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  Writing the Nation: Self and Country in the Post-colonial Imagination

  John C. Hawley

  The fourteen essays in this volume contribute significantly to a consideration of the interplay between nation and narration that currently dominates both literary and cultural studies. With the fervent reassertion of tribal domains throughout the world, and with the consequent threat to the stability of a common discourse in putative countries once mapped and subsequently dominated by colonizing powers, the need for such studies becomes increasingly obvious. Whose idea of a nation is to prevail throughout these postcolonial territories; whose claims to speak for a people are to be legitimized by international agreement; amid the demands of patriotic rhetoric, what role may be allowed for individual expression that attempts to transcend the immediate political agenda; who may assume positions of authority in defining an ethnic paradigm — such are the questions variously addressed in this volume.The essayists who here contribute to the discussion are students of the various national literatures that are now becoming more generally available in the West. The range of topics is broad — moving globally from the Caribbean and South America, through the African continent, and on to the Indian subcontinent, and moving temporally through the nineteenth century and into the closing days of our twentieth. We deal with poetry, fiction, and theoretical writings, and have two types of reader in mind: We hope to introduce the uninitiated to the breadth of this expanding field, and we hope to aid those with a specialized knowledge of one or other of these literatures in their consideration of the extent to which post-colonial writing may or may not form a reasonably unified field. We seek to avoid the new form of colonialism that might impose a theoretical template to these quite divergent writings, falsely rendering it all accessible and familiar. At the same time, we do note questions and concerns that cross borders, whether these imagined lines are spatial, temporal, gendered or racial.

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  Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders (SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture)

  John C. Hawley

  The sixteen original essays by scholars from around the world examine concerns common to writers who experience marginalization based upon their inescapable identification with two or more cultures. From Australian aboriginal and Maori, to Irish, Maghrebian, and South African, and on to the rich ethnic mix in North America, the book considers fiction, poetry, autobiography, and anthropological reportage to raise questions as determinative as one's choice of language, one's presentation of self in society, one's "recovery" of a history. This collection serves as a bridge between recent Eurocentric postmodern discourse dealing with the breakdown of the modernist stability in art, architecture, and electronic media, and those recent studies that problematize the issue of racial identity and literary practice.

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  Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination

  John C. Hawley

  These essays, interdisciplinary in their approach, demonstrate the variegation of the religious imagination from the broadest historical and denominational scope. By examining the works of philosophers and theologians, of poets, painters, and novelists - from Saint Mark to Jacques Derrida and from Erasmus, Loyola, and Milton to Rouault and to Andrew Greeley - the essayists seek to answer the question Jesus posed to His disciples: "Who do you say that I am?" and to anticipate the equally contentious query: "How do you say who I am?"
  The essays together explore the religious imagination through the question of transcendence, using both the age-old Christian imagination and the contemporary world wherein the divisions between religious cultures are less fixed, an age of imaginative permeability where the absence of God is as present as the presence of God.

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  The History of Alta California: Memoirs of Mexican California, by Antonio María Osio

  Antonio Maria Osio, Robert M. Senkewicz, and Rose Marie Beebe

  Antonio Maria Osio's La Historia de Alta California was the first written history of upper California during the era of Mexican rule, and this is its first complete English translation. A Mexican-Californian, government official, and the landowner of Angel Island and Point Reyes, Osio writes colorfully of life in old Monterey, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and he gives a first-hand account of the political intrigues of the 1830s that led to the appointment of Juan Bautista Alvarado as governor. Osio wrote his History in 1851, conveying with immediacy and detail the years of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 and the social upheaval that followed. As he witnesses California's territorial transition from Mexico to the United States, he recalls with pride the achievements of Mexican California in earlier decades and writes critically of the onset of American influence and imperialism. Unable to endure life as foreigners in their home of twenty-seven years, Osio and his family left Alta California for Mexico in 1852.

  This work provides an English translation of the history of upper California during the era of Mexican rule. A Mexican-Californian, Osio writes of life in old Monterey, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and gives a first-hand account of the political intrigues of the 1830s.

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  Media, Culture and Catholicism (Communication, Culture & Theology)

  Paul A. Soukup

  This collection of essays addresses the issue of communication and ministry in a mass-media dominated society.