Betty Joseph

How contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening.In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writers—including Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara Kingsolver—Joseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality. Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual metaphors that have captivated literary, critical, and cultural studies: specters, attachments, networks, markets, and assemblages. Joseph demonstrates how these terms are embedded with their own temporal structures and linguistic complexity. She develops a mode of reading that she calls "conceptual-metaphorical performances," which embody the writers' complex chronopolitical commitments and their refusal to concede to the political paralysis implied in the synchronous and flattened world-time of globality. Time, rather than space, is the axis along which contemporary fiction challenges us to imagine forms of coexistence and social collectivity under the precarious conditions of global capitalism and environmental damage.From Empire to Anthropocene convincingly dispels the notion that so-called English-language "world literature" precludes the possibility of historical analysis and social collectivity. Bringing postcolonialism and Marxist theory into conversation with critical global and ecological perspectives, this book paves the way for a new literary theorization of contemporary Anglophone literature and contributes a fresh perspective to the field of cultural studies.

How contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening.In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writers—including Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara Kingsolver—Joseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality. Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual metaphors that have captivated literary, critical, and cultural studies: specters, attachments, networks, markets, and assemblages. Joseph demonstrates how these terms are embedded with their own temporal structures and linguistic complexity. She develops a mode of reading that she calls "conceptual-metaphorical performances," which embody the writers' complex chronopolitical commitments and their refusal to concede to the political paralysis implied in the synchronous and flattened world-time of globality. Time, rather than space, is the axis along which contemporary fiction challenges us to imagine forms of coexistence and social collectivity under the precarious conditions of global capitalism and environmental damage.From Empire to Anthropocene convincingly dispels the notion that so-called English-language "world literature" precludes the possibility of historical analysis and social collectivity. Bringing postcolonialism and Marxist theory into conversation with critical global and ecological perspectives, this book paves the way for a new literary theorization of contemporary Anglophone literature and contributes a fresh perspective to the field of cultural studies.

In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.

Betty Joseph offers an account of how archives - and the practice of archiving - shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.