Phantasy, Resistance and Alienation in Language and Discourse: An Introduction
Sara Zavaree, Anne Storch, Nico Nassenstein,
Angelika Mietzner & Andrea Hollington
This volume brings together new and engaged contributions on languages of phantasy, resistance and alienation: work that moves beyond the strategies of inversion and mimesis, and also work that looks at language and thinking about language from a critical perspective. It features contributions on the decentering and de-marginalization of language practices, which, as a form of postcolonial mimesis, portray the Other from the perspective of marginality and subalternity. The Other, who is normally defined in the sense of Fabian (1983), where he/she is not only different, but remote and inferior, and constructed in relation to the Self, has often been denied a voice of his/her own (Spivak 1988). But this Other is constructed by productively filling derogatory, trashy labels with new meaning, so that the resulting Other’s Other can speak back, laugh back, and stain the arena in which the Other was formerly ostracized and discarded.