This book analyses colonial and postcolonial writing about Cyprus, before and after its independence from the British Empire in 1960. These works are understood as ‘transportal literatures’ in that they navigate the liminal and layered forms of colonialism which impede the freedom of the island, including the residues of British imperialism, the impact of Greek and Turkish nationalisms, and the ethnolinguistic border between north and south. This study puts pressure on the postcolonial discipline by evaluating the unique hegemonic relationship Cyprus has with three metropolitan centres, not one. The print languages associated with each centre (English, Greek, and Turkish) are complicit in neo-colonial activity. Contemporary Cypriot writers address this in order to resist sectarian division and grapple with their deferred postcoloniality.
Author(s): Daniele Nunziata
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 297
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgements
A Note on Terminology
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations
1 ‘The Key of Western Asia’: An Introduction to Transportal Literatures
Historical, Linguistic, and Literary Background
The Problem of Cypriot Literatures and Postcolonialism
Cyprus and the UK
Cyprus and Western Europe
Cyprus and Greco-Turkish Nationalisms
Questions of Form: Travel and Transportal Literatures
‘Postcolonial’ Travel Writing
Transportal Literatures
2 ‘A Business of Some Heat’: Sexuality, Disease, and Gendered Orientalism on Venus’ Island, 1878–1973
Cyprus, Degeneration, and Gendered Orientalism
The Homosocial Segregation of Empire
‘I Am Bound to Speak’: British Women’s Responses to Orientalism
Conclusions
3 Re-imagining the Cypriot Nation: Writing-Back to the Colonial Travelogue, 1964–1974
‘Postcolonial’ Tactics: Costas Montis’ Closed Doors and Taner Baybars’ Plucked in a Far-Off Land
Intersecting Genres
Writing-Back to the British Colonial Book
Languages as/and Cutting Instruments
Writing-Back to Nationalisms
Conclusions
4 Travelling Across the Buffer Zone: Intersections in Language, Genre, and Identity, 2000–2013
Re-writing the Limits of Nationalist Partitions
Counter-Travelling the Buffer Zone
The Transportal Language of the Buffer Zone
The Homes of the Buffer Zone
Poems of Homelessness and the Unhomely
Conclusions
5 Re-gendering Borders: Partitions in Contemporary Cypriot Women’s Writing
Rewriting History from the Periphery
Re-claiming Gendered Spaces
The Closed Doors of Gender
Rejecting the ‘Provincial’ Through Translation as Resistance
Translating Across Mother-Tongues and Father-Tongues
Confronting Father-Tongues in the No-Man’s-Land of Translation
Distanced Readings of Gender
Conclusions
6 Conclusions
Bibliography
Author Index
Subject Index
