Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays(Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

Since the 1960s American and Western European gays have set the agenda for sexual liberation and defined its emergence. Western models of homosexuality often provide the only globally recognizable frameworks for discussing gay and lesbian cultures around the world, and thus Western interpretive schemes are imposed on non-Western societies. At the same time, gay and lesbian lifestyles in emerging countries do not always neatly fit Western paradigms, and data from those countries often clash with dominant Western models. So too, the literature of emerging countries often depicts homosexuality in ways which challenge the existing tools of Western literary critics. The thirteen contributors to this book examine the implied imposition of a heavily capitalistic, white, and generally male model of homosexuality on the emerging world. By combining postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches, this volume suggests alternative frameworks for describing sexuality around the world and for exploring non-Western literary representations of gay and lesbian lifestyles. The volume concludes with a chapter assessing new questions in both postcolonial and queer theorizing that suggest common concerns and many avenues for future research.

Table of Contents:
Preface Global Gaze/Global Gays by Dennis Altman The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia by Thomas M. Boellstorff Heavenly Creatures' Queer Sort of Fandom: The Closeted Indigene, Lesbian Islands and New Zealand National Cinema by Elizabeth Guzik Im/De-position of Cultural Violence: Reading Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine by Benzi Zhang Gender Crossing and Decadence in Taiwanese Fiction at the Fin de Siecle by Liang-Ya Liou Racial and Erotic Anxieties: Ambivalent Fetishization, From Fanon to Mercer by Sonia Otalvaro-Hormillosa Race, Class and the Homoerotics of The Swimming-Pool Library by James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant The U.S. in South Africa: (Post) Colonial Queer Theory? by Ian Barnard Other and Difference in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory by David William Foster In Search of a Lost Body with Organs: Reclaiming Postcolonial Gay Interiority After Bersani's Reading of Gide by Christian Gundermann Theorizing the Under-Theorized by Erich De Wald Index

About the Author :
JOHN C. HAWLEY is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His previous books include Reform and Counter-Reform (1994), Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders (1996), Writing the Nation (1996), Through a Glass Darkly (1996), The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact on Contemporary Literature (1998), and Christian Encounters with the Other (1998).

Review :
.,."the book performs its work with exhilarating success. Since Hawley's afterword gives perspective to the collection--providing material that is more often in an introduction--this reviewer recommends starting there. Highly recommended for large university and public libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice ?...the book performs its work with exhilarating success. Since Hawley's afterword gives perspective to the collection--providing material that is more often in an introduction--this reviewer recommends starting there. Highly recommended for large university and public libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and above.?-Choice ?This collection uses postcolonial theory as a model for avoiding the imperialist tendency to imagine "gay" and "lesbian" cultures around the world in the image of white, upper-middle-class Americans and Western Europeans. It seeks to explore the often more fluid forms of same-sex attraction in other cultures, as expressed by their literature and film, without fetishizing or reductively translating them.?-American Literature ..."the book performs its work with exhilarating success. Since Hawley's afterword gives perspective to the collection--providing material that is more often in an introduction--this reviewer recommends starting there. Highly recommended for large university and public libraries serving upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice "This collection uses postcolonial theory as a model for avoiding the imperialist tendency to imagine "gay" and "lesbian" cultures around the world in the image of white, upper-middle-class Americans and Western Europeans. It seeks to explore the often more fluid forms of same-sex attraction in other cultures, as expressed by their literature and film, without fetishizing or reductively translating them."-American Literature