In this volume, Deckard analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.
Tracking Capital introduces new ways to understand the entanglement of cultural forms and practices in economic, social, and ecological crises and struggles. Building on the fundamental insights of world-systems analysis, the book offers readers a series of rubrics, keywords, and concepts—such as zemiperiphery, registration, and commodity chains—to enable more integrated, transdisciplinary methods of literary and cultural study. Throughout, Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, and Stephen Shapiro foreground the role of culture in both consolidating and contesting the classism, racism, sexism, and ecocide constitutive of the modern world-system. In the context of capitalism's ongoing bloody war against the poor, the powerless, and the planet, Tracking Capital provides tools with which to diagnose the morbid symptoms of the present, as well as to plot possible steps on the road to a better future.
Tracking Capital introduces new ways to understand the entanglement of cultural forms and practices in economic, social, and ecological crises and struggles. Building on the fundamental insights of world-systems analysis, the book offers readers a series of rubrics, keywords, and concepts—such as zemiperiphery, registration, and commodity chains—to enable more integrated, transdisciplinary methods of literary and cultural study. Throughout, Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, and Stephen Shapiro foreground the role of culture in both consolidating and contesting the classism, racism, sexism, and ecocide constitutive of the modern world-system. In the context of capitalism's ongoing bloody war against the poor, the powerless, and the planet, Tracking Capital provides tools with which to diagnose the morbid symptoms of the present, as well as to plot possible steps on the road to a better future.
This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses paradise discourse in a wide range of writing from Mexico, Zanzibar, and Sri Lanka, including novels by authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. Tracing dialectical tropes of paradise across the "long modernity" of the capitalist world-system, Deckard reads literature from postcolonial nations in context with colonial discourse in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a topos motivating European exploration and colonization, shifts into an ideological myth justifying imperial exploitation, and finally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary writers to critique neocolonial representations and conditions in the age of globalization. Combining a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, ecocritical, and postcolonial—the volume opens up a deeper understanding of the relation between paradise discourse and the destructive dynamics of plantation, tourism, and global capital. Deckard uncovers literature from East Africa and South Asia which has been previously overlooked in mainstream postcolonial criticism, and gestures to how the utopian dimensions of the paradise myth might be reclaimed to promote cultural resistance.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.