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The Shock of Arrival
Reflections on Postcolonial Experience
Meena Alexander
Pages: 224ISBN: 0-89608-545-7
Format: paper
Release Date: 1996-01-01
This book is also available in cloth
In The Shock of Arrival, acclaimed South Asian American poet and novelist Meena Alexander unleashes a fury of prose and poetry to confront the stereotypes and explore the challenges facing postcolonial immigrants in America. Lyrically commenting on the history of memory, language, shame, and exile, Alexander takes us from her childhood in Tiruvella, in the south of India, and Khartoum in the Sudan, to her present-day home in Manhattan. She poignantly describes the wealth of experiences and imaginings that have shaped her life and writing. Her project: "to make space for what was crossed out in the decorum of femininity, in the high places of classical hierarchy, in the racism of a canonical knowledge, in the obliterations of a national memory … all this is part of our task, part of the violent, fractured worlds that we must etch into beauty."
With essays on home, childbirth, the Indian experience in America, and the postcolonial "Third World," The Shock of Arrival is always provocative and often startling—a deeply personal and fierce testament to the imperative to write and resist. It will especially appeal to readers and students interested in postcolonial literature, Third World feminism, and Asian American studies.
Other topics that are related to Asian American Studies are:
Table of Contents
Overture
Another Voice
Piecemeal Shelters
Art of Pariahs
Language and Shame
Alphabets of Flesh
Passion
Skin Song
Whose House is This?
House of a Thousand Doors
Hotel Alexandria
Sidi Syed's Architecture
Tangled Roots
Poem by the Wellside
Bobating
Her Garden
Erupting Words
Aunt Chinna
Coda from Night-Scene
Translating Violence
Bordering Ourselves
Her Mother's Words
Ashtamudi Lake
Translating Violence
Desert Rose
Estrangement Becomes the Mark of the Eagle
Accidental Markings
Great Brown River
The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts
Making Up Memory
That Other Body
'A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse...'
New World Aria
No Nation Woman
White Horseman Blues
Migrant Music
A Durable Past
Performing the Word
For Safdar Hashmi Beaten to Death Just Outside Delhi
Moloyashree
Making Up Memory
Brief Chronicle by Candlelight
San Andreas Fault
The Shock of Arrival
Paper Filled with Light
Skins with Fire Inside: Indian Women Writers
Fracturi...
Meena Alexander
Click here to view Meena Alexander's full Author PageMeena Alexander is the author of several highly acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including the memoir Fault Lines (named one of the best books of 1993 by Publishers Weekly), the novel Nampally Road (a VLS Editor’s Choice in 1991), a volume of poems River and Bridge, and the novel Sandhya Rosenblum. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Daedalus, Poetry Review (UK), and Grand Street, and has been translated into Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, French, Italian, and German. Alexander is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City University of New York, and Lecturer in Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University.