Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation, McGill-Queen's UP.
Discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation have emerged as powerful scripts for interracial negotiations in states struggling with the legacies of colonialism. While such discourses can obscure or even perpetuate existing power relations, they can also encourage remembrance, reformulate notions of justice, and ultimately bring about social transformation.
Drawing on critical and theoretical material by thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, and Julia Kristeva, McGonegal supplements indigenous models and approaches with those produced within Euro American discourse. In the process, she develops an understanding of forgiveness and reconciliation based on the interventive power of literature. Through insightful readings of four novels, she demonstrates the ways in which literature can create the conditions that make processes of postcolonial reconciliation possible. The first book to approach the political demands for reconciliation from the perspective of postcolonial literary criticism and theory, Imagining Justice demonstrates that reading can have potentially radical social and political effects. While the primary focus is on literary texts, the issues at stake are germane to historians, political scientists, theologians, and sociologists. "McGonegal provides lucid discussion of theoretical models and fictional works, weaving disparate discourses into coherent arguments with ease. I can find little to quibble with in this fine study... Imagining Justice is groundbreaking." My award-winning writing has also been published in academic journals such as
Essays in Canadian Writing, Interventions, English Studies in Canada, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Postcolonial Text, and in magazines like This, Broadview, and University Affairs. |
Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century, Rodopi Press.
Literature for Our Times offers the widest range of essays on present and future directions in postcolonial studies ever gathered together in one volume. Demonstrating the capacity of different approaches and methodologies to 'live together' in a spirit of 'convivial democracy', these essays range widely across regions, genres, and themes to suggest the many different directions in which the field is moving. Beginning with an engagement with global concerns such as world literatures and cosmopolitanism, translation, diaspora and migrancy, established and emerging critics demonstrate the ways in which postcolonial analysis continues to offer valuable ways of analysing the pressing issues of a globalizing world. "Literature for Our Times is a great reference for current scholarship in the field...There is almost certainly something to satisfy anyone with an interest in postcolonial studies." Faith on the Move: Daily Reflections on Hope and Change, UCPH.
Our spiritual practices carry us through the times of transition in our lives, when we wander in the metaphorical desert. For migrants, refugees, and immigrants, the journey is more than a metaphor. Writers include theologians, ministers, friends of the church, and activists, a number of whom are migrants themselves.
"I am moved by the stories each contributor shares, which are both intensely personal and utterly universal in the feelings and experiences they evoke. I look forward to engaging deeply with this resource throughout the Lenten season." |