Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation
Editor: Tuomas Huttunen, Kaisa Ilmonen, Janne Korkka and Elina Valovirta
Date Of Publication: Aug 2008
Isbn13: 9781847186317
Isbn: 1-84718-631-9
Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other offers new insights into diasporic experiences, encounters and representations. This collection of texts examines diaspora narratives and the ways in which different encounters with the other are represented, as well as how these encounters might be read and interpreted in ethical terms.

The anthology explores questions of ethics in narratives of displacement or belonging, nationalist narratives of exclusion and borderline narratives, constructed on the foundation provided by encounters with the cultural, sexual, gendered and ethnic other. The contributors’ aim is to explore questions of responsibility and ethics in the study of diaspora, migration, and alterity from a wide range of perspectives. Following a Levinasian one, if the other is always ultimately transcendental and ungraspable through language, we are required to consider ethics every time we write, read or interpret an encounter with the other.

Tuomas Huttunen is a Research Fellow at the Department of English at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on the ethics of representation. Huttunen is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the writings of Amitav Ghosh, and has published several articles on Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul and M.G. Vassanji.

Kaisa Ilmonen currently works as co-ordinator of the Centre of Excellence in University Education at the School of Art Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, and is working on her PhD dissertation on Caribbean female identity in Michelle Cliff's fiction at the Department of Comparative Literature at the same university. She has published widely on the topic and is the co-editor (with Lasse Kekki) of the first queer literature studies anthology in Finland, Pervot Pidot (2004).

Janne Korkka is a Fesearch Fellow at the Department of English at the University of Turku in Finland. He is completing his doctoral thesis on the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe, focusing on representations of place and discourses of alterity. His published work is mainly on Wiebe and other Western Canadian authors.

Elina Valovirta is writing her doctoral thesis on feminist reader theory in Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing at the Department of English, University of Turku in Finland. Her research interests include postcolonial fiction, feminist theories of affectivity and ethics, sexuality and feminist pedagogy. She has published articles on Caribbean writing in refereed journals in Finland and internationally.

“The fields of diaspora studies and postcolonial ethics are gaining in popularity and prestige. The collection provides very comprehensive coverage of both the issues and debates that animate diaspora studies in the humanities and a series of distinctive and careful mappings of these issues.”

Dr Alison Donnell, Reader at the School of English and American Literature, University of Reading

"Seeking the Self-Encountering the Other is an important and powerful volume of essays, which asks how ethics can be responsive to the kinds of otherness thrown up by living in a diasporic world. What kinds of encounters with others are possible when unfinished histories of colonialism shape the landscapes of the present? With a remarkable willingness to proceed from the particular, and a patience for thinking through the complexities of history and inheritance, this volume has much to teach us about the practical as well theoretical value of ethical thinking. Individual contributors reflect on questions of trauma, power and conflict, and attend with optimism to the ongoing living potentiality for new cultural forms in situations of encounter. Showing us on every page that ethics is also about how we read and know about others, as well as how we allow ourselves to be affected by others, this volume will open up a much needed dialogue between postcolonial studies of diaspora and ethical criticism.”

-Sara Ahmed, Professor in Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

“[the book’s] analysis of diasporic cultural traditions and the ethics of representation are of particular interest not only in a postcolonial context but also in terms of our contemporary phase of ‘globalisation’. With its interlinked focus on philosophical/theoretical and literary texts and its exposition of central notions, such as the ‘self’, ‘nation’ and ‘home’, it promises to extend critical and academic discourse in the field.”

-Tabish Khairm University of Aarhus, Denmark

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