Cultivating Anti-Oppressive Ethics: A Community-Grounded Reading of Caryl Phillips and J.M. Coetzee

Abstract

The recent shift in critical attention to the transnational circulation of literature has generated debate about the need for better-suited practices of reading that are able to address in a nuanced way the growing complexity of global allegiances. The urge to think transnationally if we hope to capture and critique the conditions of our contemporaneity has led to a growing number of works that explore and reframe the sometimes ambiguous linkages between terms such as transnational, postcolonial, and world literature. Another major trend associated with the worldly circulation of literature is the transformation of the existing ways of theorizing about fictional works, a shift from a shared fund of knowledge of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, and Joyce to Butler, Foucault, Said, and Spivak.