Abstract
Like Umberto Eco, M. G. Vassanji straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction, and both have an interest in scientific precision, Eco in semiotics and Vassanji in his training as a scientist. The border between fiction and nonfiction in both their work is not always clear. In this chapter, I could discuss the same matter in Vassanji, but I would rather concentrate on his lesser-known work. His fiction tends, like Eco’s, to be best known to readers, but, unlike Eco, Vassanji has not made a career in the study of language, literature and philosophy. Both share an interest in journalism, and I will discuss briefly Vassanji’s journalism just as I did Eco’s. Both are public figures engaged with the world.
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Notes
M. G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Toronto: Doubleday, 2009). My thanks to Asma Sayed for the invitation to write on Vassanji, for discussing the field, and for permission to reprint a revised version of that essay, “M. G. Vassanji and the Essay of Life,” M. G. Vassanji: Essays on His Works, ed. Asma Sayed (Toronto: Guernica, 2013).
For some of my earlier work on Native and African Canadian literature, see Jonathan Hart, Interpreting Cultures: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1580)
and Michael de Montaigne, The Essayes, trans. John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1603).
Marshall McLuhan, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1941)
Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Berkeley, CA: Ginko Press, 2003). In Toronto, Marshall McLuhan gave me permission in the late 1970s to read his thesis, which I also reread on several occasions in the Manuscripts Room of Cambridge University. It is good that there is now a published version, as I had thought when I first read it that it should find its way to a larger audience. McLuhan was able to combine the local and global in the most suggestive and open of ways.
M. G. Vassanji, “Introduction,” A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature, ed. M. G. Vassanji (Toronto: TSAR, 1985), 1.
See Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, ed. Cecil Jane (New York: Dover, 1988).
See Jonathan Hart, Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain, 1492–1713 (New York, Palgrave, 2001)
Jonathan Hart, Empires and Colonies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
Tom King, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: Anansi, 2003)
Jonathan Hart, “Canadian Literature: in the Mouth of the Canon,” Journal of Canadian Studies 23 (1988–89), 145–58.
Vassanji, “The Postcolonial Writer,” A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature, ed. M. G. Vassanji (Toronto: TSAR, 1985), 63.
M. G. Vassanji, “Am I a Canadian Writer?” Canadian Literature 190 (2006), 7.
Vassanji, “Am I a Canadian Writer?” 8–9; see E. K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1943)
Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971)
Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto, Anansi, 1972)
Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988)
E. D. Blodgett, Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003).
M. G. Vassanji, “I was a city boy, a soft Asian,” New Internationalist 396 (December 2006); 8–11; the version I have is not paginated, so none will be noted here and below.
See William Edgett Smith, We Must Run While They Walk: A Portrait of Africa’s Julius Nyerere (New York: Random House, 1972).
M. G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003), 291
in Roy Cullen, The Poverty of Corrupt Nations (Toronto: Blue Butterfly Books, 2008), ch. 2.
M. G. Vassanji, “Tanzania: Land of Constant Complaints,” Maclean’s, September 13, 2011. I refer the reader to http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/09/13/a-land-of-constant-complaints/. There are no page numbers in this version and thus none in mine here and below.
See, for instance, Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, trans. Henry Percival Biggar and ed. with an intro. by Ramsey Cook (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); [Frobisher, Martin] and George Best. The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A. D. 1576–8 (by G. Best), ed. Richard Collinson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867).
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© 2013 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Vassanji, Africa and America. In: From Shakespeare to Obama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_9
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