Caribbean.She argues that a new region-wide literary se…
Edward Said and the Dialectic of the “Imperialized” Intellectual
This essay responds to Timothy Brennan’s recent biography of Edward Said by delving into Said’s relation to Frantz Fanon, who became an important influence in the second half of his career. Particularly, it considers whether Said’s readings and misreadings of Fanon signal a wider break with the latter’s notion of the “colonized intellectual.” Said, it emerges is more an “imperialized” intellectual, whose post-nationalist anti-imperialism is an at…
"The Birth of "Quow
This essay revisits the early phases of the history of poetry written primarily in an anglophone Caribbean Creole by closely examining the circumstances in which the White Guyanese administrator Michael McTurk launched his Creole-speaking persona "Quow." It focuses on an 1870 verse letter to the editor in which McTurk dons the racialized mask of his persona to warn that an inquiry into the abuse of indentured Indian laborers will provoke a violen…
Historical poetics and the problem of exemplarity
Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher
Reviewed by: Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher Ben Etherington Decolonizing Dialectics By George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. At heart, George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics is a study of political identity. The three thinkers on whom he focuses each confront the conundrum of oppressed groups that fail to recognise their political agency, or are stymied in doing so. Georges Sorel, Fr…
The Cambridge Companion to World Literature
The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalizat…
Cambridge Companion to World Literature
An Interview with Ali Cobby Eckermann
Ali Cobby Eckermann, poet and writer, was born on Kaurna country, and grew up on Ngadjuri country in South Australia. She has travelled extensively and lived most of her adult life on Arrernte coun
Unsettled Poetics: Contemporary Australian and South African Poetry
The soul must be the bonessince they're what lasts(Karen Press) Heart of butter, heart of bone(Kate Fagan)For the first time, this Special Issue brings to the attention of Wasafiri's readers two po
An Answer to the Question: What Is Decolonization? Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in a…
Crafts of world literature: Field, material and translation
Field, material, technique: On renewing postcolonial literary criticism
Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthes…
"What is materialism's material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for "world literature
Materialists in postcolonial literary studies can often tend to look past the literary material before them to the "material conditions" that seem the more urgent object of attention. This article argues that the materialist's gaze should be fixed on the literary surface, not as a kind of code for an external material world, but as itself the material profile of the lived experience of need. To this end, the article introduces the concept of "the…
Introduction: Pure Language, Pure Medium
Sound Gazes: Response to William Fitzgerald
This response considers whether it is possible to think of listening as a non-coercive alternative to ‘the gaze’. An attention to the work of ancient and modern thinkers provides a starting point for conceptualizing musical ‘possession’ in a way that is not bound to asymmetrical, subject–object relations
Deafness and Insight: On the Seductions of the Music/Language Analogy
This article contends that close attention to music/language analogies allows us to perceive how language attempts to gain an understanding of its own cognitive nature. The article does so by closely reading Paul de Man's 'The Rhetoric of Blindness', an essay in which de Man suggests that a detailed look at the analogies between musical and linguistic structures made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Essay On the Origin of Languages helps reveal ho…
Field, material, technique: On renewing postcolonial literary criticism
Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthes…
"What is materialism's material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for "world literature
Materialists in postcolonial literary studies can often tend to look past the literary material before them to the "material conditions" that seem the more urgent object of attention. This article argues that the materialist's gaze should be fixed on the literary surface, not as a kind of code for an external material world, but as itself the material profile of the lived experience of need. To this end, the article introduces the concept of "the…
"The Birth of "Quow
This essay revisits the early phases of the history of poetry written primarily in an anglophone Caribbean Creole by closely examining the circumstances in which the White Guyanese administrator Michael McTurk launched his Creole-speaking persona "Quow." It focuses on an 1870 verse letter to the editor in which McTurk dons the racialized mask of his persona to warn that an inquiry into the abuse of indentured Indian laborers will provoke a violen…
An Interview with Ali Cobby Eckermann
Ali Cobby Eckermann, poet and writer, was born on Kaurna country, and grew up on Ngadjuri country in South Australia. She has travelled extensively and lived most of her adult life on Arrernte coun
An Answer to the Question: What Is Decolonization? Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in a…
Crafts of world literature: Field, material and translation
Sound Gazes: Response to William Fitzgerald
This response considers whether it is possible to think of listening as a non-coercive alternative to ‘the gaze’. An attention to the work of ancient and modern thinkers provides a starting point for conceptualizing musical ‘possession’ in a way that is not bound to asymmetrical, subject–object relations
Deafness and Insight: On the Seductions of the Music/Language Analogy
This article contends that close attention to music/language analogies allows us to perceive how language attempts to gain an understanding of its own cognitive nature. The article does so by closely reading Paul de Man's 'The Rhetoric of Blindness', an essay in which de Man suggests that a detailed look at the analogies between musical and linguistic structures made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Essay On the Origin of Languages helps reveal ho…
Introduction: Pure Language, Pure Medium
"What is materialism's material? Thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for "world literature
Materialists in postcolonial literary studies can often tend to look past the literary material before them to the "material conditions" that seem the more urgent object of attention. This article argues that the materialist's gaze should be fixed on the literary surface, not as a kind of code for an external material world, but as itself the material profile of the lived experience of need. To this end, the article introduces the concept of "the…
An Answer to the Question: What Is Decolonization? Frantz Fanon’s the Wretched of the Earth and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason
This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of “dialectical reason”, as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in a…
Crafts of world literature: Field, material and translation
Field, material, technique: On renewing postcolonial literary criticism
Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthes…
An Interview with Ali Cobby Eckermann
Ali Cobby Eckermann, poet and writer, was born on Kaurna country, and grew up on Ngadjuri country in South Australia. She has travelled extensively and lived most of her adult life on Arrernte coun
Unsettled Poetics: Contemporary Australian and South African Poetry
The soul must be the bonessince they're what lasts(Karen Press) Heart of butter, heart of bone(Kate Fagan)For the first time, this Special Issue brings to the attention of Wasafiri's readers two po
The Cambridge Companion to World Literature
The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalizat…
Cambridge Companion to World Literature
Historical poetics and the problem of exemplarity
Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher
Reviewed by: Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher Ben Etherington Decolonizing Dialectics By George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. At heart, George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics is a study of political identity. The three thinkers on whom he focuses each confront the conundrum of oppressed groups that fail to recognise their political agency, or are stymied in doing so. Georges Sorel, Fr…
"The Birth of "Quow
This essay revisits the early phases of the history of poetry written primarily in an anglophone Caribbean Creole by closely examining the circumstances in which the White Guyanese administrator Michael McTurk launched his Creole-speaking persona "Quow." It focuses on an 1870 verse letter to the editor in which McTurk dons the racialized mask of his persona to warn that an inquiry into the abuse of indentured Indian laborers will provoke a violen…
Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time , by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann
Caribbean literature of the 1940s has often been overlooked.It came between the first stirrings of the anticolonial public sphere in the 1930s and the rise of Caribbean authors to global prominence in the 1950s.In Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, Katerina Gonzales Seligmann spotlights the 1940s by reading across the literary communities of the Francophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone Caribbean.She argues that a new region-wide literary se…
Edward Said and the Dialectic of the “Imperialized” Intellectual
This essay responds to Timothy Brennan’s recent biography of Edward Said by delving into Said’s relation to Frantz Fanon, who became an important influence in the second half of his career. Particularly, it considers whether Said’s readings and misreadings of Fanon signal a wider break with the latter’s notion of the “colonized intellectual.” Said, it emerges is more an “imperialized” intellectual, whose post-nationalist anti-imperialism is an at…
Mervyn Morris
This essay considers Mervyn Morris's sustained efforts to decolonize practical criticism. It starts by revisiting the canonical references that play a central role in Morris's early critical intervention, "On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously." These have often been misconstrued by critics who mistake the nature of critical polemic as conducted within the terms of mid-century anglophone criticism. The essay then considers the civic nature of Morr…
Art (10 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · History (5 works)