Calibrations: Reading for the Social

by Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson explores a practice of reading that oscillates rapidly between domains-the literary-aesthetic, the social, the cultural, and the political-in order to uncover the mutually illuminating nature of these domains. He does this not to assert the often repeated postmodernist view that there is nothing outside the text, but to outline a method of reading he calls calibrations: a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society.

Quayson surveys a wide array of texts-ranging from Bob Marley lyrics, Toni Morrison's work, Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, and Althusser's reflections on political economy-and treats a broad range of themes: the comparative structures of alienation in literature and anthropology, cultural heroism as a trope in African society and politics, literary tragedy as a template for reading the life and activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, trauma and the status of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa, representations of physical disability, and the clash between enchanted and disenchanted time in postcolonial texts.

Ato Quayson is director of the African Studies Centre, lecturer in English, and fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge.

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Calibrations: Reading for the Social, and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, as well as editor of the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, coeditor of A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies and general editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.