Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Post/Modernist rhythms and voices: Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith to Jo Shapcott and Selima Hill
- 3 Reframing women’s war poetry
- 4 Verbal and visual art in twentieth-century British women’s poetry
- 5 Towards a new confessionalism
- 6 The mid-Atlantic imagination: Mina Loy, Ruth Fainlight, Anne Stevenson, Anne Rouse and Eva Salzman
- 7 The Irish history wars and Irish women’s poetry: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland
- 8 Interculturalism: Imtiaz Dharker, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay and contemporary Irish poets
- 9 Post-pastoral perspectives on landscape and culture
- 10 Feminism’s experimental ‘work at the language-face’
- 11 Carol Ann Duffy, Medbh McGuckian and ruptures in the lines of communication
- Selected reading
- Index
8 - Interculturalism: Imtiaz Dharker, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay and contemporary Irish poets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Post/Modernist rhythms and voices: Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith to Jo Shapcott and Selima Hill
- 3 Reframing women’s war poetry
- 4 Verbal and visual art in twentieth-century British women’s poetry
- 5 Towards a new confessionalism
- 6 The mid-Atlantic imagination: Mina Loy, Ruth Fainlight, Anne Stevenson, Anne Rouse and Eva Salzman
- 7 The Irish history wars and Irish women’s poetry: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Eavan Boland
- 8 Interculturalism: Imtiaz Dharker, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay and contemporary Irish poets
- 9 Post-pastoral perspectives on landscape and culture
- 10 Feminism’s experimental ‘work at the language-face’
- 11 Carol Ann Duffy, Medbh McGuckian and ruptures in the lines of communication
- Selected reading
- Index
Summary
‘Interculturalism’, like ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’, is a multivalent term, and one which has been contested for reifying differences between cultures while eliding differences within cultures. In this chapter, ‘interculturalism’ denotes a discursive space which accommodates differences and commonalities, allowing us to expand the paradigms through which we read women’s poetry. The imperatives of our contemporary travelling culture, manifested in the transnational flow of people, information and finance, have impacted in significant ways upon the priorities of first- and second-wave feminism: the struggle for civil and social justice, the exploration of identity politics and the task of recovery. At the beginning of the 1990s, the woman writer could persuasively be defined by feminist theorists such as Susan Stanford Friedman as a ‘Penelope [who] exercises her agency as a weaver/writer within and against’ a patriarchal tradition. Today’s Penelope also works within the expanded contours of a world wide web and, whether by choice or through necessity, she demonstrates that migrancy and travel are not male prerogatives. In the lived experience, as in the poetics, of many women, ‘home’ is a condition of ‘dwellingin- displacement’. Received notions of nation, place and female space are reconfigured in the global circuitry of diaspora, migration and the information superhighway.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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