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‘Metroglorification and diffuse urbanism’: Literarische repräsentationen des postkolonialen im palimpsestraum der ‘neuen’ metropolen

Published/Copyright: October 19, 2012
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Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie
From the journal Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Volume 130 Issue 3

Abstract:

The notion of ‘new’ metropolises alludes to the multilayered ways of life inside as well as outside, or even ‘downside’ of the cityscapes in the postcolonial societies. This holds true to what can be identified ‘new’ metropolises such as Bombay, Delhi or Lagos. Unlike the normative conception of the metropolis in the West, seen through the concepts of “metroglorification” and “diffuse urbanism”, these ‘new’ metropolises disclose the postcolonial city’s own subversive nature of underworlds morphing into overworlds, where tradition, modernity (and postmodernity) collide in the most unrelenting and dynamic fashion. The texts selected for analysis in this essay include Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Kushwant Sing’s Delhi (1990) and Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2005). While elaborating on the themes of palimpsest-like layering in these texts, this essay aims to show, via the eyes of postcolonial flâneurs, that postcolonial cities are essentially ‘new’ metropolises that do not lend themselves to an easy explanation or conceptual ornamentation. Instead, they bear features of dynamism and multiplex layering that is most categorically absent in the literature on urban studies and the postcolonial metropolises in general.

Published Online: 2012-10-19
Published in Print: 2012-10

© 2012 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Masthead
  2. Translating iconoclasm: William Thomas’s The Perygrine and the Historie of Italie
  3. ‘Metroglorification and diffuse urbanism’: Literarische repräsentationen des postkolonialen im palimpsestraum der ‘neuen’ metropolen
  4. Adaptation for the postcolonial community: Jindabyne’s contested spaces
  5. “Language is the only thing that lies”: linguistic scepticism in Rebecca Brown’s reinvention of literary minimalism
  6. Transnationalization of ecocriticism
  7. Foundations of pragmatics
  8. Sprachlicher Ausbau: Konzeptionelle Studien zur spätmittelenglischen Schriftsprach
  9. Testifying to language and life in early modern England, including a CD-Rom containing an electronic text edition of depositions 1560–1760 (ETED)
  10. William Barnes’s dialect poems: a pronunciation guide
  11. Magic and the supernatural in medieval English Romance
  12. Fairies in medieval Romance
  13. The Trojan Mirror: middle English Narratives of Troy as books of princely advice
  14. The scientist as God: a typological study of a literary motif, 1818 to the present
  15. Cornelia James Cannon and the future American Race
  16. 10.1515/ang-2012-0514
  17. Autobiography, ecology, and the well-placed self: the growth of natural biography in contemporary American life writing
  18. Paradoxes of authenticity: studies on a critical concept
  19. American cultural icons: the production of representative lives
  20. Imagology revisited
  21. The framing text in early modern drama: ‘Whining’ prologues and ‘Armed’ epilogues
  22. Stage, Stake, & Scaffold. Humans and animals in Shakespeare’s theatre
  23. Eingegangene Schriften
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2012-0501

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Masthead
  2. Translating iconoclasm: William Thomas’s The Perygrine and the Historie of Italie
  3. ‘Metroglorification and diffuse urbanism’: Literarische repräsentationen des postkolonialen im palimpsestraum der ‘neuen’ metropolen
  4. Adaptation for the postcolonial community: Jindabyne’s contested spaces
  5. “Language is the only thing that lies”: linguistic scepticism in Rebecca Brown’s reinvention of literary minimalism
  6. Transnationalization of ecocriticism
  7. Foundations of pragmatics
  8. Sprachlicher Ausbau: Konzeptionelle Studien zur spätmittelenglischen Schriftsprach
  9. Testifying to language and life in early modern England, including a CD-Rom containing an electronic text edition of depositions 1560–1760 (ETED)
  10. William Barnes’s dialect poems: a pronunciation guide
  11. Magic and the supernatural in medieval English Romance
  12. Fairies in medieval Romance
  13. The Trojan Mirror: middle English Narratives of Troy as books of princely advice
  14. The scientist as God: a typological study of a literary motif, 1818 to the present
  15. Cornelia James Cannon and the future American Race
  16. 10.1515/ang-2012-0514
  17. Autobiography, ecology, and the well-placed self: the growth of natural biography in contemporary American life writing
  18. Paradoxes of authenticity: studies on a critical concept
  19. American cultural icons: the production of representative lives
  20. Imagology revisited
  21. The framing text in early modern drama: ‘Whining’ prologues and ‘Armed’ epilogues
  22. Stage, Stake, & Scaffold. Humans and animals in Shakespeare’s theatre
  23. Eingegangene Schriften
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