Laughing Out of Place
Humour Alliances and Other Postcolonial Translations inIn an Antique Land
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4824979 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christi Ann Merrill (University of Michigan) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 106-123 |
| Publication date | 2007-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13698010601174229 |
| OpenAlex | W1561023746 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 25 |
This essay looks closely at the rhetorical tools of the postcolonial trade by examining humourous passages from Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land – a work which itself combines scholarship and literary non-fiction – in order to ask how we might read writing that plays with the fixed, static binaries of postcolonial relation we so regularly critique. I apply recent insights in cultural translation regarding the politics of figurative location to offer a more complex understanding of the ways we might read geographical relation in ironic first-person accounts. I consider Neelam Srivastava's suggestion that we read Ghosh's book as ‘a more complex literary genre’ against Gauri Viswanathan's charge that the writing is ‘politically ineffectual’. I argue that the debate reveals something more fundamental about our own interests and strategies in engaging with issues of postcoloniality, and thus should be part of a broader enquiry into the ideological – as rhetorical – positionings of essayists and other cultural critics
Aesthetics · Art · Ideology · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Literature · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
Routes
Writing Culture
Postcolonialism
Irony's Edge
Imperial Eyes
Siting Translation
Provincializing Europe
Metahistory
Contracting Colonialism
Introduction
The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology
Translingual Practice
Postcolonialism
Outside the Fold
Amitav Ghosh’s Ethnographic Fictions
Travelling in the West
Taming Distance”
Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land
Contingency, hegemony, universality
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 1905
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2022 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |