Bill Ashcroft
Biographic Data
| ID | 94052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bill Ashcroft |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bill |
| FAMILY NAME | Ashcroft |
| SIGNATURE | ASHCROFT B |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2447-2710 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts
Now in its fourth edition, this popular A-Z guide provides a comprehensive overview of the issues which characterize postcolonialism: explaining what it is, where it is encountered and the crucial part it plays in debates about race, gender, politics, language and identity. Fully revised and updated, the fourth edition contains more than 30 new entries, including: Anthropocene Biopolitics Decoloniality Ecocriticism Global South Postcolonial scien…
Re-writing India
For most critics, and possibly for most readers, contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981. The following decades have witnessed the growth of a literature that has been outwardlooking, confident and increasingly widely read. It is arguable that in that time the Indian literary diaspora has had a greater impact on English Literature than writing f…
Transculturality and the contingency of belonging
The increasing mobility of world populations has disturbed the perception of national cultures as immovable, sedentary and ancestral. A constant tension has arisen between the bordering practices of nation states and the actual diversity of the cultures round which their fences are built. The most destructive force of modern times, the force that keeps borders in place is nationalism. As nationalism proliferates, violence increases because the na…
Sacred in the Secular: Francis Webb’s Incarnational Poetry
Francis Webb’s poetry places the significance of Jesus firmly in the miracle of the incarnation, a moment that symbolises the presence of Christ in all creation, a presence summed up in the lines ‘The tiny not the immense / Will teach our groping eyes’. Drawing energy out of the Thomist tradition and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Webb demonstrates a belief in the presence of Jesus in the quotidian, proximate aspects of existence, a belief he …
Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial theory (or often post‐colonial theory) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies and those societies' responses. The study of the controlling power of representation in colonized societies began in the 1950s with the work of Frantz Fanon and reached a climax in the late 1970s with Edward Said's Orientalism . This study led to the development of the colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Gay…
Constitution Hill: Memory, ideology and utopia
The opening of the Constitutional Court on the 21st March 2004 in Johannesburg was an eventful national day, because, built on the site of the notorious Number 4 prison, the Court symbolized the intention to build a just future out of the memory of oppression. The incorporation of existing prison buildings and materials in the new court building reinforced the discourse of rebuilding and reconciliation that was to characterise the new nation stat…
Magda Meets Theodora: Language and Interiority in *The Aunt’s Story* and *In The Heart of the Country
In â Orders of Discourseâ Foucault raises the deeply embedded opposition between reason and folly: â From the depths of the Middle Ages a man was mad if his speech could not be said to form part of the common discourse of menâ . This discursive rule becomes magnified in the case of women and of the colonised. In Coetzeeâ s In the Heart of the Country and Patrick Whiteâ s The Auntâ s Story, Magda and Theodora demonstrate the precarious marginality…
Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures
postcolonial. literatures. While Europe looked for utopias located in the \nshimmering distance the distinctive feature of postcolonial utopias was the \ndominance of utopianism over utopia, because while utopias provided particular \nmodels of
Archipelago of dreams: Utopianism in Caribbean literature
The Caribbean is often considered to be the dysfunctional result of the twin catastrophes of colonialism and the sugar industry but it has become the most vibrant example of postcolonial transformation. Caribbean literature, owing to its radical creolisation of the English language has been at the forefront of the innovative production of Caribbean culture and a major factor in the region's capacity for future thinking. Rejecting nostalgia for an…
The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures
The production of Anglophone texts by postcolonial writers has often raised the issue of translation. This article argues that the transformation of English in the postcolonial text may be seen as a form of 'inner translation' in which the text is both source and target. More importantly the postcolonial author produces a culturally significant text by various strategies of appropriation and transformation that act as metonymic of the source cult…
Colonialism (Neocolonialism)
The term colonialism describes a dominant form of cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years. Although many earlier civilizations had colonies, and although they perceived their relations with them to be one of a central imperium in relation to a periphery of provincial, marginal, and barbarian cultures, a number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the post‐Renaissance practices of im…
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism (or, often, post‐colonialism) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. Unlike “colonialism,” this term is of much more recent provenance, emerging in the late 1970s to describe a range of literary and cultural analysis of colonized and formerly colonized societies. As originally used by historians after World War II in terms such as “the postcolonial state,” “postcolonial” had a chronological meaning, desi…
Towards a postcolonial aesthetics
Aesthetic theory has often been regarded with suspicion by postcolonial theorists who see aesthetics as implicated in the canonical marginalization of postcolonial literatures. This article approaches the idea of a postcolonial aesthetics from the point of view of the transformative exchange that occurs in the "contact zone" of the transcultural text. Debates about aesthetics revolve around its status as either an ideology or a stimulus, universa…
Conflict and Transformation
The Twentieth Century was the most violent in history and prepared the way for the conflict with which this century has already been marked. Conflict comes in various forms but ultimately it is about power: a struggle for power or a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. The argument of this paper is that art and literature, far more than the language of politics, have the capacity to speak to power by speaking beyond it. They do this f…
African futures: The necessity of utopia
This article examines the utopian vision of much African writing as the dynamic of hope generated in anticolonial struggle continues to characterise contemporary poetry and novels. The premise is that utopia is necessary, not as mere wishful thinking but as willed action, because, according to Paul Ricoeur, utopia is the ‘no place’, the only place from which ideology can be countered. This means that utopia is the only place from which the discou…
Re-writing India
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
This hugely popular A-Z guide provides a comprehensive overview of the issues which characterize post-colonialism: explaining what it is, where it is encountered and the crucial part it plays in debates about race, gender, politics, language and identity. For this third edition over thirty new entries have been added including: Cosmopolitanism Development Fundamentalism Nostalgia Post-colonial cinema Sustainability Trafficking World Englishes. Po…
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
This best selling key guide, now in its second edition, provides an essential key to understanding the issues which characterize post-colonialism; explaining what it is, where it is encountered and why it is crucial in forging new cultural identities. As a subject, post-colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism, gender, politics and language. Key topics covered include: Borderlands Transnational literatures Ne…
Including China: Bei Dao, resistance and the imperial state
This article suggest how we might include China in postcolonial studies. Despite its lingering sense of victimization by the West, China's peculiar manifestation of continental imperial power upon its 55 ethnic cultures makes it amenable to a post-colonial reading. But the case of the Bei Dao and the ‘misty poets’ shows how imperial power is threatened by a form of literary resistance, developed through a new language and an annoyingly obscure li…
L’Empire vous répond: Théories et pratiques des littératures post-coloniales
Voici la traduction en français d’un essai dont la version originale anglophone, The Empire Writes Back, a rencontré depuis sa parution en 1989 un écho considérable dans le monde des lettres et même au-delà. De façon stimulante, les trois chercheurs associés dans cette entreprise y ont en effet synthétisé et théorisé le concept devenu célèbre de post-colonialité. Celui-ci rend compte à la fois de l’impact déterminant des grandes colonisations eur…
Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century
Literature for Our Times offers the widest range of essays on present and future directions in postcolonial studies ever gathered together in one volume. Demonstrating the capacity of different approaches and methodologies to ‘live together’ in a spirit of ‘convivial democracy’, these essays range widely across regions, genres, and themes to suggest the many different directions in which the field is moving. Beginning with an engagement with glob…
Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city
The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it …
Caliban's Voice: The transformation of English in post-colonial literatures
Introduction 1. Prospero's Language, Caliban's Voice 2. Language, Learning and Power 3. Language and Race 4. Language and Place 5. Language and Identity 6. Language, Culture and Meaning: the Caribbean 7. Caliban's Books - Orality and Writing 8. How Books Talk 9. Translation and Transformation Bibliography
Remembering the future: Utopianism in African literature
Edward Said
Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of the landmark study Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies, and for his controversial journalism on the Palestinian political situation. Looking at the context and the impact of Said's scholarship and journalism, this book examines Said's key ideas, including: the significance of 'worldliness', 'amateurism', 'secular cri…
Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city
The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it …
Language and Race
Towards a postcolonial aesthetics
Aesthetic theory has often been regarded with suspicion by postcolonial theorists who see aesthetics as implicated in the canonical marginalization of postcolonial literatures. This article approaches the idea of a postcolonial aesthetics from the point of view of the transformative exchange that occurs in the "contact zone" of the transcultural text. Debates about aesthetics revolve around its status as either an ideology or a stimulus, universa…
Critical utopias
Remembering the future: Utopianism in African literature
Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis
Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant cu…
Archipelago of dreams: Utopianism in Caribbean literature
The Caribbean is often considered to be the dysfunctional result of the twin catastrophes of colonialism and the sugar industry but it has become the most vibrant example of postcolonial transformation. Caribbean literature, owing to its radical creolisation of the English language has been at the forefront of the innovative production of Caribbean culture and a major factor in the region's capacity for future thinking. Rejecting nostalgia for an…
Constitution Hill: Memory, ideology and utopia
The opening of the Constitutional Court on the 21st March 2004 in Johannesburg was an eventful national day, because, built on the site of the notorious Number 4 prison, the Court symbolized the intention to build a just future out of the memory of oppression. The incorporation of existing prison buildings and materials in the new court building reinforced the discourse of rebuilding and reconciliation that was to characterise the new nation stat…
Conflict and Transformation
The Twentieth Century was the most violent in history and prepared the way for the conflict with which this century has already been marked. Conflict comes in various forms but ultimately it is about power: a struggle for power or a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. The argument of this paper is that art and literature, far more than the language of politics, have the capacity to speak to power by speaking beyond it. They do this f…
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
Realer than the Real’: Francis Webb’s 'Ward Two
Ward Two' has long been one of Francis Webb's best known poems, if not the best known, due to the coherence lent it by the hospital metaphor and its finely modulated development of emotional experience. But like most of his poetry, it is difficult to see where the poem takes us until we identify the position of the poem in the context of his work, and the received systems of philosophy and metaphysics which it explores. One of the central themes …
Centre of Fierceness: Francis Webb’s Vision of the Artist
The recent death of Francis Webb has left a body of work that is unique in circumstance, stature, and conception in Australian poetry. There are many avenues open to the person eager to plumb the depths of this magnificent talent, but the most central and comprehensive view of the poetry lies in an examination of Webb's conception of the role of the creative artist, and the relationship of the artist to his art
Realer than the Real’: Francis Webb’s 'Ward Two
Ward Two' has long been one of Francis Webb's best known poems, if not the best known, due to the coherence lent it by the hospital metaphor and its finely modulated development of emotional experience. But like most of his poetry, it is difficult to see where the poem takes us until we identify the position of the poem in the context of his work, and the received systems of philosophy and metaphysics which it explores. One of the central themes …
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoreti…
The Language of Music: Helen Garner’s *The Children’s Bach
All Garner's novels and stories present female experience as a discourse of the possible rather than a narrative of simple conflict although this possibility always hinges on the dialectical resolution of contradictions. The Children's Bach focusses this discourse, along with its view of love and power, on women's alienation from language. The principal vehicle for this focus is the characters' varying experience of music, which itself offers a w…
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
Theorising Colonised Cultures and Anti-Colonial Resistance 2. Theorising the West: Theorising Gender 3. Theorising Post-Coloniality: Intellectuals and Institutions 4. Theorising Post-Coloniality: Discourse and Identity 5. Reading from Theory Bibliography
Edward Said
Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies.This volume explains Said's key ideas, their contexts and impact, with reference to both his scholarship and journalism. These ideas include:* the place of text and critic in the world* knowledge, power and the construction of the 'Other'* the links between culture and imperialism.…
Language and Race
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
Representation and its discontents: Orientalism, Islam and the Palestinian crisis
Orientalism has become the pivotal account of the relationship between Europe and its others. But its very focused and selective account of Orientalism has provoked controversy from all sides. Said's work must be seen as an argument rather than as the presentation of some transcendental historical truth because we may then see that it fulfils a much broader task set for the ‘Oriental’: to take back the power of representation from the dominant cu…
Reading Carey Reading Malley
Discusses the connection between Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake (2003) and the Ern Malley hoax. 'The novel demonstrates what the hoax itself revealed, if only we could see it: that real life can be a created by the text. Moreover, hoaxes themselves deconstruct our belief in an historical truth by demonstrating that both truth and lie, history and hoax, are a function of narrative. Both gain life by the stories told about them. The stories that s…
Critical utopias
Edward Said
Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of the landmark study Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies, and for his controversial journalism on the Palestinian political situation. Looking at the context and the impact of Said's scholarship and journalism, this book examines Said's key ideas, including: the significance of 'worldliness', 'amateurism', 'secular cri…
Caliban's Voice: The transformation of English in post-colonial literatures
Introduction 1. Prospero's Language, Caliban's Voice 2. Language, Learning and Power 3. Language and Race 4. Language and Place 5. Language and Identity 6. Language, Culture and Meaning: the Caribbean 7. Caliban's Books - Orality and Writing 8. How Books Talk 9. Translation and Transformation Bibliography
Remembering the future: Utopianism in African literature
Urbanism, mobility and Bombay: Reading the postcolonial city
The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it …
L’Empire vous répond: Théories et pratiques des littératures post-coloniales
Voici la traduction en français d’un essai dont la version originale anglophone, The Empire Writes Back, a rencontré depuis sa parution en 1989 un écho considérable dans le monde des lettres et même au-delà. De façon stimulante, les trois chercheurs associés dans cette entreprise y ont en effet synthétisé et théorisé le concept devenu célèbre de post-colonialité. Celui-ci rend compte à la fois de l’impact déterminant des grandes colonisations eur…
Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century
Literature for Our Times offers the widest range of essays on present and future directions in postcolonial studies ever gathered together in one volume. Demonstrating the capacity of different approaches and methodologies to ‘live together’ in a spirit of ‘convivial democracy’, these essays range widely across regions, genres, and themes to suggest the many different directions in which the field is moving. Beginning with an engagement with glob…
African futures: The necessity of utopia
This article examines the utopian vision of much African writing as the dynamic of hope generated in anticolonial struggle continues to characterise contemporary poetry and novels. The premise is that utopia is necessary, not as mere wishful thinking but as willed action, because, according to Paul Ricoeur, utopia is the ‘no place’, the only place from which ideology can be countered. This means that utopia is the only place from which the discou…
Re-writing India
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
This hugely popular A-Z guide provides a comprehensive overview of the issues which characterize post-colonialism: explaining what it is, where it is encountered and the crucial part it plays in debates about race, gender, politics, language and identity. For this third edition over thirty new entries have been added including: Cosmopolitanism Development Fundamentalism Nostalgia Post-colonial cinema Sustainability Trafficking World Englishes. Po…
Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
This best selling key guide, now in its second edition, provides an essential key to understanding the issues which characterize post-colonialism; explaining what it is, where it is encountered and why it is crucial in forging new cultural identities. As a subject, post-colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism, gender, politics and language. Key topics covered include: Borderlands Transnational literatures Ne…
Including China: Bei Dao, resistance and the imperial state
This article suggest how we might include China in postcolonial studies. Despite its lingering sense of victimization by the West, China's peculiar manifestation of continental imperial power upon its 55 ethnic cultures makes it amenable to a post-colonial reading. But the case of the Bei Dao and the ‘misty poets’ shows how imperial power is threatened by a form of literary resistance, developed through a new language and an annoyingly obscure li…
Conflict and Transformation
The Twentieth Century was the most violent in history and prepared the way for the conflict with which this century has already been marked. Conflict comes in various forms but ultimately it is about power: a struggle for power or a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. The argument of this paper is that art and literature, far more than the language of politics, have the capacity to speak to power by speaking beyond it. They do this f…
The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures
The production of Anglophone texts by postcolonial writers has often raised the issue of translation. This article argues that the transformation of English in the postcolonial text may be seen as a form of 'inner translation' in which the text is both source and target. More importantly the postcolonial author produces a culturally significant text by various strategies of appropriation and transformation that act as metonymic of the source cult…
History (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Art (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Colonialism (14 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Literature (12 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works)