G Huggan
Biographic Data
| ID | 40809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Huggan |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Huggan |
| SIGNATURE | HUGGAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3375-1033 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 74 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Indigeneity, Mobility, and the Stakes of World Literature
This article charts the relationship between “indigeneity” and “mobility,” assessing its salience for contemporary World Literature. The argument positions, and critically interrogates, Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book as a “worldly” Indigenous text. Through three nested analytical tropes – “mobile bodies,” “multispecies Dreamings,” and “moving worlds” – the analysis reveals the precariousness of categories through which the…
More-Than-Human
What Are Conservation Humanities? Preliminary Reflections on an Emerging Paradigm
It is increasingly acknowledged that one of the primary tasks of the humanities today is to engage with environmental issues: all the more so in light of the Anthropocene, which underlines significant—indeed transformative—human influence on the planet, even as it reiterates that humans are themselves shaped by ecological processes, at least some of which are beyond their control (N [...]
Creating Corridors for Nature Protection
This article seeks to provoke by linking two apparently contradictory perspectives on conservation in Europe. On the one hand, in light of the consistent failures of biodiversity protection measures to live up to the ambition of conservation policy, national parks can be seen as historical relics that are no longer fit for purpose. Conservation urgently requires forms of geographical and political connectivity that do not stop at national borders…
From the Serengeti to the Bavarian Forest, and back again
This short piece focuses on the work of the German “celebrity conservationist,” Bernhard Grzimek, situating it in the context of historical and contemporary debates about the political and ecological importance of national parks. Grzimek’s role in the creation of Bavarian Forest National Park may not be as well-known as his public ministrations on behalf of the wild animals of the Serengeti, but in several ways his work in and for these two natio…
The Gospel According to Ah Meng
This essay reflects on the story of probably the world’s most famous captive orangutan, Ah Meng, who died in 2008 but has since been “replaced” by her granddaughter, Ishta, who took over as the “new face” of Singapore Zoo in 2016. Ah Meng’s story is interesting for what it conceals and what it reveals, including the recent history of wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia, for which Singapore – despite its conservationist credentials – acts as an…
Australian landscape memoir as conservationist vehicle
In this essay, we propose to study three recent Australian landscape memoirs - Tim Winton's Island Home (2015), Mark Tredinnick's The Blue Plateau (2009) and Germaine Greer's White Beech (2013) - all of which demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to act as perceptual conduits for the fundamental tension between world and self. Our main contention is that landscape memoir acts as a pre-eminent vehicle for this tension, which is captured across di…
Writing Cyprus
Writing Cyprus brings together postcolonial and partition studies to look at the recent as well as more distant history of Cyprus as a ‘strategically located Mediterranean island that has had a dis
Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic
This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have a…
Affective Animals
British animal writing is among the most popular of its kind in the world, including such household names as Williamson, Maxwell, and Durrell. It is hardly reassuring, however, for either younger or older readers. Drawing on some recent examples mostly written after the Second World War, this essay makes the case for modern British animal writing as a genre less likely to reveal our capacity to reach out to nonhuman others than to comment –– some…
Killers
Orcas are among the world's most charismatic animals, combining grace and power, violent when they need to be, but rarely toward humans and never in the wild. Attacks on humans have been restricted to captive orcas, opening up widespread discussions on the ethics of marine-mammal captivity and prompting major changes to the North American orca-display industry, as represented by corporate giants such as SeaWorld. Orcas are now more likely to be f…
Introduction
Travel writing from black Australia
"Travel writing from black Australia: utopia, melancholia, and aboriginality." Studies in Travel Writing, 20(4), pp. 424–425
Reevaluating the Postcolonial City
This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We 10 suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other 'Others', examining Caryl Phillips’ case study of the migrant David Ol…
Last whales
Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist c…
A Beginning, Two Ends, and a Thickened Middle
This article looks at three disparate travel texts—Robert Byron's classic 1937 travelogue The Road to Oxiana, Khaled Hosseini's massively popular 2003 novel The Kite Runner, and Michael Winterbottom's emotionally wrenching 2002 fauxdocumentary In This World—which deal, either directly or indirectly, with Afghanistan. It argues that the geographical coordinates of Afghanistan have recently been confused with the “War on Terror,” and that one of th…
The Plurality of Risk
General Introduction
The General Introduction to the Handbook makes the case for postcolonialism as a committed mode of revisionist knowledge, both rigorously aware and resolutely adversarial, that dedicates itself to the service of human freedom in the context of a world historically conditioned by colonial relations of power. Beginning with a brief discussion of the recent events of the Arab Spring, the Introduction argues that, far from turning its back on its own…
Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony
This essay discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and in literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. The author introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The images and motifs that are mediated by such disaster writings, it is further argued, easily become the object of t…
Australian Literature
Australian literature, race and the politics of location 2. Beginning Again 3. Interrogating Whiteness 4. Multiculturalism and its Discontents Afterword
Green Postcolonialism
The incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards catastrophically resulted in genocide or the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples across the globe. It also caused drastic changes in extra-European temperate as well as tropical environments. As Alfred Crosby argues, environmental impact in the form of disease human, plant and animal forest felling, the casual or systematic slaughter of…
(Not) Reading Orientalism
Since its publication in the late 1970s, Orientalism has been subject to a wide variety of not always friendly interpretations, prompting Edward Said to offer one or two additions, correctives, and sideswipes of his own. This essay looks—highly selectively, as it must—at recent patterns of reception for Orientalism, arguing that the book has been "re-Orientalized" by its readers, and might even be considered to be Orientalist itself. The essay wi…
The Postcolonial Exotic
Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by whi…
Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity
(2002). Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 245-275
Human pigmentation genes
The synthesis of the visible pigment melanin by the melanocyte cell is the basis of the human pigmentary system, those genes directing the formation, transport and distribution of the specialised melanosome organelle in which melanin accumulates can legitimately be called pigmentation genes. The genes involved in this process have been identified through comparative genomic studies of mouse coat colour mutations and by the molecular characterisat…
Green Postcolonialism
The incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards catastrophically resulted in genocide or the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples across the globe. It also caused drastic changes in extra-European temperate as well as tropical environments. As Alfred Crosby argues, environmental impact in the form of disease human, plant and animal forest felling, the casual or systematic slaughter of…
(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis
Situating itself at interface between critical theory and cultural studies, this article addresses theoretical problem of relationship between mimicry and mimesis, two terms which are often seen as being virtually interchangeable but which may, as I shall argue here, have different cultural functions. Its point of departure, however, is so-called cultural studies project, whose twin imperatives are, first, to redefine culture not as privileged do…
A Tale of Two Parrots
T _ his essay is about parrots in Caribbean literature-a subject which might easily appear facetious, or frivolous, or both. But far from being silly gimmicks or prosaic decorations, parrots serve a crucial function in several Caribbean texts as metaphors for the process of colonial mimicry. Mimicry, I shall argue, is a strategy by which Caribbean writers of different backgrounds seek to interrogate the European and cultural traditions which not …
Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity
(2002). Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 245-275
Philomela's Retold Story
Australian landscape memoir as conservationist vehicle
In this essay, we propose to study three recent Australian landscape memoirs - Tim Winton's Island Home (2015), Mark Tredinnick's The Blue Plateau (2009) and Germaine Greer's White Beech (2013) - all of which demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to act as perceptual conduits for the fundamental tension between world and self. Our main contention is that landscape memoir acts as a pre-eminent vehicle for this tension, which is captured across di…
Killers
Orcas are among the world's most charismatic animals, combining grace and power, violent when they need to be, but rarely toward humans and never in the wild. Attacks on humans have been restricted to captive orcas, opening up widespread discussions on the ethics of marine-mammal captivity and prompting major changes to the North American orca-display industry, as represented by corporate giants such as SeaWorld. Orcas are now more likely to be f…
Last whales
Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist c…
A Beginning, Two Ends, and a Thickened Middle
This article looks at three disparate travel texts—Robert Byron's classic 1937 travelogue The Road to Oxiana, Khaled Hosseini's massively popular 2003 novel The Kite Runner, and Michael Winterbottom's emotionally wrenching 2002 fauxdocumentary In This World—which deal, either directly or indirectly, with Afghanistan. It argues that the geographical coordinates of Afghanistan have recently been confused with the “War on Terror,” and that one of th…
Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony
This essay discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and in literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. The author introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The images and motifs that are mediated by such disaster writings, it is further argued, easily become the object of t…
Unsettled settlers
Philomela's Retold Story
Some Recent Australian Fictions in the Age of Tourism
Exile, expatriation, migration, travel: a rhetoric of restlessness has underpinned Australia's chimerical search for national selfhood. Torn between the need for definition and the desire to elude it, generations of Australians have sensed that they might better understand their country, or themselves, by leaving it. And leave it they have, in their droves; in 1991, over two million Australians- more than 10% of the total population - left the co…
Anthropologists and Other Frauds
The native point of view ... is not an ethnographic fact only, is not a hermeneutic construct primarily or even principally; it is in large measure a continuing, protracted, and sustained adversarial resistance to the discipline and the praxis of anthropology (as representation of outside power) itself, anthropology not as textuality but as an often direct agent of political dominance. Edward Said
A Tale of Two Parrots
T _ his essay is about parrots in Caribbean literature-a subject which might easily appear facetious, or frivolous, or both. But far from being silly gimmicks or prosaic decorations, parrots serve a crucial function in several Caribbean texts as metaphors for the process of colonial mimicry. Mimicry, I shall argue, is a strategy by which Caribbean writers of different backgrounds seek to interrogate the European and cultural traditions which not …
Canada
(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis
Situating itself at interface between critical theory and cultural studies, this article addresses theoretical problem of relationship between mimicry and mimesis, two terms which are often seen as being virtually interchangeable but which may, as I shall argue here, have different cultural functions. Its point of departure, however, is so-called cultural studies project, whose twin imperatives are, first, to redefine culture not as privileged do…
Tourists with Typewriters
Human pigmentation genes
The synthesis of the visible pigment melanin by the melanocyte cell is the basis of the human pigmentary system, those genes directing the formation, transport and distribution of the specialised melanosome organelle in which melanin accumulates can legitimately be called pigmentation genes. The genes involved in this process have been identified through comparative genomic studies of mouse coat colour mutations and by the molecular characterisat…
Unsettled settlers
The Postcolonial Exotic
Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by whi…
Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity
(2002). Postcolonial studies and the anxiety of interdisciplinarity. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 245-275
(Not) Reading Orientalism
Since its publication in the late 1970s, Orientalism has been subject to a wide variety of not always friendly interpretations, prompting Edward Said to offer one or two additions, correctives, and sideswipes of his own. This essay looks—highly selectively, as it must—at recent patterns of reception for Orientalism, arguing that the book has been "re-Orientalized" by its readers, and might even be considered to be Orientalist itself. The essay wi…
Australian Literature
Australian literature, race and the politics of location 2. Beginning Again 3. Interrogating Whiteness 4. Multiculturalism and its Discontents Afterword
Green Postcolonialism
The incursion of Europeans into other areas of the world from the fifteenth century onwards catastrophically resulted in genocide or the dispossession and marginalization of indigenous peoples across the globe. It also caused drastic changes in extra-European temperate as well as tropical environments. As Alfred Crosby argues, environmental impact in the form of disease human, plant and animal forest felling, the casual or systematic slaughter of…
Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony
This essay discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and in literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. The author introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The images and motifs that are mediated by such disaster writings, it is further argued, easily become the object of t…
General Introduction
The General Introduction to the Handbook makes the case for postcolonialism as a committed mode of revisionist knowledge, both rigorously aware and resolutely adversarial, that dedicates itself to the service of human freedom in the context of a world historically conditioned by colonial relations of power. Beginning with a brief discussion of the recent events of the Arab Spring, the Introduction argues that, far from turning its back on its own…
A Beginning, Two Ends, and a Thickened Middle
This article looks at three disparate travel texts—Robert Byron's classic 1937 travelogue The Road to Oxiana, Khaled Hosseini's massively popular 2003 novel The Kite Runner, and Michael Winterbottom's emotionally wrenching 2002 fauxdocumentary In This World—which deal, either directly or indirectly, with Afghanistan. It argues that the geographical coordinates of Afghanistan have recently been confused with the “War on Terror,” and that one of th…
The Plurality of Risk
Reevaluating the Postcolonial City
This foreword begins with a survey of the field of postcolonial studies, from its points of departure to its current situation and future directions. We 10 suggest that the field has long sought to problematize borders, particularly those that separate academic disciplines. The foreword also highlights the material consequences of border crossing for people of colour and other 'Others', examining Caryl Phillips’ case study of the migrant David Ol…
Last whales
Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist c…
Introduction
Travel writing from black Australia
"Travel writing from black Australia: utopia, melancholia, and aboriginality." Studies in Travel Writing, 20(4), pp. 424–425
Killers
Orcas are among the world's most charismatic animals, combining grace and power, violent when they need to be, but rarely toward humans and never in the wild. Attacks on humans have been restricted to captive orcas, opening up widespread discussions on the ethics of marine-mammal captivity and prompting major changes to the North American orca-display industry, as represented by corporate giants such as SeaWorld. Orcas are now more likely to be f…
Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic
This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have a…
Affective Animals
British animal writing is among the most popular of its kind in the world, including such household names as Williamson, Maxwell, and Durrell. It is hardly reassuring, however, for either younger or older readers. Drawing on some recent examples mostly written after the Second World War, this essay makes the case for modern British animal writing as a genre less likely to reveal our capacity to reach out to nonhuman others than to comment –– some…
History (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Art (13 works) · History (12 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Geography (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works)