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26 janvier 2023
- doi: 10.4000/books.pulm.11078
- isbn: 9782842698850
- eisbn: 9782367813943
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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traduction politique mythologie intertextualité spectralité littérature postcoloniale fantôme commonwealth translation politics mythology intertextuality spectrality postcolonial literature ghost commonwealth ghostwriting LIT000000 Literature (General) DSSujets proches
Frontier troubles Handwriting Chirography World literature Western literature (Western countries) Belles-lettres Land Land utilization Utilization of land Use of land Annals Specters Spectres PhantomsCiter ce document
Dave Gunning, « History, Anthropology, Necromancy—Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land », Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, ID : 10.4000/books.pulm.11078
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This essay looks to Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land (1992) in order to explore the ways in which the writer stages the conjunction of types of writing that seem to find their discursive origin within the disciplines of anthropology and history respectively. In this meeting of modes, it is argued, a haunted space is opened which speaks of the past but is always orientated toward an ethical revisioning of the present and, more significantly still, of the future. Ghosh’s engagement with ghosts within his accounts of twelfth-century cosmopolitan connections and of the realities of contemporary Egyptian rural life allows him to develop an oppositional stance that stands outside of modernity’s enforced divisions. In attempting to speak to the ghosts that cannot be contained in an easily imagined past, but become manifest instead in the present, he finds a way of writing about a lost history that is more than just nostalgia, and a way of presenting ethnography that is always marked by a disruptive potential set into motion by the problematised position of the recorder.