English Department

From President Obama's Predator drones to 'twitter litter'; from novels by Teju Cole and Mohsin Hamid to Judith Butler's concept of 'grievable lives', this essay focusses on the circulation of narratives of porosity and their modes of translocal representation. The concept of porosity is deployed here to account for spatial and textual connections which cultural products fashion, exploit, and transform at the same time. Porosity has the potential to render borders – despite their evident and frequently harmful function of division and separation – as membranes and connectors which foster and modulate traffic, connection, cross-fertilisation.

Crossing boundaries is a key issue in EFL teaching and Postcolonial Studies. It is an objective not only for the foreign language classroom that is facing increasingly global influences in terms of more heterogeneous societies, but also with a view to the growing heterogeneity in the literature, media and materials used in teaching and research. Because the intersections between Postcolonial Studies and TEFL are not only manifold but also highly significant, this volume brings together papers that explore, perform and theorize various kinds of crossovers, be they disciplinary, thematic or intermedial ones.

Christiane Lütge holds the Chair for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at the University of Munich. Her research interests include media literacy, literature in the EFL classroom, inter- and transcultural learning, global education and foreign language teacher education.

Mark Stein is Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at WWU Münster. His areas of research include Afroeuropean studies, diasporic formations, porosity, ransnationalism and translocation, black and Asian British cultural production, and postcolonial literatures.

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts reflects that critiques of ideological formations occur within intersecting social, political, and cultural configurations where each position is in itself ‘ideological’ – and subject to asymmetrical power relations. Postcolonialism has become an object of critique as ideology, but postcolonial studies’ highly diversified engagement with ideology remains a strong focus that exceeds Ideologiekritik. Fourteen contributors from North America, Africa, and Europe focus (I) on the complex relation between postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, and conceptualizations of ideology, (II) on ideological formations that manifest themselves in very specific postcolonial contexts, highlighting the potential continuities between colonial and postcolonial ideology, and (III) on further expanding and complicating the nexus of postcolonial ideology, from veiling as both ideological practice and individual resistance to home as ideological construct; from palimpsestic readings of colonial photography to aesthetics as ideology.

In the 1990s, it has become protocol to distinguish "black" (that is, African Caribbean) and "Asian" groupings in Britain' Ashwani Sharma and others have recently noted. 4 I take this quotation as emblematic of a moment in British cultures where alliances between distinct black British groups have become more difficult and where diversity is emphasized. It stems from a study which responds to a growing presence and commodification of 'Asian' musical production in Britain such as bhangra, Southall beat, northern rock bhangra and house bhangra. This increased visibility of an Asian cultural presence is true for the arts generally; think of the soaring success of the sculptor Anish Kapoor's work; think of writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, and, obviously, Rushdie, or younger ones like Bidishas or Atima Srivastava. There are the fields of fashion to be considered, or food, or TV with programmes like Goodness Gradous. While limiting my inquiry to the field of writing, I'm pursuing the larger question of the politics of 'Asian' cultural production visa -vis the older and overarching denomination 'Black British'.

Religion and spirituality have long held a prominent position in Mexican American literature. The complex interplay of indigenous practices and colonial Catholicism, which developed after the Spanish conquest, also deeply affects Latino cultures in the United States. This study proposes that religion is not only a significant aspect of Mexican American literature but that it needs to be understood as a discourse that underlies other discourses on race, gender, and class and therefore structures Mexican American culture and literature in a way that is subversive and powerful. In this book, an interdisciplinary approach to inter-American studies, discourse analysis, theories on religion and spirituality, as well as Mexican American culture and literature reveals the interconnectedness of the borderlands and religion. Of Virgins, Curanderas, and Wrestler Saints provides close-readings of works by Ana Castillo, Carmen Tafolla, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Rodriguez, Salvador Plascencia, and others to illustrate the notion of “un/doing religion.”


The study by Alexia Schemien offers a wealth of insights into Mexican American spirituality unlike anything we have seen before. The approach to such a complex subject is masterfully achieved, thanks to a nuanced critical interdisciplinary lens that encompasses elements from a history of convergence, a hybrid spirituality, an unrelenting myth, a border of crossroads, and a transnationalism of postmodernity. A carefully formulated theoretical paradigm is constructed to address Chicano literature by explaining both the pretext and background of certain texts along with their creative impulse. This sweeping analytical method of “un/doing” religion opens up immense possibilities in order to better understand the underpinnings of spirituality in literature.

Francisco A. Lomelí
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara
Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language