Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South Asian Diasporas

by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Through close readings of works by writers like C. L. R. James, Salman Rushdie, Ama Ata Aidoo, Michelle Cliff, and Hanif Kureishi, Using the Masterâ s Tools examines instances of textual resistance elaborated within imperial/metropolitan epistemologies and ideologies. In her analysis, Anuradha Needham focuses especially on each writerâ s historical location, personal and political affiliations, presumed audiences, and position on gender as integral contextual determinants of the strategies of textual resistance each deploys. Drawing on the extensive scholarship on â subalternâ and anti-colonial resistances in a number of disciplines, this book demonstrates the mutual interactions of (general) theory with (specific) practice such that each is enriched, extended, and refurbished.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2000