Browsing by Subject "Language and literature"

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    Black Bodies in the Open City: Precarity and Belonging in the work of Teju Cole
    (2019) Watson, Luke; Twidle, Hedley
    This dissertation attempts to read Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s fiction and essays as sustained demonstrations of precarity, as theorised by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004). Though never directly cited by Cole, Butler’s articulation of a shared condition of bodily vulnerability and interdependency offers a generative critical framework through which to read Cole’s representations of black bodies as they move across space. By presenting the ‘black body’, rather than ‘black man’, as the preferred metonym for black people, Cole’s work, which I argue can be read as peculiar travel narratives, foregrounds the bodily dimension of black life, and develops an ambivalent storytelling mode to narrate the experiences of characters who encompass multiple spatialities and subjectivities. Through close analysis of the novels Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007), and essays from the collection Known and Strange Things (2016), principally “Black Body” and “Unmournable Bodies”, I argue that Cole’s work subverts certain tropes in the tradition of black literary cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by James Baldwin, at the same time as Cole self-consciously situates himself within that tradition. It is the insistence on the black body as site of publicity at once desirable and vulnerable, to paraphrase Butler, that allows Cole to make these interventions. A tentative critical consensus on Cole’s work has begun to emerge: his oeuvre is read alongside a cohort of contemporary African and black diasporic writers whose works navigate the tenuous boundary between Western centers and peripheral Africa. It is not my intention in this dissertation to argue against those readings, but rather to offer the concept of precarity as productive framework that allows for readings that other spatio-temporal frameworks may occlude.
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    Riverborne
    (2018) Parker, Ruby; Partridge, Sally
    Twelve-year-old Ghost lives in Riverborne, an isolated village in the borderlands. Raised by the wood witch Maeve from birth, he grows up with only a dog for company. The villagers mistrust Ghost, because of the pale features that gave him his name. These mark him as Were – one of the wild clansmen that inhabit the lands to the north. But his Were blood is also a gift – granting him the ability to sense the essence of living things. Maeve’s other apprentice is her niece, Nella. After her mother dies, Nella comes to live at the cottage to escape her alcoholic father. When Maeve is called away one rainy night, Nella decides to make a “telling fire” - a binding to glimpse the future. However, something goes horribly wrong and they wake a slumbering evil in the woods. When villagers begin to die under unnatural circumstances, people suspect Maeve. The witch believes a spirit is behind the attacks, as it is powers beyond anything she has seen before. She tells Nella and Ghost of a bone witch in the Wild Wood, who knows how to put the dead to rest. When Maeve is seized by the village mob, Ghost and Nella manage to escape. Together they must find the bone witch to help vanquish the spirit and free Maeve.