Where Cultures Collide

The literature that arises from the collision of cultures is often referred to as being post colonial. The black longing versus the white longing, the cultural matrix of the old world challenged by that of the new. In this social critique, the western tradition is rightly being diluted, mixed and challenged by the other.

While respecting the canon of the western tradition, I find the new literatures have an energy and newness that excite and challenge my old world view. These writers help us to see european ethnocentricity, cultural hegemony and attitudes through a different set of cultural eyes. This can be a discomforting experience as it brings a personal challenge to take off your ethnocentric blinkers and see the world as it is, rather than through the inculcated lenses of ones cultural upbringing.

Reading writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Luis Borges opened a window to the Latin American worldview for me. The vitality, warmth and otherness of the writings positively challenged me as I struggled to find pegs for my experience. The cultural dislocation I felt initially was overcome as I read more.

Students today get the opportunity to study beyond the Western canon and also can freely explore the other within their own cultural milieu (gay literature for example). Such exposure helps to give them a global, rather than a constrained view of the human experience.

Words Chosen Carefully

In a recent post I mentioned a book that interviewed 12 New Zealand poets in 1985. I was wondering then what the same people would think now after 27 years. On Saturday I went to the library and found a book that answers the questions for several of the original poets.

The book is titled Words Chosen Carefully - New Zealand writers in discussion and is edited by Siobhan Harvey with photography by Liz March. Elizabeth Smither and C.K.Stead are in both books and one can see the development of their thoughts and observations on craft and the place of the writer in a New Zealand context.

In 1985 New Zealand still had a degree of cultural cringe and preferred literature from overseas, which was a reflection of the country's colonial past. In this post colonial and post modern world NZ writing is coming of age.

While this book of literary discussions is centered on New Zealand many of the observations equally apply to any country that has been colonized in he past.

DK

Post Colonial Children's Literature

I recently found an excellent course on iTunes from La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia. it is on post colonial children's literature and it is fascinating.

The lecturer is very entertaining but brings the salient points across in a very clear way.

The themes of colonialism, post colonialism, the Aboriginal and European voice and who owns the story is gripping listening.

Not a book but about books. The story of Little Black Sambo in colonial times and it's form in post colonial times is provocative and challenging.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]