1. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Brev till min dotter : Theodor Kallifatides' palimpsest
- 2013
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In: Nya Argus. - Helsingfors. - 0027-7126. ; 106:4, s. 118-122
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This essay is a critical review of the Swedish writer, Theodore Kallifatides' novel Brev till min dotter (2012) ('Letters to My Daughter'). It is formatted, thematically and inspirationally, by Ovid's two works Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, written while in exile in Tomis (today's Constanța) on the Black Sea. I have organized Kallifatides' fictive narrative of his pre-Junta (1964) emigration from Greece (where he was born), his multilevelled refashioning of the source material, into a palimpsest that contains three rhetoric layers: the epistle, the autobiography, and the pamphlet.The first depicts the slow transition of 'Ovid', the presumptive Roman imperialist and colonialist, into the less self-centered icon of the Ars Amatoria fame and the more accommadating listener to the people around him. In the second, I show how 'Ovid' is merging into the persona of Kallifatides, a migrant who voluptuously absorbs his new language (Swedish). A language that he masters with the innovatory skill of the best postcolonial writer. The third constitutes a universal praise song of freedom of speech and gender equality. Ovid, in Kallifatides portrait, is feminized.
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2. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Eastern and Western Africa : Transmutations, Translations, and Transgressions -- Literature in English from Nsukka, Accra, Kampala, to Nairobi, and Back
- 2013. - 1
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In: Postcolonial Texts & Events. - Lund : Studentlitteratur. - 9789144070698 ; , s. 85-125
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The chapter on West- and East African literature is divided into four sections called Maps, Images, Words, and Conflict and Concord. Maps is the only section that has a clear chronological structure; the others follow no such a protocol. None of them attempts at grounding the selected texts in national spaces and cultural landscapes. The Map is a metaphor for the colonial power acquisition, its methods of surveillance and preservation and the affiliated notion of border of demarcations, crossings, and transgressions of language and culture. In the second section of Images, the focus is on the dichotomies of African writing in English, the rhetoric of 'talking back,' and the emergence of the multi-faceted expressiveness in visuality/ print/ sound. The third section of Words centres on the development of West and East African English as a cultural and controversial vernacular, as a contact language (lingua franca), Pidgin, and Rotten English – in writing and street talk. In the last section I invite writers to discuss areas of concord and conflict, war and imprisonment, on a literary personal and universal level. Women and women's writing, and children's are highlighted. The chapter problematizes normative concepts such as 'tradition,' 'ethnicity,' and 'borders' for a better understanding of the writers' choices of what topics to unearth. The English-language texts examined are not necessarily neither 'English' nor 'texts,' being hybridized, transformed, and translated in many ways. Local entrepreneurship and indigenous creativity with literary aspirations operate from the beginning in an interface with the global, where the two are enmeshed with each other to the extent that the conventional dichotomy of centre-periphery becomes an inadequate term with which to qualify the East and West-African book-market. The giants, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo and Flora Nwapa perform on the same volatile scene as the Longman Drumbeat, Macmillan’s Pacesetter series and the Spear Books thrillers.
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3. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J., 1940-
(author)
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Ebbe Linde, 1897-1991
- 2013
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In: Svenskt översättarlexikon. - Stockholm : Södertörns högskola.
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)
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4. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Eliot Elisofon's Famous Portrait of a Young Chinua Achebe
- 2013
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This is a reading of Eliot Elisofon's portrait of Chinua Achebe taken in Enugu on November 16, 1959. Achebe's Things Fall Apart has recently been published. My reading of the portrait is placed in the larger context of the mission of Elisofon's travel to produce two seemingly antagonistic articles or viewpoints for LIFE magazine, one old, the second modern. The first about the Western myths of Africa, I claim, submerged the second about the independence process of Nigeria. The portrait of a young assertive Achebe is filtered by such a complexity.
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5. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Fieldwork as Translation : Linnaeus' Apostle Anders Sparrman and the Hottentot Perspective
- 2013
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In: African literatures and beyond. - Amsterdam-New York : Editions Rodopi B.V.. - 9789042037380 - 9789401209892 ; , s. 149-176
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The critical reception of Sparrman's South African travelogue (as a whole text and not a source bank for particular scholarly interests) is, markedly, dominated by inaudibility and negligence. The resistance to examine the in-between-ness of Sparrman's dialogic meetings outside of their spatial and temporal hierarchies is persevering. Style is always personal. Genre is not. It within the interface of a social event shaped by speakers in translation, in exchanges of shared values transcending the colonial asymmetry that Sparrman emerged as a reciprocal, interactive agent.This chapter discusses the entangled history of Anders Sparrman's travel account Resa till Goda Hopps-udden, södra pol-kretsen och omkring jordklotet, samt till hottentott- och caffer-landen, åren 1772-76, its decade long progression from fieldwork memoranda to the Swedish edition (1783) and the translations into German (1784) and English (1785, 1786). My focus is on the linguistic-cultural communication that evolved between Sparrman and his informants and how its critical denouncement of Boer colonial aggression and enactment of Khoisan struggle for survival were adjusted to the Linnean pedagogy for naturalist travellers and translators. I show how Sparrman endorsed the Linnean concept of 'socializing' with the people en route for the acquisition of data, how his fascination with language provided him with an incisive tool for self-reflexivity. I extend the notion of field-work to confront the postmodern negligence and rejection of Sparrman as a unique communicator and writer.
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6. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J., 1940-
(author)
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Sekulär humanism, mänskliga rättigheter, religion
- 2013
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In: Nya Argus. - Helsingfors. - 0027-7126. ; 106:12-13, s. 391-393
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- My essay called "Secular humanism, the human rights, religion" is a response to the special feature issue "Religion and Society" (Nya Argus nr 10-11/2013), which, I argue, is skewed. 'Society,' as part of the binary above, is absent, transforming the issue into a theistic pamphlet. The illusion of Finland as a theocracy is disturbing.
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7. |
- Granqvist, Raoul J.
(author)
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Utopi i krigets skugga : Erla Hovilainen i ett österbottniskt fiskesamhälle
- 2013
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In: Horisont. - Vasa : Horisont. - 0439-5530. ; 60:4, s. 6-12
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Erla Hovilainen-Husgafvel (b. Lund), a Finland-Swede ethnologist (1907-1984) returned in June-July 1944 to the small fishing community of Tankar, an island in the outer archipelago off the city of Kokkola/Karleby, after many previous visits there, to finish the research for her book Ro, ro till fiskeskär ('Row, Row to the Fishermen's Island') that appeared the next year. Her documentary consists of two parts: the history of fishing on the island with the eighteenth-century wooden church and the lighthouse as its major narrative icons, and her interviews with three fishermen and their family members. Although the country is at war, it is only indirectly present in her account. I read Hovilainen's chronicle as an allegory of an ideal utopian world, where the politics is at the hands of the people, where pragmatism overrules both religious and secular conventions, where language is free from hierarchical structures. Hovilainen, I explain, transliterates the speech forms of her informants into distinct personal voices. It is an allegory of a community that should exist.
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