Description
Book SynopsisWhy should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire?
Trade Review“This book enriches our appreciation of three of the most important writers of the twentieth century, while forwarding an original thesis with potential applicability to many postcolonial writers.“
“The literary-critical readings that form the core of (
Making Words Matter) are superb, and both literary scholars and those from disciplines in the social sciences will find the analyses elegant and rigorous.” * The Journal of Asian Studies *
“Hai’s work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.
Making Words Matter is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light.” * SirReadaLot.org *
“This book is the most assiduous to date, and may one day be recognized as the most assiduous ever, on the central colonial/postcolonial dynamic of word and body, the body making words, and making them matter, and—the tables turned—words themselves having a hand in materially creating and substantially shaping, though sometimes disfiguring and even destroying, bodies of various kinds.” * Author of The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism *
