Markets of Memories combines the analysis of rhetorical (and dialectical) structures and the exploration of contact zones (and their power dynamics). In effect, the book explores the movement of history, and its interpretive narratives, from two perspectives – the postcolonial (with its central colonizer-colonized binary) and the transnational (with its cross-cultural multiformity). While one often tends to be vertical and the other horizontal in progression, these two concepts are related. To be postcolonial, especially in the contemporary sense, is to be already multicultural or transnational. One pointer to this transnational mode of being is the phenomenon of the traveling sign or the travel of the sign – and its consequences – across cultural-ideological boundaries.

Focusing on markets (both actual sites and ideational frameworks or contexts) as the quintessential traveling sign of modernity, Markets of Memories includes the synoptic exploration of historical relations (and the pertinent markets of memories) in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. This exploration explains the historical basis for the emergence and advancement of postcolonialism/transnationalism as discourse.

Markets of Memories also includes, and in fact emphasizes, the text/context interpretation of particular works by Christopher Okigbo (Africa), Derek Walcott (the Caribbean), James Joyce (Ireland/Europe), and Isabel Allende (Latin America). The writers and the works studied point to the localization as well as transnational transcendence of specific narratives in imaginative engagements with history and its parenthetical myths.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maik Nwosu is an assistant professor of African and world literature at the University of Denver, Colorado. A novelist, poet, journalist, and scholar, Nwosu’s research interests include African, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and world literatures as well as semiotics and critical theory.

Subject categories

Literature, Literary Criticism, History/AFRICA