Culture Writing

Reviews / Votes

"Full of splendid insight and erudition, Culture Writing offers a new way to understand the cross-pollination of literature and anthropology. By centering his story in the era of decolonization, Tim Watson shows how the 'literary turn' in anthropology caught fire not in the era of high theory but in an earlier moment when a wide radius of novelists, thinkers, and ethnographers--with women in the vanguard--merged political and creative energies in
powerful new ways. Watson has written a truly accomplished and important book." --Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
"With its wealth of historically-grounded close readings from the neglected midcentury, Culture Writing makes original and noteworthy contributions to Anglophone and Francophone twentieth-century literary studies, to the history of anthropology, and to studies tracking the relationship between these disciplines. Encompassing writings from the US, the UK, France, and the Caribbean, with glances toward writings from Nigeria, South Africa, and India, the
book covers an impressively broad geographical range. Through the use of archival materials like notebooks, manuscript drafts, and letters, Watson makes such a convincing case that it is surprising that critics
have neglected this dimension of midcentury literature until now." --Carey Snyder, Ohio University
"This brilliant new history of the decolonizing of metropolitan anthropology also gives us smart exegetical turns on writers who have never had their critical due (Barbara Pym), who have remained somewhat boxed in the bin of genre fiction (Ursula Le Guin), who have been understood as social scientists rather than creative minds (Laura Bohannan and Michel Leiris), or who have fallen out of favor as novelists (Saul Bellow) or theorists (Edouard Glissant).
Watson redefines the north-south problematics of postwar fiction in a single, decisive, and authoritative stroke." --Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania