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An interview with the late Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam Una entrevista con Jean Arasanayagam, la escritora srilanquesa recientemente fallecida

‘Transport’ is a delightfully open word; adding an ‘s’ to the original makes it even more interesting. The participants in the Conference which was organized on this topic by the Cerpac, early November 2005 at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), explored several facets of the word. They started with ‘Means of transport’, in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They then moved to ‘Forced transport’, which dealt with West African slaves, Tasmanian Aborigines, Indo-Caribbean women and Japanese-Canadians. ‘Travel’ offered some gentler kind of transport, from India to South Carolina and the Tongan Islands. And the very same word offered a way of ‘Crossing Borders’ with the symbolism in Salman Rushdie’s or V.S. Naipaul’s novels, or the transfer of mentalities in the 18th century. All in all, we covered a lot of ground from beginning to end. And now, readers, just allow yourselves to be. . . transported. « Transport » est un mot d’une richesse et d’une ouverture étonnantes; ajouter un « s » à l’original le rend encore plus intéressant. Début novembre 2005, un colloque a été organisé par le Cerpac sur le sujet à l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier (France), et ses participants explorèrent plusieurs facettes du mot. Ils débutèrent par « Moyens de transport », en Australie, en Nouvelle-Zélande et en Afrique du Sud ; puis ils passèrent à « Transport forcé », où il fut question des esclaves d’Afrique de l’Ouest, des Aborigènes de Tasmanie, des femmes caribéennes d’origine indienne, et des Canadiens-Japonais. « Voyage » permit de se transporter de façon plus douce, de l’Inde à la Caroline du Sud et aux îles Tonga. Et le même mot offrit l’occasion de « Traverser les frontières », qu’il s’agisse du symbolisme dans les romans de Salman Rushdie ou ceux de V.S. Naipaul, ou du transfert des mentalités au XVIIIe siècle. Au total, depuis le début jusqu’à la fin, un grand espace d’étude fut parcouru. Il ne reste plus maintenant au lecteur qu’à se laisser... transporter.

During the first half of the 19th century, hundreds of slaves saw themselves transported to freedom through the Underground Railroad which covered most of the United States and Canada. This was a secret organised network of communications and routes whose aim was to rescue from slavery as many people as possible, helping them to reach safely territories where slavery had been abolished. In many cases, Canada was the final step of the journey. One of the protagonists of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave that, once a free woman in Canada, spent the rest of her life helping fellowmen and women to escape the ordeal of slavery, doing several trips back to the south in search of new ‘cargo’ to be transported north to freedom. More than a century later, in 1988 Toronto, a black and witty fourteen-year-old will find her heroine and social model in the figure of Harriet Tubman. Margaret Cruishank is the main character in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s novel for teenagers Harriet’s Daughter (1988). In her coming-of-age process, she sees the need to disavow her real name to become Harriet, a name which, she reckons, carries with it a signification that her own name lacks. A girl of unusual courage and determination, Margaret-Harriet will seduce her schoolmates with a new and fascinating game: the Canadian Underground Railroad. Thus they will set out to reenact history, twisting it on the way and unlearning some of its particulars: ’ “Can slaves be white?” “Of course they can!"’ we read, for instance, at one point in the novel. The children’s game will eventually be discovered, and its organiser severely reprimanded. But through this and other adventures, Margaret-Harriet will herself become a sort of Harriet Tubman, since with her account she traces new routes for her fellow teenagers to reach a safe Afrocaribbean-Canadian identity, making them feel proud of their origins, their culture and their skin colour.

This piece presents a number of autotraslations by poet and academic Isabel Alonso-Breto, with acompanying illustrations by Sabrina Atanasiu Alonso.

An editorial introduction to a collection of articles conceived and developed around the theme of "Pacific Solutions", a conference organised by the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Barcelona (ASC) and The Centre for Peace and Social Justice at Southern Cross University (CPSJ), celebrated at the University of Barcelona in December 2011.

Editorial

Editorial Introduction.

This article provides an intersectional analysis of Loving this Man (2001), the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian writer and sociologist Althea Prince. The analysis approaches different aspects tackled in the novel, mostly connected to the complexity of the migration experience and to gender and race politics in the different contexts where the story is set, namely, an unnamed Caribbean country and Canada. Loving this Man revises the vital experience and the achievement of a sense of identity of Sayshelle, a young Caribbean woman who migrates to Canada at the end of her teenage years. An adult Sayshelle narrates her life, beginning with her childhood and early adolescence in the Caribbean to, in the second part of the novel, delve on her early youth experiences in Canada. Both periods and contexts are strongly influenced by gender and race politics: in the Caribbean because of the continuance of social structures inherited from colonialism and with a strong patriarchal component, and in Canada because Sayshelle arrives there precisely at the end of the 1960s, when the social mobilization of the Black population, as it happened in the US, gained strength and momentum. In definitive, the novel is structured following a traditional pattern of migration narratives (here vs. there), while migration remains the vital experience which articulates the tale and leads it towards its conclusion, when a mature Sayshelle is finally seen to have achieved a sense of identity and belonging., El artículo lleva a cabo un análisis interseccional de la novela Loving this Man, publicada por la escritora y socióloga canadiense de origen caribeño Althea Prince en 2001. El análisis consiste en una revisión de diferentes aspectos abordados por la novela, en concreto problemáticas relacionadas con el hecho de la migración y con políticas de género y raza abordados desde los dos contextos en que se sitúa la novela: el caribeño y el canadiense. Loving this Man gira en tomo a la peripecia vital y el desarrollo de un sentido de identidad de Sayshelle, una joven caribeña que emigra a Canadá al terminar la adolescencia. Una Sayshelle adulta relata su experiencia vital, revisando primero su infancia y adolescencia en algún país del Caribe, y después su juventud en Canadá. Ambos periodos y contextos están fuertemente marcados por la influencia de los mencionados aspectos de género y raza: en el Caribe por la pervivencia de estructuras sociales heredadas del colonialismo y con un fuerte componente patriarcal, y en Canadá porque Sayshelle llega allí en un momento histórico, el final de los años 60, en que los movimientos sociales de la población negra cobraron especial vitalidad, como sucedió en Estados Unidos. En definitiva la novela se estructura siguiendo un modelo clásico en las narrativas de migración (aquí vs. allá), siendo la migración la experiencia vital cuya exploración articula el relato y lo dota de dirección hasta que una madura Sayshelle alcanza un sentido de identidad y pertenencia.

DOIREANN MACDERMOTT: UNA PIONERA DE LOS ESTUDIOS UNIVERSITARIOS DE INGLÉS EN ESPAÑA

This paper consists of an analysis of Monsoons and Potholes (2006), the first novel by Sri Lankan playwright Manuka Wijesinghe. Attention is paid to the ways in which the text articulates relations between personal stories, food, history and politics. Food plays a central role in some novels published in the last years by Sri Lankan authors, as is the case, for instance, with Yasmine Gooneratne's A Change of Skies (1984) and Mary Ann Mohanraj's Bodies in Motion (2005). Both these works elaborate metaphors of identity through the dominant trope of food-encompassing cooking and the rituals of consumption. In Monsoons and Potholes, food accompanies and illustrates the autobiographical account of a Sri Lankan youngster born in the early 1960s, and revisits the first twenty years in her life together with the socio-political up and downs in her country. While it is a novel which to a great extent draws on metaphors of myth and history, scenes of food and eating appear consistently throughout the narration, which contribute in providing a down-to-earth (and highly satirical) version of the life of the Sinhala upper-middle classes during the period. These images of food (and the sets of rituals, beliefs and constrictions around it) are exploited by the author with the aim to explore, understand and denounce the historical process which precipitated Sri Lanka, at the beginning of the 1980s, "on the road to nowhere".

El artículo lleva a cabo un análisis detallado de Looking For Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), novela con acento poético y formalmente híbrida de Marlene Nourbese Philip. Se perfilan las coordenadas que gobiernan este trabajo de cara a situarlo en el marco total de la obra de esta autora, señalando tanto las particularidades del mismo como los aspectos que tiene en común con otras entregas. El análisis se realiza en base a aspectos de las teorías posmodernas, en su cenit en 1991, ya que nociones puestas en tela de juicio por la posmodernidad tales como Historia, poder o subjetividad, son examinadas críticamente en esta obra, y revisadas a fondo desde una perspectiva ‘afrospórica’ y femenina. An Odyssey of Silence es una obra a la que comparativamente se ha prestado poca atención, ya que la mayoría de publicaciones académicas sobre Nourbese Philip refieren su poemario ya clásico de la poesía postcolonial She Tries Her tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989).

This paper offers an analysis of The Streets, a short play framed within the essay “Dis Place—The Space Between”, by Afro-Caribbean-Canadian author Marlene Nourbese Philip. The play follows the argument developed in the essay, namely, that the sign “woman”, and more specifically that of “black woman” has been expelled from the “outer space” or social sphere and, as a consequence, has been erased from historiography as well as from a particular instance of the writing of Philip herself. Tackling most of the themes which are a constant source of preoccupation for the author, the essay searches for the reasons for that suppression or silencing, as well as for the means of overcoming it. The Streets operates as a symbolic redemption of that suppression. The play, incomplete and fragmented, recovers the historical figure of the jamette, a black woman ‘of loose morals’ who through her heterodox behaviour manages to sidestep the reclusion within her “inner space” devised for the black woman by the secular connivance of patriarchy and white hegemony.

Curs d’especialització del professorat novell de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2003-2004. Postgrau d'Especialització Docent, Memoria final del proyecto de innovación docente "Elaboración de un portfolio de grupo", implementada en la asignatura "El Món Postcolonial Anglòfon: El Mosaïc Canadenc", de la licenciatura en Filología Inglesa impartida en la Universitat de Barcelona. Esta innovación se llevó a cabo en el marco del Postgrado en Especialización Docente, Universitat de Barcelona, 2004-2005.

Dr. Saumitra Chakravarty, an alumni of Calcutta University with an Hons degree in English Literature, secured a gold medal in her Masters degree and a Ph.D on the topic “The Search for Identity in Contemporary British Fiction”. She teaches English Literature at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Bangalore and guides research students. She has presented papers in several national and international seminars. She has published a book of poems, The Silent Cry (2002), and co-authored a book of critical essays, The Endangered Self (2003). A book of translations of short stories of four major Bengali women writers on women’s ssues is currently under publication with Oxford UP. She is working on a second book of poems on issues related to tribal women and their habitat, some of which have already been broadcast over All India Radio. She has also been joint coordinator for a British Council project on translations for which Prof. Susan Bassnett, at the University of Warwick, is the over-all co-ordinator.

Jack Mapanje was born of Yao and Nyanja parents in Kadango Village, Mangochi District, in southern Malawi. He holds a B.A. Degree and a diploma in Education from the University of Malawi and an M.Phil degree from the University of London. In 1975 he joined the staff of the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. In the early 1980s, he worked at University College, London, where he obtained his PhD. In 1981 he published Of Chameleons and Gods, his first collection of poems. Back in Malawi, in 1987 Mapanje was detained and imprisoned following the banning of his book, being released only in 1991 following intense international pressure. His second volume of poetry, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, written in prison, was published in 1993. He is currently based in England, where he lives with his wife and three children. An academic at the University of Leeds, he recently edited the anthology Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002).

La tesis es un estudio analítico de la obra literaria y teórica de la escritora afrocaribeña afincada en Canadá Marlene Nourbese Philip según teorías postcoloniales y posmodernas. Tras algunas consideraciones sobre la estructuración y enfoque del estudio, y una primera aproximación al contexto actual de la literatura y la comunidad canadiense afrocaribeña, el texto elabora una sucinta arqueología de la posmodernidad y establece unos principios para una "literatura posmoderna" que se aplicarán al corpus literario analizado. El análisis posterior pone de manifiesto la pertinencia de combinar etiquetas relacionadas con lo posmoderno con una literatura aparentemente minoritaria como es la de Philip, una literatura, por lo demás, marcada por el deseo de combatir el endémico racismo de que adolece la sociedad canadiense, y consagrada a hallar caminos de representación de la subjetividad de todo un colectivo: el de las mujeres afrospóricas de origen caribeño que viven en Canadá.