Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kappel, Yvonne

Titel

Re-Membering the Travelogue: Generic Intertextuality as a Memory Practice in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief

Ist Teil von

• Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2017-03, Vol.65 (1), p.67-83

Ort / Verlag

Leipzig: De Gruyter

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Genres are not simply carriers of meaning – they generate meaning themselves. By intertextually evoking the genre of the travelogue, Teju Cole’s re-members a genre and its practices of not only portraying but also creating the Other. By ways of openly using but at the same time misusing the main characteristics of the imperialistic travelogue – such as the discourse of negation and visual practices – highlights entanglements that destabilize any fixed boundary between the past and the present as well as between the colonizer and the colonized. Disappointing the reader’s expectations raised by the generic conventions, the generic intertextuality asks the reader to reconsider the wider memory context that the genre is placed in. Neither conforming to the traditional travelogue nor to the postcolonial travelogue, questions these firm categorisations, positioning itself in the in-between and asking for a thinking beyond binary divisions and, most of all, a linking of the past and the present.