In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. The present collection seeks, from a variety of angles, to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian-Asian and West Indian contexts.
Table of Contents
Embracing the Other: An Introduction
Poetry
Susan N. KIGULI: One Wing; Home Floats in the Distance; Floating My Presence; Stories Retold
Theory, Writing History, and Textuality
Edwin THUMBOO: Conditions of Cross-Cultural Perceptions: The Other Looks Back
Judith DELL PANNY: Benign Xenophobia? The Testimony of Maori Literature
Russell WEST-PAVLOV: ‘Daft Questions’: Xenophobia, Teaching, and Social Semiosis in Caribbean-British Fiction: Using Intertextuality and Narratology to Analyze a Text by David Dabydeen
Migrant and Border Narratives
Mala PANDURANG: How Brave Is Our New World?
Danilo Victorino MANARPAAC: Desire and Loathing in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido Santos’s The Man Who
(Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor
Vera ALEXANDER: “Worlds of Disenchantment”: Alienation and Change in Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments
Dipli SAIKIA: Writing From the Border, Doing Away With Margins: Carl Muller’s Sri Lankan Burgher Narrative
Virginia RICHTER: The Civilized Ape
Transitional States
Martin GENETSCH: Race and Racism in Contemporary Canadian Fiction: M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land
Jochen PETZOLD: White Angst in South Africa: The Apocalyptic Visions of John Conyngham
Natividad MARTÍNEZ MARÍN: Nadine Gordimer’s Later Novels: Or, The Fiction of Otherness
Negotiating Identity and Alterity
Mary E. MODUPE KOLAWOLE: Multicultural Strategies and Alterity: Transgressing the Other in Contemporary Nigerian Women’s Short
Stories
Raihanah M.M.: The Other Within: The Malaysian Experience
J&oouml;rg HEINKE: The Resistance to Being (Em)Braced: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and David Malouf’s Johnno
Sandhya PATEL: The Difficulty of Being: Reading and Speaking in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Laurenz VOLKMANN: The Quest for Identity in Benjamin Zephaniah’s Poetry
Diaspora and Orientalism
David S. LA BRECHE : Stereotype, Prejudice, and Illusion in the Austral-Asian Otherworld
Sissy HELFF: Desired Exotica: Gendered Spaces in Queer West Indian Diasporic Fiction
Canadian and South African Theatre
Ginny RATSOY: Dramatizing Alterity: Relational Characterization in Postcolonial British Columbia Plays
Henning SCHÄFER: Disappointing Expectations: Native Canadian Theatre and the Politics of Authenticity
Haike FRANK: Embracing Oneself and the Other: Overcoming Racial Hatred in South African Drama
Notes on Contributors.