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      Melancholia and Conviviality in Modern Literary Scots: Sanghas, Sengas and Shairs

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          Abstract

          This paper considers the visions of Scottish identity projected in twenty-first century, post-devolution Scots literature, and seeks to read them against Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia ( 2005) which examines the protean identities of post-imperial Britain. Gilroy looks particularly at social and artistic manifestations of racial and cultural inequality, although conceding that there is also room for a ‘postcolonial conviviality’ that celebrates diversity. His critique of this ‘Britain’ is, however, selectively constructed, making only passing reference to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and no space is devoted to an evaluation of post-colonial Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. As yet, no comparable analysis is forthcoming for these ‘home nations’, so this paper attempts to outline the ways in which Scottish—and particularly Scots—literature may provide relevant comparable cultural commentary. Focus is given here to literature written in Scots because the choice to write in Scots is strongly politically motivated and speaks immediately to the question of cultural inequality and loss. Specific attention is paid to Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go ( 2000), Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag ( 2004), and Anne Donovan’s Buddha Da ( 2003), which various engage with questions of personal and national identity as their main characters take part in their personal journeys.

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          Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence

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            Nineteen Eighty-Four

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              Postcolonial melancholia

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                2045-5224
                C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings
                Open Library of Humanities
                2045-5224
                30 January 2017
                : 5
                : 1
                : 5
                Affiliations
                [-1]University of Salford, GB
                Article
                10.16995/c21.14
                7d575c54-9913-4d3c-bc22-8e969dd08f80
                Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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                Literary studies
                Scots,Scots language,Scottish literature,postcolonial melancholia,devolution
                Literary studies
                Scots, Scots language, Scottish literature, postcolonial melancholia, devolution

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