Overview

Nationalist and tribal cohesion in Ireland, South Africa, the US, and elsewhere often relies on an absence of female and gender-nonconforming bodies in the public life. Staging a vital counter-narrative to global nationalist discourses, this book explores how 20th and 21st-century postcolonial literatures criticize hetero-normative definitions of nationhood across different geopolitical and cultural contexts. Szczeszak-Brewer delves into the metaphorical currency of male impotence and sexual aggression in nationalist narratives. She examines the place of gender-nonconforming characters in literature from Ireland, the US, Poland, France, Britain, South Africa, and Senegal, in the work of writers including: James Joyce, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Toomer, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, Andrea Levy, Patrick McCabe, and David Diop. Aligning queer and gender perspectives with discussions of white supremacy, this book examines the urgency for contemporary geopolitics to imagine new discourses of community against the backdrop of a rise in neo-nationalisms steeped in homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric.

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9781350323339

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This book’s sophisticated literary study of the complex intersection(s) of sex and nation within global geopolitics advances inclusive narratives of belonging – it is an informative, innovative and important read. -- Aretha Phiri, Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University, South Africa

Author Information

Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is Professor of English and John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric at Wabash College, USA where she teaches 20th-century World Literatures, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published two scholarly books—Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (2010) and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (2015)—and co-edited a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on Irish and South African literary and cultural intersections. Her 2023 memoir in essays The Hunger Book won the Gournay Prize.

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