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Journal articles on the topic 'Postcolonial novels'
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1
Stef Craps and Gert Buelens. "Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels." Studies in the Novel 40, no. 1-2 (2008): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sdn.0.0008.
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Khan, Fawad, Aqlimia Farhad, and Asma Amanat. "CODE MIXING AS POSTCOLONIAL MARKER: A CORPUS BASED ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH POSTCOLONIAL NOVELS." Pakistan Journal of Social Research 04, no. 04 (December 31, 2022): 346–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.52567/pjsr.v4i04.818.
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The scope, nature, significance, and causes of code mixing in Pakistani Post-Colonial novels are discussed in the current study. It highlights the conceptual frameworks created by Kachru (1983) and the Modiano’s model of English (1999). The Heart Divided written by Mumyaz Shah Nawaz, Bitter Gourd written by Talat Abbasi, My Feudal Lord written by Tehmina Durrani, Burnt Shadows written by Kamila Shamsie, and The Triple Mirror of the Self written by Zulifkar Ghose were five post-colonial novels of Pakistani English authors that were chosen as a sample for this study. The features of post-colonialism in these works have been examined by the authors. Code mixing of a relatively larger extent has been discovered in English novels written by Pakistani authors in this research. The authors of these novels haven’t denigrated native dialects; instead, they’ve emphasized the significance of Pakistani English, since the English language occasionally falls short of meeting locals' communication needs. These translations into other native languages are made to fill in the vocabulary spaces of the ideological concepts that cannot be expressed in English. These borrowings are not intended to portray the code-mixing English as a poor variant. We draw the conclusion that the usage of local words has brought attention to the value of local languages and raised concerns about the lingua franca. Keywords: Code Mixing, Corpus Based Analysis, Pakistani English Novels, Post-Colonial Novels
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Haileab, Isaias. "Postcolonial Psyche in English Novels from India and Africa." International Journal of Linguistics 4, no. 2 (March 17, 2023): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.47604/ijl.1861.
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Purpose: Postcolonial Themes in English Novels from India and Africa is a thematic analysis of four novels, two from India and two from Africa. The novels are: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. They represent the vast postcolonial writing which has emanated from these two lands as a result of the disaffection that indigenous writers felt that colonialism had exacted on their people, culture and literature. The novels stand out in their treatment of the postcolonial themes of conflicts between the colonial and the local, the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the communal and the individual aspects of the European colonial legacy in both India and Africa. A study in Postcolonial English novels from India and Africa is important as it may unfold the comparative experience of the effect of colonial period and the literary reaction by English language novelists from these two lands, which were subject to more or less similar colonial master.
Findings: The study reveals that all the four novels share in common the strong postcolonial theme which is at the crux of everything that follow. The story of the coming and going of the colonial powers in India and Africa had left their mark and it was not naturally compatible to the peoples of the populace in these two environments that were both colonized by the British.
Methodology: This article is based on a textual analysis of primary and secondary materials. The primary materials were obtained from the four selected English novels from India and Africa: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. The secondary materials were obtained from various books and articles published on the novels and on the subject of discussion as well.
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PURI, JYOTI. "READING ROMANCE NOVELS IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA." Gender & Society 11, no. 4 (August 1997): 434–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/089124397011004004.
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Sajarwa, Sajarwa. "TRANSLATION IDEOLOGY OF FRENCH NOVELS INTO INDONESIAN IN COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL PERIOD." JOALL (Journal of Applied Linguistics and Literature) 6, no. 2 (August 31, 2021): 330–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.33369/joall.v6i2.15372.
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This study analyzes the differences in the expression of meaning of the colonial and postcolonial French novels and the ideology of translating French novels into Indonesian during the colonial and postcolonial periods. This study uses data from French novels and their translations into Indonesian during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The data were analyzed by using descriptive-qualitative-comparative method. The results of this study show that text message expression during colonial period is indirect due to at that time The society was under the rule of the Dutch colonialists or subaltern. In post-colonial period, the community social situation changed, people were no longer afraid to express their thoughts or they were more open so that the delivery of meaning is direct. Colonial period novels have two types of foreignization ideology, namely self-names translation and setting translation, while post-colonial period novels have three types, namely self-names translation, title translation, and setting translation. The novels domestication ideology during colonial period occurred in translation of pronouns on and the translation of kinship calls, while in post-colonial period novels it occurred in pronouns on translation, kinship calls translation, and self-names translation. The different ideology in the two novels is self-names translation.
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McManus, Anne-Marie E. "SCALE IN THE BALANCE: READING WITH THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION (“THE ARABIC BOOKER”)." International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 2 (April 7, 2016): 217–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743816000039.
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AbstractThis article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher'sWahat al-Ghurub(Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi'sSaq al-Bambu(The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.
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Yacine, Barka Rabeh, and Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh. "Reimagining Colonialism: Dune Within Postcolonial Science-Fiction." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 13, no. 2 (February 1, 2023): 501–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1302.27.
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This research paper will examine the science-fiction novel Dune as a postcolonial work. Colonial history and literature that have been the central focus of postcolonial studies influenced the structure of many science-fiction novels. One of these was Herbert’s Dune (1965), which carries a colonial formula into a new fictionalized setting. However, very few postcolonial studies cross into the science-fiction novel, and fewer still consider the science-fictional element that sets it apart as a genre. Thus, this article attempts to provide a new perspective on Dune as a postcolonial novel that sets a new premise for our understanding of postcolonialism. In employing the early anticolonial thoughts of Amilcar Cabral and his notion of resistance, this study will trace these anticolonial notions throughout the novel. In addition, it will consider the novel’s science-fictional element of spice and how it proves detrimental in perceiving the novel as a new form of postcolonial narrative.
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Hussein Dizayi, Saman Abdulqadir, and Ary Syamand Tahir. "Postcolonial Identity Crisis in Selected Contemporary Novels." JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE STUDIES 6, no. 4, 2 (July 31, 2023): 70–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.25130/jls.6.4.2.5.
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The study argues that postcolonial novels can offer valuable insights into the nature of identity and the challenges of living in a postcolonial world. Homi Bhabha's theoretical framework is used in this study to analyze the complexities of cultural identity and the challenges that actors face as they navigate between their background and new cultural identities. The concept of hybridity, mimicry, and cultural difference developed by Bhabha are utilized to examine and comprehend these themes. It explains how novels such as Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emphasize the contradictions between cultural hybridity and the need to adhere to mainstream cultural standards. The study also looks at the role of literature in developing our perception of cultural identity and encouraging empathy and understanding across cultures. The study employs an analytic approach for evaluating the postcolonial identity crisis in chosen contemporary novels, which entails an in-depth reading and analysis of the text. This may imply identifying essential themes and motifs relating to identity, cultural hybridity, and colonialism, as well as investigating how characters manage their sense of self in the face of cultural diversity. The study's findings emphasize the necessity of comprehending and appreciating the complexities of cultural identity in the context of globalization. It promotes constant postcolonial debate and reflection on identity as we confront the problems of cultural hybridity and try to build a more inclusive and just society that acknowledges and respects cultural differences. As a result, this study adds to our knowledge of postcolonial identity and its continuing importance within modern literature
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Boehmer, Elleke. "Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 1 (January 2017): 11–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2016.43.
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AbstractThis essay discusses the activity of reading in three postcolonial novels from three different national contexts (Dangarembga in Zimbabwe, Kapur in India, and Adichie in Nigeria). The essay considers the scenes of focused, respectful, even canonical reading staged in these novels, alongside the more selective or eclectic “reading” and citation taking place at the level of the narration. On the basis of this contrast, it suggests that the postcolonial and transnational publics interpellated by the novels are sometimes different from the audiences or readers dramatized in the texts. It concludes by pointing to the particularly layered—at once deferential and exploratory—reading that is staged within, and by, the postcolonial novel. The essay is shaped by postcritical, cognitive, and hermeneutic approaches to narrative and reading drawn from Rita Felski, James Phelan, Dan Sperber, and Deirdre Wilson.
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Madavi, Dr Manoj Shankarrao. "Exploring the Unexplored- Postcolonial Issues in the novels of Upmanyu Chatterjee and Arvind Adiga." International Journal of Teaching, Learning and Education 2, no. 4 (2023): 28–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijtle.2.4.5.
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Indian English fiction writings have flourished after the post-independence period. Most of the Indian English novels were dealing with post-partition, changing social-political values and impact of colonial rule on Indian Psyche. Upmanyu Chatterjee wrote some of the prominent novels focusing on changing values of Indian society in postcolonial India were having high education and all comforts of life, characters in novels finds themselves in a cultural dilemma. Postcolonial literature of India which deals with the decolonization of the minds of colonized communities. Important issues like socio-economic disparities, cultural domination, ethical subjugation, identical marginalization, political nepotism, and corrupt bureaucracy have been brought to the forefront by Arvind Adiga in postcolonial Indian English fictions. This research article examines the different aspect of postcoloniality as reflected in the selective novel writing of Upmanyu Chatterjee and Arvind Adiga.
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Hamann-Rose, Paul. "New poetics of postcolonial relations: global genetic kinship in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome." Medical Humanities 47, no. 2 (March 4, 2021): 167–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012020.
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Conceptions of genetic kinship have recently emerged as a powerful new discourse through which to trace and imagine connections between individuals and communities around the globe. This article argues that, as a new way to think and represent such connections, genetic discourses of relatedness constitute a new poetics of kinship. Discussing two exemplary contemporary novels, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), this article argues further that literary fiction, and postcolonial literary fiction in particular, is uniquely positioned to critically engage this new biomedical discourse of global and interpersonal relations. Ghosh’s and Smith’s novels illuminate and amplify the concept of a cultural poetics of genetic kinship by aesthetically transcending the limits of genetic science to construct additional genetic connections between the West and the Global South on the level of metaphor and analogy. As both novels oscillate spatially between the West and a postcolonial Indian subcontinent, the texts’ representations of literal and figurative genetic relations become a vehicle through which the novels test and reconfigure postcolonial and diasporic identities, as well as confront Western genetic science with alternative forms of knowledge. The emerging genetic imaginary highlights—evoking recent sociological and anthropological work—that meaningful kinship relations rely on biological as much as on cultural discourses and interpretations, especially in postcolonial and migrant contexts where genetic markers become charged with conflicting notions of connection and otherness.
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Leservot, Typhaine. "Murder or Accident?: Condé's Postcolonial Detective Novels." Women in French Studies 16, no. 1 (2008): 85–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2008.0031.
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Casteel, Sarah Phillips. "David Dabydeen’s Hogarth: Blacks, Jews, and Postcolonial Ekphrasis." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, no. 1 (December 16, 2015): 117–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2015.27.
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Eighteenth-century satirical artist William Hogarth figures centrally in Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s ekphrastic postcolonial fiction. In particular, Dabydeen’s novels A Harlot’s Progress and Johnson’s Dictionary invoke plate 2 of Hogarth’s 1732 series A Harlot’s Progress, which depicts the encounter of a cuckolded Jewish merchant, his mistress, and a turbaned slave boy.In this article, I argue that Dabydeen’s strategy of introducing visual intertexts into his fiction encourages a comparative reading of the representational regimes that historically have shaped popular perceptions of blacks and Jews. Situating Dabydeen’s Hogarth novels as part of a larger tradition in postwar Caribbean writing of advancing an identificatory reading of Jewishness, I examine how Dabydeen’s novels illustrate the need to broaden discussions of the relationship between postcolonial and Jewish studies beyond the question of Holocaust memory.
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Sides, Kirk B. "“Narratives of Modernity: Creolization and Early Postcolonial Style in Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka”." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 2 (March 23, 2018): 158–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2017.56.
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This article revisits Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1925) in order to make an argument for a different historical approach to the field of African literatures. Often called one of the earliest African novels, I argue that how we read Chaka – especially for what Simon Gikandi calls the novel’s “early postcolonial style” – is indicative of a range of assumptions about Africa and its relationship to modernity. In the article, I explore some of the ways in which Chaka has been made to give precedence to other and mostly subsequent imaginings of both the African postcolonial struggle, as well as African ideas on modernity and national culture. Also, through a brief comparison with Chinua Achebe’s foundational Things Fall Apart, the article explores the possibilities of an African discourse on creolization in Chaka, a discourse that rejects the European colonial-encounter narrative of African and postcolonial modernity.
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Khan, Saleem Akhtar, Waheed Ahmad Khan, and Imran Ali. "Anticolonial Visions and Fictional Versions: A Comparative Study of American and Indian Postcolonial Novels." Global Language Review VI, no. III (September 30, 2021): 81–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/glr.2021(vi-iii).09.
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The research juxtaposes two of the prominent postcolonial literary discourses produced by the nations that resisted the colonial encroachments militarily and, ultimately, gained their independence from the British imperial clutch, America and India. The selected literary works are replete with retrospective representations of the historical landmarks and laden with future ideological aspirations regarding national glory. Remaining awake to the perplexing verisimilitude of postcolonial works of literature, the study aims to explain the pivotal nexus that links the divergent discourses, that is, the anti colonial élan.For the accomplishment of the comparative analysis, two of the novels have been chosen, one for each country, to represent the respective version of resistance: Jeff Shaara's The Glorious Cause (2002) from an array of the American fictional narratives and Basavaraj Naikar's The Sun behind the Cloud (2001)from the Indian anglophone fiction. After outlining the belligerent disposition of these novels, their thematic schemas have been compared and contrasted to make the post coloniality of these polemical fictions manifest. It has been made explicit that the novels are essentially similar in their counter-discursive character and dissemination of the anti colonial sentiment despite some peripheral differences. Thus, these novels contribute to the broader postcolonial continuum that comprehensively accommodates varying versions of the textual resistance.
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D’Cruze, Mira Pallav. "Reconstructing Postcolonial Identity: A Comparative Analysis of Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s Novels with a Focus on the South Asian Context." Journal of Research in Social Science and Humanities 2, no. 12 (December 2023): 50–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.56397/jrssh.2023.12.08.
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Salman Rushdie’s novels, including Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, offer profound insights into postcolonial identity in South Asia. This analysis explores the themes of cultural hybridity, religious transformation, and globalization, revealing the complex nature of identity negotiation in a postcolonial context. Beginning with an overview of postcolonial identity and the significance of cultural hybridity, the analysis focuses on Midnight’s Children, illustrating characters navigating the synthesis of diverse cultural elements in post-independence India. The theme of cultural hybridity becomes a lens for understanding the shifting nature of identities in the wake of historical changes. The Satanic Verses extends the examination to religious hybridity, revealing the transformative impact of religious experiences on individual and societal identities. The novel becomes a profound exploration of the intersections between religion, identity, and cultural conflict within the South Asian context. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the analysis delves into globalization and cultural fusion as transformative forces shaping South Asian identity. Characters navigate the tension between local traditions and global influences, offering a nuanced representation of South Asian identity in a transnational world. Within the South Asian context, the analysis scrutinizes cultural diversity, the impact of colonialism, and Rushdie’s nuanced representation of identity. The novels become a literary mirror reflecting the kaleidoscope of cultures, languages, and histories that define South Asia, challenging stereotypes and embracing the fluid, hybrid nature of postcolonial identities. Salman Rushdie’s novels contribute significantly to the discourse on postcolonial identity. Themes of cultural hybridity, religious transformation, and globalization collectively offer a profound exploration of the complexities inherent in identity formation in the postcolonial era. This comparative analysis invites readers to navigate the intricate terrain of postcolonial identities, transcending boundaries and embracing the richness of a world shaped by diverse cultural influences.
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Potter, Troy. "Ghosts of Australia Past: Postcolonial Haunting in Australian Adolescent Mystery Novels." International Research in Children's Literature 8, no. 2 (December 2015): 185–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2015.0167.
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This essay explores the use of haunting in two Australian adolescent mystery novels, Victor Kelleher's Baily's Bones (1988) and Anthony Eaton's A New Kind of Dreaming (2001). Both novels mobilise the mystery genre as a means to interrogate Australia's colonial past and neocolonial present. The function of the spatial environments in which the novels take place and the construction and function of haunting in each novel is interrogated. It is argued that haunting is figured as a disruptive process whereby the repressed colonial scene intrudes on the present, such that the haunting the teenage protagonists experience encourages them to enquire into the past. While on the one hand the novels advocate a renewed interrogation of Australia's past in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the present, a closer reading of the texts reveals that the novels fail to sustain their postcolonial endeavours. Thus, while adolescent mystery fiction is a genre that can be mobilised in the name of postcolonial enquiry, the difficulty of doing so effectively is illustrative of the wider challenge of achieving decolonisation.
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Iqbal, Liaqat, Irfan Ullah, and Abdur Rehman. "Postcolonial perspective in No Longer at Ease and A Passage to India." Global Language Review III, no. I (December 30, 2018): 114–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/glr.2018(iii-i).07.
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Postcolonialism with its various aspects is focused in this paper. The present study highlights the key postcolonial issues in Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease and E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. While keeping in view length of the chapters, only the first chapter of No Longer at Ease and the first three chapters of A Passage to India have been analyzed and discussed. The postcolonial issues found in these novels are ambivalence, stereotyping, mimicry, hybridity, representation, orality, binarism and marginalization. Almost both of the novels got these issues in some proportion with different contexts but still with many similarities.
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Tajiri, Yoshiki. "BECKETT'S LEGACY IN THE WORK OF J. M. COETZEE." Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 19, no. 1 (August 1, 2008): 361–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757405-019001029.
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Beckett has been one of the most important authors for J. M. Coetzee and his influence is clearly felt in Coetzee's novels. In this paper, I aim to reconsider the relation between modernism and postcolonialism by examining how Beckett's (modernist) legacy is inherited by Coetzee's (postcolonial) novels.
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Talukdar, Dr Jeuti. "Postcolonial critique of imperialism in Joseph Conrad’s novels." International Journal of Humanities and Arts 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 44–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.33545/26647699.2024.v6.i1a.66.
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Lombardi-Diop, Cristina. "Filial Descent: The African Roots of Postcolonial Literature in Italy." Forum for Modern Language Studies 56, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 66–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqz058.
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Abstract The essay concentrates on two seminal postcolonial novels by authors of African descent: Cristina Ubax Ali Farah’s Madre piccola (2007) (Little Mother: A Novel) and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) (Queen of Flowers and Pearls). It argues that these works give expression to an African diasporic urban generation that is changing the literary legacy of the Horn of Africa. The co-presence of multiple genres, with orality appearing as a strong influence on their written narrative forms, places these novels within the larger formation of a black African literary tradition. By looking at these two novels from an Africanist perspective, the essay takes into consideration their plurilingual interventions, the use of glossaries and linguistic borrowings, alongside the presence of Somali and Amharic cultural references. It highlights the authorial perspective as a ‘filial descent’ that addresses the complexity of a postcolonial generational shift in contemporary African literature. By placing these works within an African literary tradition and showing their critical de-centring of this tradition, the essay reconfigures a possible space of cultural autonomy for African postcolonial writing, away from the Italocentric space of discourse that has so far dominated its critical reception in Italy.
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Chifane, Cristina, and Liviu-Augustin Chifane. "Reflections on Cultural Specificity and Dystopian Standardization in Chinua Achebe’s Novels." Linguaculture 10, no. 1 (June 10, 2019): 69–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2019-1-0136.
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Although tackling Chinua Achebe’s novels as illustrative pieces of postcolonial African literature, this article moves a step further in tracking down the elements projecting these literary texts into universalization. The major aim is to highlight the stylistic differences between the novels making up the African trilogy (Things Fall Apart - 1958, No Longer at Ease - 1960, Arrow of God - 1964) and his subsequent masterpieces A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). If the African trilogy particularly relies on and therefore has been analyzed in terms of culture-specific items and postcolonial issues, the other two novels acquire new dimensions, giving birth to what can be called dystopian standardization characteristic not only of a certain space or time, but of any society fighting corruption and abusive political systems inevitably leading to oppressive regimes, chaos and collapse.
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Topper, Ryan. "Trauma and the African Animist Imaginary in Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen, and Me." English Language Notes 57, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 86–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-7716171.
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Abstract This essay intervenes in debates surrounding trauma theory and postcolonial studies, tracing how forms of African animism can lead to a decolonized discourse of trauma. Taking the postcolonial critique of trauma theory’s Eurocentrism as a point of departure, the essay focuses on two contemporary novels of the African diaspora: Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen, and Me. Narrating local forms of survival in post–civil war Sierra Leone, these novels use animist modes of consciousness to theorize the collective trauma of, and envision political futures for, Sierra Leone. Forna’s writing is emblematic of realism, while Jarrett-Macauley’s is an example of animist realism. Both novels are united, however, by an animism at the level of narrative process, drawing on the spirit world and possession rituals to counter therapeutic and humanitarian ideologies.
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Abedi Valoojerdi, Mohammad Hossein. "Postcolonial Gothic Elements in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels." IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship 10, no. 2 (December 15, 2021): 22–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.22492/ijl.10.2.01.
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Nick Joaquin (Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín, (1917-2004) is known for his unique style of writing, tropical Gothic, and applying gothic elements in his stories and novels. This paper examines his first novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels through the lens of postcolonial theory. The paper also investigates gothic narratives in his novel by applying David Punter’s literary-historical approach. Punter (2000), in his book Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, examines the metamorphoses of the Gothic as a genre in some selected novels and poems. The book depicts new manifestations of the Gothic during 20th century literature. This paper attempts to investigate how the elements of postcolonial Gothic as discussed by Punter are manifested in Joaquin’s novel. In doing so, the contrapuntal method of reading, introduced by Edward Said (1993), is also applied to explore the hidden parts of history in the novel.
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Hayuningsih, Arifah Arum Candra. "Women and exile narratives in Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau's Francophone Caribbean novels." LITERA 22, no. 2 (July 17, 2023): 129–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.21831/ltr.v22i2.58792.
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One of the most prevalent issues in francophone literature is exile and its impact on the postcolonial identity formation of French colonised society. However, there is limited space for the voices of Francophone women writers to speak about their exile. This article draws on the autobiographical novels by Caribbean Francophone women writers Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau. The research method used is comparative cultural studies to look at the tension between the discourse of the centre and the periphery in postcolonial literature. This article shows that both writers have different exile experiences but still centre on the clash of postcolonial identities between the people of the former colonies and the colonial government. Both novels also represent the realities of francophone societies that continue to be confronted with questions of cultural roots, homeland, and cultural roots that gradually disappear under colonialism.Keywords: Caribbean, exil, female, francophone
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Fajar SA, Gabriel. "Colonial Inferiority and Postcolonial Ideology in Pramoedya’s House of Glass: Between the Dominant and the Marginalized." Addaiyan Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 10 (January 5, 2021): 55–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.36099/ajahss.2.10.7.
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Pramoedya Ananta Toer, despite his position of being controversial among the Indonesian writers, wrote four historical novels, which have been compiled in the title of Buru Quartet. The core of the contents is about the stress between the Dutch-Indies colonial government and Indonesia’s local, marginalized, and colonized people. As postcolonial novels they certainly effort to voice the desire, will, and also hope of the marginalized people in opposing the dominant colonial government. However, through the last novel, Rumah Kaca, Pramoedya applies a certain technique which is interesting and different from the other common postcolonial novels, including also those the first three novels. The existence of a narrator, representing the colonial government, seems to emphasize that as a matter of fact, the colonizer has the problem of being inferior to the colonized. Rumah Kaca conveys this notion by showing that due to the inferiority the colonizer would undergo illogical conduct for the sake of maintaining the position of being the controller. Even, to the very helpless and powerless activist, Minke, the colonizer must undergo a violent and illogical act to his death.
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Wright, Loic. "Reimagining Subversive Masculinities in J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man and John Broderick's The Pilgrimage." Review of Irish Studies in Europe 7, no. 1 (April 29, 2024): 24–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.32803/rise.v7i1.3243.
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This article investigates two banned novels, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955) and John Broderick's The Pilgrimage (1961), to explore how the mid-century Irish novel explored themes of masculinity in opposition to official Church and State teachings on postcolonial Irish masculinity. In its analysis, the article focuses on each novel’s use of narrative and style to articulate thematic concerns over the rigidity of the expectations of mid-twentieth-century Irish manhood. Moreover, it demonstrates how both authors construct models of masculinity that reject contemporaneous teachings on an idealised masculinity and expose the contradictions that are inherent in such teachings. The article's examination of these works showcases how both novels sought to complicate these dogmatic images of masculinity, and were ultimately banned by the Censorship Board as a result.
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Nikolaeva, Iuliia I. "The problem of postcolonial identity in novels “Queen Of Flowers And Pearls” by Gabriella Ghermandi and “The color of my name” by Vittorio Longhi." Vestnik of Kostroma State University 28, no. 2 (May 12, 2022): 193–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.34216/1998-0817-2022-28-2-193-198.
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The article considers the problem of postcolonial identity in contemporary Italian novels written by authors of mixed Afro-Italian origin that speak about colonisation in territories under Italy’s control. After a short overview of specific features of Italian postcolonial literature comes the analysis of some important topics and artistic methods in the following novels: “Queen Of Flowers and Pearls” by Gabriella Ghermandi and “The Colour of my Name” by Vittorio Longhi. Common techniques in depiction of characters and presentation of the theme of colonisation are revealed. As a result, it is possible to trace a gradual process of realisation of one’s own identity by residents of colonies that find their voice in fiction.
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Davis, Christian R. "Protestant Missionaries in Literature." Renascence 72, no. 3 (2020): 125–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/renascence202072310.
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Protestant cross-cultural missionaries have appeared as characters in literary narratives for some two hundred years. These narratives use three patterns. The first, showing godly missionaries supported by divine interventions, includes nonfiction accounts of missionaries like Hudson Taylor, Jim Elliot, and Don Richardson. The second pattern, showing missionaries as orthodox fanatics, includes Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Maugham’s “Rain,” and Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The third pattern, common in postcolonial novels, portrays missionaries with ambivalence and humor and includes elements of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”: comic-grotesque imagery, obscenities, and feasts. This postcolonial missionary character represents not oppression but freedom and appears in such novels as Anand’s Untouchable, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller.
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Browning, Barbara. "Choreographing Postcoloniality: Reflections on the Passing of Edward Said." Dance Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2004): 164–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0149767700007622.
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Nearly twenty years ago, I took a graduate seminar on postcolonial theory with Edward Said in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. It was a heady experience: competitive grad students and young faculty members vied for his imperious (I realize the irony of the word in reference to Said!) attentions. We read novels—potent, searing, difficult novels—alongside some of the theorists of political struggle who would indelibly alter my understanding of what cultural resistance could mean. Said's recent death, which of course coincided with a period of distressing shifts in political tides, has placed pressure on those of us engaged with cultural analysis to probe even more deeply the significance of anticolonial struggle in cultural forms. As a dance scholar, I have found myself reflecting on the ways in which postcolonial theory might inform my understanding of the power of choreography to affect political change—but also on the ways in which dance can inform our readings of postcolonial theory.
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Bashkyrova, Olha. "REPRESENTATION OF FEMININITY IN MODERN UKRAINIAN NOVELS." Слово і Час, no. 6 (November 26, 2020): 72–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.33608/0236-1477.2020.06.72-86.
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The paper deals with the main tendencies of the artistic reception of women images in modern Ukrainian novels. The principles of modeling femininity in literature have been considered from the positions of the gender studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. It is proved that the peculiarities of this modeling are determined by stylistic and genre tendencies of the Ukrainian literature. The interpretation of feminine images typical for the national literary tradition (mother, family-keeper, demonic woman) has been demonstrated in numerous examples. These images correlate with the fundamental artistic principles of the turning points in history (actualization of the archetypes, attention to the irrational manifestations of human psychics). They display the ‘masculine’ literary tradition (representation of a woman as an external object), but at the same time demonstrate a new accent in the understanding of the gender roles (woman as a mentor of a man). The alternative types of the feminine identity represented by feminist and culturological women’s writing have been explored as well. Special attention has been paid to procreation as the main woman’s ability, which forms different models of feminine mentality – from the essentialist mother-type to the image of a child-free woman. The modeling of a feminine artistic worldview becomes an actual strategy in overcoming the postcolonial trauma. It is explained by the peculiarities of the postcolonial literatures, which fulfill their historical reflections in the local family stories. In this context, feminine conscience gets the status of a memory-keeper and shows the ability to trace the development of national history in its everyday dimensions. Based on the large-scale generalization of the last decades’ artistic practice, the researcher determines the main worldview intentions of modern novels, in particular the tendency to achieve gender parity, the full-fledged dialogue of men and women as the equal subjects of culture creation.
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Chaudhary, Fariha, and Qamar Khushi. "In Search of Identity: A Comparative Feminist Exploration of Muslim Female Sexuality in Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Shahraz’s The Holy Woman." Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies 10, no. 1 (March 8, 2015): 83–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.46568/pjgs.v10i1.227.
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A critical exploration of Muslim female sexuality through the feminist analysis of the various female characters in Twilight in Delhi and The Holy Woman, by Ahmad Ali and Qaisra Shahraz respectively, is the central focus of this paper. Theoretical insights have been drawn from Islamic feminism and Postcolonial feminist scholarship for the contextual understanding of female sexuality. Focusing specifically on the issue of female sexuality and marriages, in both of the novels, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women in the postcolonial Pakistan seems to have gained a certain measure of agency as compared to the plight of women in the colonial milieu of Ali’s novel. However, examined closely, as this paper will highlight, women in both of the novels, still in certain ways, remain helpless victims of sexual victimization. This comparative analysis of novels based in two varied settings of colonial and post-colonial Muslim societies reveals that female sexuality remains a stifling point of contention which is predominantly controlled by men.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Salami, Ali, and Bamshad Hekmatshoar Tabari. "IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY." Folia linguistica et litteraria XI, no. 33 (2020): 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.33.2020.2.
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Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.
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Irvine, Colin. "A Land-Based Approach to Postcolonial, Post-Modern Novels." Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 5, no. 12 (2010): 23–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/jphilnepal201051214.
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Chakravorty, Mrinalini. "The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Difference and Postcolonial Melancholia." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 542–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.3.542.
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Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje's haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, probes paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictional representations of transnational violence. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as a “deathworld”? The prism of death in Anil's Ghost requires readers of this text to relinquish settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude and our entanglements with the deaths of others. Postcolonial fictions of violence conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmatic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. Advancing a theory about “postcolonial crypts” in fiction, I argue that postcolonial fictions' attention to violence transforms notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework.
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Chaloemtiarana, Thak. "Making new space in the Thai literary canon." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 1 (January 7, 2009): 87–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022463409000058.
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The Thai literary canon identifies three novels published around 1929 as the first authentic Thai novels. This pronouncement elides the importance of novels published before that date. Because literary scholars focus their teaching, writing and research on novels defined by the canon, lesser-known works have been overlooked or ignored. The current Thai canon obfuscates literary transmission, in particular, the significance of pre-1929 compositions. In this essay, three novels – Mae Wan'sKhwam phayabat(1902), Khru Liam'sKhwam mai phayabat(1915) andNang neramid(1916) – are selected to show that these early compositions represent important genres of novels that should be considered for the canon, even though they are seen as less than ‘authentic’ Thai. This paper examines the three novels through the lens of critical, translation and postcolonial theories. It is a study of vernacularisation, authenticity, hybridity, mimesis, and bi-culturalism.
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Marín, Luis Paganelli. "Postcolonial Black Motherhood: Dismantling Controlling Images in Jesmyn Ward's Bois Sauvage Novels." Women Gender and Families of Color 11, no. 1 (2023): 72–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/23260947.11.1.04.
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Abstract Centering on Jesmyn Ward's two recent novels, this article begins with the literary through line from Toni Morrison's early novels to Ward's constructions of Black mothers in the twenty-first century of a fictional rural Mississippi. As Morrison before her, Ward archives Black women's lived experiences to reconfigure not only an American literary imagination but also the past itself to explore Black women's oppressions from the slave era to our contemporary moment. Ward's novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing express the social constructions that have burdened Black women, especially mothers, since the slave era. Through the social framework of controlling images as defined by Patricia Hill Collins, this article dissects U.S. social hierarchies that discriminate against Black mothers’ intersectional identities while theorizing how Black women feminist writers have strived toward self-definition and liberation. Implicit in the construction of these dominant social hierarchies is the postcolonial condition of Black mothers and women who have contested the colonial project of slavery, the imperial project of expansionism, and the postcolonial project of mass incarceration and lynchings. Most importantly, Ward illustrates how these controlling images and social constructions of racialized motherhood have concealed the structural oppressions experienced by Black women every day. Thus, I argue these two novels dismantle the controlling images surrounding Black mothers while examining how motherwork and othermothering constitute radical interventions that disrupt our racist, sexist culture and society. By reappropriating their past and self-defining their present, the Black mothers in Ward's novels uncover structural oppressions and reveal the critical connections between enslaved mothers and contemporary Black mothers.
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Monika, K., and S. Meenakshi. "The Indigenous Vision of Ecology in The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa." World Journal of English Language 12, no. 6 (August 5, 2022): 255. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v12n6p255.
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The contributions of Mario Vargas Llosa, along with other “boom” writers, to Latin American literature have drawn attention to Third World literature. His novels, apart from functioning on multidirectional social issues, create an awareness of the environmental issues of the Amazons. Concerning ecological issues, postcolonial countries face more crises compared to developed countries. Literary works focusing on environmental degradation emerge from these countries. Llosa’s The Storyteller is an ecocritical novel that can provoke a revaluation of man-nature interactions through an exploration of Indigenous culture. This article is an attempt to bring out the Indigenous vision of ecology as present in the novel The Storyteller by Llosa. It also advocates the need for critical analysis of postcolonial novels, which will reveal connections between imperialism, environmental degradation, capitalism, and cultural hegemony.
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Hussain, Zakir, and Binod Mishra. "Eurocentrism Reconsidered: (Re)writing the History of the ‘Other’ in Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and The Book of Saladin." Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 30, no. 2 (June 15, 2022): 681–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.47836/pjssh.30.2.14.
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This article examines the reconstruction of Eurocentric representations of religious minorities of post-Reconquista Spain and Jerusalem through Tariq Ali’s novels, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) and The Book of Saladin (1998). These novels suggest that the reconfiguration of history and the analysis of the traumatic experiences of characters such as Zuhayr and Saladin challenge the essentialist notion of Eurocentrism. The paper explores the narrative approaches and procedures employed in the novels to articulate the sufferings caused by the sidelining and elimination of Muslim and Jewish minorities. The study relies on concepts formulated and explicated by postcolonial critics like Fanon, Said, and Spivak in their critical works as its theoretical premise. We argue that the postcolonial outlook has the potential to challenge Eurocentric historical accounts, as it revives the forgotten memories of the “Other” and intertwines these memories to form new compatibility across ethnocultural and religious polarization. This study demonstrates that revealing the brutality implicit in the reasonable practices of nation-building conditions causes a crisis in Eurocentric historiography.
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ÇELİKEL, Mehmet Ali. "Humour and Sadness in Postcolonial Novel: Emotional Ambivalence in Early Anglo-Indian Novels." Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları/Journal of Language and Literature Studies, no. 28 (October 23, 2023): 118–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.30767/diledeara.1380261.
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The deployment of humour and sadness together in postcolonial literature invites im- portant discussions on ambivalence. These two juxtaposing themes in postcolonial nov- els reflect not only the cultural clashes effectively, but also the emotional ambivalence of the characters. While the use of humour and sadness turns the anti-colonial novels into sub-historical texts, the tragi-comedy created in this context provides an opportunity to view history from an individual perspective and re-interpret it. This can be observed within the early novels of Salman Rushdie, particularly in Shame, Midnight’s Children, and The Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy. The excerpts taken from these novels indicate that the cultural clashes occurred by the confrontation of Eastern and Western cul- tures inevitably bring humour and sadness together. Yet, the occurrence of these juxtaposing uses of humour and sadness reveals an emotional ambivalence as well as cultural ambiva- lence of the main sub-continental characters in these works. This paper, therefore, argues that colonial practices, as represented in Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy’s novels in question, function to create a juxtapositional unity of humour and sadness that create the emotional ambivalence of colonial subjects who are not only hybridized culturally but also trauma- tized individually.
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Rosenberg, Beth. "The Postcolonial Jew in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood." Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, no. 8 (December 1, 2015): 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/syn.16211.
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Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997) are novels that feature Jewish protagonists; both represent the history of the Holocaust and diverge from the postcolonial landscapes the authors are associated with. Though the Indian Desai and the Anglo-Caribbean Phillips are distinct as postcolonial subjects, their Jewish protagonists help to create what Rebecca Walkowitz terms “comparison literature,” the “work of books that analyse… the transnational contexts of their own production, circulation, and study.” In other words, Desai and Phillips are interested in the structures and dynamics of ethnic identification in a global context. Through what I term the postcolonial Jew, these novels move beyond the notion of ethnic authenticity to a cosmopolitan view of identity as hybrid and positional. The authenticity of and in these novels does not rely on the authors’ ethnic backgrounds, but is found in their ways of telling history. Their intention is to break from the traditional association of Jews with the Judeo-Christian tradition, to represent them instead as separate from the Occidental tradition. As a result, Desai and Phillips utilise a decentred Jew, one who is constantly in flux, disparate, conflicted, and the embodiment of diaspora. The existential condition of this Jew —the placeless place he is called upon to inhabit, which the reader is invited to visit— and the paradoxical states of belonging and displacement become the conditions of all displaced others and represent the constant deferral of meaning in the narrative act.
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Lema, Emmanuel P. "The Journey Motif and The Re-Reading of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow, a Gikuyu Trilogy." Utafiti 13, no. 2 (March 18, 2018): 173–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26836408-01302010.
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This essay employs the journey motif to re-read three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow. It is argued here that these three novels form Ngugi’s era of Gikuyu fiction; they are chosen to represent his celebrated decision to freely tap from Gikuyu orature. Ngugi’s use of indigenous language in these novels bridges the historical and chronological gaps separating the three narratives; they constitute a trilogy that retells Ngugi’s parable about postcolonial Kenya and Independent Africa more generally. By exploring the different physical, metaphorical and psychological journeys that permeate the atmosphere of all three novels, this interpretation enhances their value in light of Ngugi’s broader political and social agenda.
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Baker, Charlotte. "Angry laughter: Postcolonial representations of dictatorial masculinities." International Journal of Francophone Studies 22, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 233–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs_00003_1.
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Abstract Focusing on the representation of the masculinity of dictator figures in Cheik Aliou Ndao's Mbaam dictateur (1997) and Baba Galleh Jallow's Angry Laughter (2004), this article explores the imbrication of social realities, power structures and literary expression that characterizes these texts as dictator-novels. It considers the writers' reappropriation of the border between animal and human as a means by which to level an allegorical political critique in the guise of a fable. In so doing, it emphasizes their representation of the hypermasculine body of the dictator and its centrality to emerging nation states that are defined by class and ethnic relations. Finally, its focus turns to the importance of voice to examine the aesthetic of these two dictator-novels, which is of equal importance to our understanding of these texts as their thematic representation. The article thus takes these two literary works as case studies for the dictator-novel at the turn of the twenty-first century to examine the ways in which African writers use the dictator-novel to express the disenchantment of citizens with the long and faltering process of decolonization that, in many countries across Africa, had seen the emergence not of an ideal postcolonial democracy, but instead of a de-humanizing neo-colonial autocracy.
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Superle, Michelle. "Imagining the New Indian Girl: Representations of Indian Girlhood in Keeping Corner and Suchitra and the Ragpicker." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 20, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 31–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2010vol20no1art1152.
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The capacity of young girls to represent a healthy new beginning is nothing new to children's literature. One need look no further, for example, than two classics: Frances Hodgson Burnett harnessed this figure's power with Mary in 'The Secret Garden' (1911), as did C. S. Lewis with Lucy in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' (1950). Yet the way young girl characters are positioned in contemporary, English-language Indian children's novels by women writers does seem new; these 'new Indian girls' function to represent a modern, postcolonial India in which gender equality is beginning to find a happy home. Setting up a binary which positions societal values from pre-colonial and colonial India as backwards and problematic, these children's novels demonstrate the value of girls in postcolonial India - at least some girls, according to some writers.
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Hamza Bekkaoui. "The postcolonial condition of refashioning national identity in the Riffian." World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews 21, no. 3 (March 30, 2023): 2218–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2024.21.3.0966.
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Novels transcend mere aesthetic creations, embodying potent instruments of both oppression and emancipation. This study analyzes the post-colonial dimensions of The Riffian, authored by the American anthropologist Carleton Stevens Coon in 1933, amidst the colonial period of Morocco. Contrary to the prevalent Western narratives about Morocco during the colonial era, which predominantly echoed colonial discourses, The Riffian markedly deviates from such trends. It critically undermines the colonial French narrative through its protagonist, Ali, thereby presenting a divergent perspective. Additionally, the novel explores the evolution of its central character, portrayed through the fictional autobiography of Coon's companion and guide in Morocco, Mohammed Limnibhy. This narrative arc follows Ali’s transformation from harboring disdain for all ethnic groups outside the Riffians, to adopting a more inclusive stance towards other Moroccan ethnicities in his resistance against French colonial rule. This analysis underscores the novel's contribution to challenging and reshaping historical and cultural perceptions during a pivotal period in Moroccan history.
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Orock, Rogers. "Chinua Achebe’s postcolony: a literary anthropology of postcolonial decadence." Africa 92, no. 1 (January 2022): 71–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0001972021000838.
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AbstractCan the African novel work as interlocutor for anthropologists studying Africa’s postcolonial politics today? Conversely, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology? This article draws on Chinua Achebe’s fictional representations of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites, corruption and postcolonial decadence in the early postcolony. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Achille Mbembe’s critique of power in the postcolony. Here, I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers such as Achebe mobilized fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.
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Butska, Kateryna V. "UKRAINIAN POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL AS A NATIONAL NARRATIVE: “THE MUSEUM OF ABANDONED SECRETS” BY O. ZABUZHKO AND “THE BEECH LAND” BY M. MATIOS." Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology 2, no. 26/1 (December 20, 2023): 33–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.32342/2523-4463-2023-2-26/1-3.
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The article examines the seminal novels of Ukrainian women writers from the first and second decades of the 21st century, namely “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” (“Музей покинутих секретів”, 2009) by O. Zabuzhko and “The Beech Land” (“Букова земля”, 2019) by M. Matios. The selected works are analyzed through the lens of postcolonial criticism, that is, from the point of view of the historical experience of the statelessness of the Ukrainian community and its reflection in literary texts. The main attention is paid to the narrative features of the works, namely the tendency to broad narrative, integrity, and narrative completeness. The purpose of the study is to highlight the postcolonial content of the narrative strategies implemented in the selected novels by O. Zabuzhko and M. Matios. Given that “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” and “The Beech Land” represent different periods and ideological and aesthetic paradigms, namely postmodernism and metamodernism, one of the tasks of the study is to assert the relevance of postcolonialism in the context of metamodernism. The article aims to highlight the peculiarities of the artistic realization of “postcolonial” narrativity in postmodern and metamodern texts. Additionally, the narrative features of the selected novels are compared. The stated purpose necessitates the application of hermeneutic (interpretation of a literary text), comparative (identification of common and distinctive features of the selected works) methods, as well as the method of structural analysis (examining the narrative structure of the texts). As a result of the study, it is established that postcolonialism, inherent in Ukrainian postmodern prose, remains relevant in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The postcolonial orientation of the novels “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” and “The Beech Land” is manifested in their intention to affirm the continuity of Ukrainian history by building a panoramic narrative that covers different historical periods and establishes a hereditary connection between them. The study identified the following features common to both novels: the intertwining of family genealogy with national history; the development of narratives at different generational levels – children, parents, grandparents, etc.; the theme of the perpetual war for independence that continues to this day; the image of God as a transcendent guardian of history, capable of seeing the intertwining of human destinies in their entirety. The defining theme shared by both novels is the anti-colonial struggle, particularly the military campaign of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This theme necessitates depicting the tragic consequences of imperial oppression. In “The Beech Land”, these are devastation and turmoil, fratricide, ruptured familial ties, the destruction of the Bukovynian “utopia”. In “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets”, these repercussions are shown through the lens of postmodern hypertextuality – as “burnt manuscripts”, irretrievably lost archives, fragmented stories. In addition, the selected novels exhibit an inclination to transcend the boundaries of realistic storytelling. Employing the montage technique, “The Museum of Abandoned Secrets” incorporates a mystical discourse of dreams that operates as a parallel reality, recounting events of the past. The oneiric discourse resonates with the image of an endless virtual archive storing memories of everything that has ever happened in the world. In “The Beech Land”, the departure from realistic historiography occurs through metamodern fantastisation, where the historical panorama is framed by the story of the “Heavenly Chancellery” – a celestial archive inhabited by the Creator and the Angels. The appeal to mystical and imaginative discourses is interpreted as a manifestation of postcolonial longing for lost integrity and completeness. The images of endless imaginary repositories of information complement the incompleteness of history, aiding in overcoming its fragmentary nature and opacity.
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Ray, Sangeeta. "Knowing and Not Knowing." Comparative Literature 74, no. 3 (September 1, 2022): 273–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00104124-9722324.
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Abstract This article articulates how an epistemology of ignorance structures the postcolonial metropolitan critic’s knowledge about a particular fraught state in India, Assam. Using the term agnotology, coined by Robert Proctor, rather than agniology, it examines two novels, Missing by Bengali writer Sumana Roy and The House with a Thousand Stories by Assamese novelist and poet Aruni Kashyap, to show that, despite their crucial differences in form, style, and narration, both novels use a locally inflected English language to tell stories about how rumor and gossip destroy families and communities living in the shadow of insurgencies and state violence. The Anglophone metropolitan postcolonial critic’s often-shallow knowledge about a region, its literature and deep politics, and their many rationalizations about why it is so, dovetails with the manner in which lies, exaggerated and fake news, shape and produce what counts as knowledge in these Indian Anglophone novels. Both works evoke the failure of a poetics and politics of familial and extrafamilial relations to underline how death and the disappearance of women from families, from society, and from the news enable a comparison of the inventive engagements with gender to understand the relationship of ignorance to truth.
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Ghazoul, Ferial J. "Humanising Islam's Message and Messenger in Postcolonial Literature." Journal of Qur'anic Studies 16, no. 3 (October 2014): 196–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2014.0173.
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Recent postcolonial novels have touched on Islamic faith and the Prophet, presenting a humanised image of Islam and Muḥammad. Such fiction has succeeded in writing back to Orientalist dehumanisation of the Other and stereotypes of Muslims as well as writing against fundamentalist reactionary appropriation of Islam. Leila Aboulela in The Translator (1999) interprets Islam literally and metaphorically to non-Muslims in a fictional romance that takes the protagonists from Scotland to Sudan. Assia Djebar in Loin de Médine (1991) deals with the beginnings of Islam in Arabia. This historical novel concentrates on women's voices that have been marginalised or dropped altogether from accounts by male historians. Salim Bachi in Le Silence de Mahomet (2008), narrates the advent of Islam through multiple points of view: by two wives of the Prophet, Khadīja and ʿĀʾisha, as well as by two influential men, the Prophet's companion Abū Bakr and the military leader Khālid b. al-Walīd. This polyphonic novel allows the complexity and diversity of worldviews to be juxtaposed and intertwined. The three novels offer fresh humane portraits of iconic figures and of Islam's message while simultaneously highlighting human frailty and splendour.