Revolts in Cultural Critique

In Revolts in Cultural Critique Rosemarie Buikema examines both a main argumentation and detailed case studies concerning the ways in which contemporary literature and art revisit history and revolt against its multiple modes of violence. These cultural critical expressions seek to make the as yet unformed and unseen, visible and thus, open for discussion, and for imagining a different future. Revolt as method and as theme. She focuses on multi-layered interaction between message and medium, materiality and form, that enacts revolt as a process of resistance against clear-cut truths. The revolt that she unpacks for all of us who crave insights into what art can be and do, encompasses a poetics of recycling, an unfolding of folds, and an inquiry into how matter matters, how forms morph, and how time leaps out of its classically assumed linearity. The art discussed demands an active involvement in the erasure and reconstruction of the violated world. -- Mieke Bal, Professor Emerita in Literary Theory, University of Amsterdam

Rosemarie Buikema is professor of art, culture and diversity at Utrecht University. She chairs the UU Graduate Gender Programme and is the scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies

Preface Introduction Part I Feminism and Postcolonialism 1. Thinking Beyond the Weight of Tradition: Virginia Woolfs Postcolonial and Anti-Militarist Feminism 2. The Future Perfect of Bertha Mason: Configurations of Gender, Class, Ethnicity and Race in Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre 3. Bertha Mason in Labuwangi: Couperus and Colonial Gothic Part II Truth and Reconciliation 4. Truth and its Discontents: Reading Coetzee and Van Niekerk 5. A Dress for Phila Portia Ndwandwe: Moving from Krog to Mntambo 6. New Leaders and Old Texts: Recycling the Archive Part III Decolonising the Public Space 7. #RhodesMustFall and the Curation of European Imperial Legacies 8. The Folds of History in William Kentridges Black Box Theatre Epilogue