Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space

In these closely argued essays, taking examples from writing and film, Arun Prabha Mukherjee considers the place of the third world person - both as artistic creator and as a subject of artistic eneavour - in the West. Works of non-mainstream, immigrant artists, she urges, shoul be understood on their own terms. In particular, established Western aethetics, especially the idea of the Universal and its applications, even within the domains of the postcolonial and feminist criticism, are demonstrated as instances of domination and disregard third world experiences and particularities. On the other hand, key canonical texts in the West, blind to these details of the third world lives they portray, are shown to be distortional and even offensive.

This important work includes detailed and original considerations of the works of David Lean, Michael Ondaatje, MG Vassanji, Earle Birney, Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand, and numerous others.

Arun Prabha Mukherjee came to Canada from India in 1971 as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Toronto. An Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto, she is the author of The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel: The Rhetoric of Dreiser and His Contemporaries (1987), Towards an Aesthetic of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism and Cutural Imperialism (1988), and numerous articles on postcolonial literatures, women's writing and critical theory. She has edited an anthology of writings by women of colour and aboriginal women entitled, Sharing Our Experience (1993), and contributed entries on several South Asian women writers to A Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990).