Postcolonial Literary Theory Research Articles

Representations of Colonial Writers in Land and Clues for Postcolonial Literary Theory －Focusing on the Descriptions of Lee In-jik and Lee Gwang-su

Representations of Colonial Writers in Land and Clues for Postcolonial Literary Theory －Focusing on the Descriptions of Lee In-jik and Lee Gwang-su

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

Picaresque narrative techniques and popular literature in African prose fiction

The Picaresque tradition is a mode of writing that began in Spain in the 16th century and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries throughout the rest of Europe. It is a literary tradition that has continued to influence modern fiction writing to date. The current paper examined the picaresque and popular African literature narrative techniques through conducting an in-depth analysis of the following texts; Kill Me Quick, Mission to Kala, The Angels Die, and A Sport of Nature. To effectively address the task, the study examined narratives and narrative techniques in the prose fiction under study. The paper then deployed the Structural Literary Theory in an effort to decode the intertextuality between the texts. The study established that the texts under study are interconnected through the main characters, especially the picaro/picara. An examination of Gustav Freytag’s narrative structure was conducted and similarities and differences in the narrative structures of the texts under study was observed. The Postcolonial Literary Theory was also consulted where specific strands of the theory as propounded by Vorn Gorp, and Frantz Fanon were blended to furnish the study with the necessary theoretical backbone to exhaustively study picaresque narratives in popular literature. In conclusion, the study established that the Picaresque and Popular Literature writing modes are interconnected through the use plot and main characters. The study also established that the non-linear and episodic plot structures are the most commonly used techniques in picaresque and popular writing modes.

Postcolonialism: Literary Applications of a Decolonizing Tool

Postcolonialism revolves around studying the effects of colonialism on cultures and discloses how European nations controlled "Third World" cultures and how the latter resisted cunning encroachments. It endeavors to decolonize postcolonial states from the political conditions to the cultural ones, as it contests the contemporary legacies of historical colonialism so as to break the present imbalances of power. Postcolonialism also seeks to criticize contemporary colonial ways by seeking powerful substantial change in postcolonial nations while celebrating the lost history of resistance as well. The purpose of this research study is to define postcolonialism and show how postcolonial literary theory is applied to examine texts produced by both the colonized and the colonizing forces. Also, it endeavors to contribute to the body of postcolonial literature and celebrate the lost cultural heritage of the colonized. To meet this end, this research investigation adopts an exploratory research design and uses searching and screening tools to examine, analyze and synthesize relevant first and secondary sources. The findings indicated that postcolonial literary theories, in their multidimensional and multidisciplinary nature, have proven practically useful in scrutinizing western literature, celebrating literary works by the colonized subaltern through giving voice to the tamed, stifled, and disdained intellectuals whose works disclose the truth behind the civilizing mission of colonialism which was nothing but a series of ideas and practices used to legitimize the establishment of overseas colonies to subject people. The results of this research study are significant in the way that they would not only enrich and further advance the existing canon of postcolonial literature but would also raise awareness of everyone investigating the power dynamics of the colonizer and the colonized. In this respect, it is therefore hoped that our dissertation deepens greater understanding and inspires respect, honor, and rehabilitation for the colonized.

Fashioning Women Citizens in al-Fajr

Abstract When Najla Abillama published the first issue of al-Fajr (The Dawn) in Beirut in January 1919, hope infused articles that looked forward to the future of the homeland and its daughters. Key to that future was the home. Using postcolonial literary theory, Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of self-fashioning, and Nan Enstad’s definition of political subjects, this article analyzes a fictional correspondence between Salma and her daughter Mary, published in al-Fajr from late 1919 through 1920. The article argues that these letters marshal the discourse of domesticity—women as educated managers of their homes, children, and husbands—to articulate women’s roles in public, national life. Thus the mother-daughter and husband-wife relationships highlighted in the correspondence fashion women as citizens patriotically devoted to and shaped by the nation, partnered with their fellow citizens for its improvement. This analysis provides a model for reexamining the relationship between the domestic and the national in the interwar women’s press.

Depiction of Shifting Identities in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust and The Dragonfly Sea

Individuals in culturally plural environments form and shift their identities in various ways to co-exist and survive in new localities. These identity changes, especially in the diaspora, result from intermingling culturally diverse individuals in a quest for self-emancipation. This paper seeks to explore how contemporary travelling writers depict the complicated process of identity formation and shifting identities of various characters in new physical and non-physical spaces. This study relies on data from Yvonne Owuor's works, The Dragonfly Sea and Dust. As advanced by Fanon and Bhabha, post-colonial literary theory – cultural hegemony and counter emancipation discourse, cultural hybridisation, and exploration of the third space of cultural enunciation underpin this literary analysis. The study, through Ajany and Ayaana, the protagonists in Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, respectively, concludes that individuals in culturally plural environments are constantly involved in shifting their identities to fit in.

"Post-Colonial Discourse: The Impact of Imperial Elements on J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians"

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is an active representative example of post-colonial novel in which a lot of postcolonial concepts and themes are highlighted. The novel revolves around the post-colonial literary theory involving: certain notions such as language, knowledge, imperialism, identity, struggle, gender problems, and oppression, as depicted in the characters and events. In this novel, the protagonist, a nameless magistrate, struggles to show eventual military, political, physical and knowledgeable power to rule over tribal nomads (i.e. an intellectual magistrate in border settlement controlled by foreign invaders seeks balance between civil life and tribal one). The aim of this paper is to account for the post-colonial elements employed in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, focusing on the purposes and functions of these elements in creating sense of realism, nationalism, and witty-persuasive arguments. These divisive elements help Coetzee to present his novel more effectively, more understandably, more persuasively, and more emotionally i.e. these elements are intended to convince, motivate, unify and drive people in the direction of certain goals.

ORAL DISTILLATES AND POSTCOLONIAL TEMPER IN ADEMOLA DASYLVA’S SONGS OF ODAMOLUGBE

This paper engages the self-validating domain of orality as a valuable and potent field in the depiction of postcolonial Africa, in particular Nigeria. The paper accounts for orality as the authentic core of the mode of self-assertion, continued self-existence and the consistent (re)validation of how traditional societies structured their worldviews and cultural aesthetics. It argues that African writers still utilise the aesthetic provisions that their oral backcloth and oral past provide in the identification, (re)appraisal and the representation of the postcolonial situation in Africa. Engaging Ademola Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe as primary text and data, the paper examines and explores features of Yoruba oral poetry and allied aggregates that the Yoruba traditional culture offers. This is clearly realized and apprehended in the crafting of the collection of poems and the overarching thematic foci and direction. These representations are captured within two extremes. Employing insights from postcolonial literary theory in its critique of the primary text, the paper situates the enervating frustrations, collapse of industry, economic inanities, atmosphere of fear, tensions, widespread underdevelopment, neocolonial excesses, prevalent hunger, deep-seated corruption and a general apathy to life and living as daily experienced in postcolonial Africa and Nigeria. As part of its finding, the paper attests that Dasylva’s Songs of Odamolugbe relishes a completed precolonial past where African communities maintained a communal cultural ownership of their existence and presided over their own affairs. It concludes that the poetry collection decries and rejects the morbid realities that characterize the postcolonial African experience.

The Omnipresent Past: Dystopian Trends in Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present

This paper seeks to analyze the dystopian character of Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present and demonstrate the claustrophobic nature of post-apartheid South Africa. The problem in this paper is to investigate the way in which Gordimer’s novel interprets the perceived socio-political evolution of her country. Our point of departure is that post-apartheid South Africa is not healed of its turbulent past and this past haunts and torments it till date. This article foregrounds the argument that the dystopian nature of Gordimer’s last novel is evident in the fact it captures the crash of dreams for an egalitarian, non-racial society; it portrays the repression and failure of individual efforts to improve society; and it describes poverty, violence and anarchy as society’s unchanging norms. Using postcolonial literary theory, this paper shows how No Time Like the Present narrates the entanglement of South Africans at a time when political morass and socio-economic inequalities abort anti-apartheid expectations. This paper arrives at the conclusion that No Time Like the Present is a dystopian novel in which grim, absurd realities are portrayed to show how remote and unfamiliar the present is when compared with expectations nurtured in the past.

THE ‘CITY’ AS TEXT

AbstractThis commentary develops a postcolonial critique of urban studies, which it distinguishes and delineates from postcolonial urban studies. To do so it mobilizes tools from postcolonial literary theory, regional and area studies, and an older tradition of thinking in the new cultural geography from which the invocation of ‘the city as text’ stands as a methodological guidepost.

Evidences of our inhumanity: Representations of evil and the quest for postcolonial healing in Tadjo’s The Shadows of Imana: Travels in the heart of Rwanda

In spite of Tadjo‘s evident references to the concept of evil and its ramifications in post-genocide Rwanda, it still remains peripheral in the literature. This gap distorts our understanding of traumatogenic experiences and the diagnostics that is required. Drawing on Immanuel Kant‘s conceptions of evil and postcolonial literary theory, this paper explores the literary representations of evil in relation to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda while simultaneously looking at therapeutic strategies in healing the wounds of the past as depicted in Veronique Tadjo‘s The Shadows of Imana: Travels in the heart of Rwanda. Such a reading, as the paper argues, creates new conversations for understanding travel writings and historical violence.

CONSTRUCTING ETHNIC IDENTITY IN RAJANIKANTA BARDOLOI’S MIRI JIYORI: A (POST) COLONIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE TEXT

Purpose of the study: The purpose of this study is to understand the concept of ethnic Identity projected in the early novels of Assamese literature. This study also investigates a colonial narrative in the text and tries to understand the present scenario highlighting the past.&#x0D; Methodology: It is a descriptive analysis based on qualitative method research. Focusing on the concept of ethnic Identity the research has been done under the discourse of postcolonial literary theory. The data and speculation are drawn from the secondary sources. Any kind of technical software has not been used in carrying out the research.&#x0D; Main Findings: The research brings out to the forefront that even in the colonial period; the native writers seem to be conscious about their own culture and the society. They were aware of the marginal boundary created by hegemonic colonial products. The writers raise the question of constructing ‘self’ and ‘other’ and a developing sense of cultural hierarchy.&#x0D; Applications of this study: This study would help to locate the space of marginalised society in that colonial construction and help the researchers to understand the gap between the early Assamese literatures of the colonial period. Moreover, the study also finds out the awareness of the writers even in the colonial rule about the peripheral boundary and ethnic Identity of a multiethnic/multilingual society.&#x0D; Novelty/Originality of this study: It is certain that Assamese novels have been studied under various theoretical frameworks, but as we are concerned this theme has not been discussed yet for this particular novel. The presentation of the colonial past in the text is the originality of this research.

Identity Crisis of Lyndall in Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

In this research paper, the researcher explores how the female identity was in crisis in the colonized Africa. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm is taken as a primary text to explore the exploitation of colonizers by interpreting it with the tool of postcolonial literary theory. African farm owners were displaced from their farm landscape by the colonizers. As a result, the farm workers have to face the problem of identity crisis. Englishmen were responsible for bringing Africans identity crisis. They struggle to establish their identity on the Karoo farmland. The main victims were women whose identity is determined in relation to the place. Their placelessness represents their identity crisis in the Karoo farm landscape. Women’s identity is connecting with the place. As a qualitative research, the researcher has extensively presents the crisis of identity of female in their own land when the colonizers seized their land.

The Autotelic Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s at the Bottom of the River

Kincaid’s fiction focused on the Caribbean dislocation and displacement which relates to racism, colonialism, and trans-culturality with little or no consideration of the role of the autotelic self in contesting these cultural forces. This study examines the extent to which the Julia Kristeva’s principles of language and subject formation and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality could intersect with this autotelic self. Using the postcolonial feminist literary theory and the Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality, it seeks to ascertain the degree to which Jamaica Kincaid’s selected fiction violate or adhere to Kristeva’s principles of language and subject formation and Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality. It applied the cultural and novel of the Julia Kristeva’s principles and the Csikszentmihalyi’s principles to Kincaid’s selected poetic novella. The study depicts that Kincaid in the selected novella violates the Kristeva’s principles as well both in the same cadre.

Postcolonialism, Time, and Body-Worn Cameras

This paper draws on postcolonial temporal analysis to make sense of police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs). We argue that the potential of BWCs to make racist policing visible, as originally hoped, is compromised by the inability of “real-time” video to capture the complexity of historical and on-going colonial relations. Drawing on postcolonial literary and visual theory, and especially Homi Bhabha’s (2004) postcolonial analysis of “belated-ness” and Andrea Smith’s (2015) anti-colonial analysis of “not-seeing,” we argue that BWCs reproduce a white settler gaze in which the complex histories of colonialism become temporally incommensurate with real-time images of policing social order.

The Politics of Opacity and Translation in Post-Migrant Germany

Abstract My commentary focusses on the anecdote described by Elise v. Bernstorff in her research on transcultural education in rural Germany. I am interested in the potential intersections between v. Bernstorff’s findings and my own work on postcolonial literary theory and translation studies. On a methodological level, I am taking my cue from the ethical theory of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant on the one hand and postcolonial translation studies (Spivak, Tymoczko, Venuti) on the other.

DISIDENTIFICATION AND HOMELESSNESS IN TABISH KHAIR’S NIGHT OF HAPPINESS

Tabish Khair, who is an Indian author settled in Denmark, employs a postcolonial discourse in his works. He creates multicultural and also anti-colonial fiction by blending his native culture with the adopted western one. Tabish Khair‟s novels, in particular, resist the hegemonic voice of the Western culture and as an author, he tries to reflect the original voice of postcolonial characters by focusing on their cultural clashes and discontents which emerge when these characters live in the West as immigrants or interact with the colonial culture. One of the most striking novels in which he portrays vivid characters with identity crisis is his latest novel; Night of Happiness. The novel, named after an important date for Muslims known as Shab-e-baraat night, was first published in 2018, and narrates the story of postcolonial characters who suffers from identity loss in the postcolonial, ambivalent atmosphere of contemporary India. In this sense, the aim of this article is to unfold the psychological and social defects of formerly colonized individuals in our contemporary era by referring to some specific quotations from the novel, and to apply Postcolonial Literary Theory to shed light on the novel‟s anti-colonial discourse, and Khair‟s humorous style of social criticism.

Religion, communism, and Ratu Adil; Colonialism and propaganda literature in 1920s Yogyakarta

This article examines the social realities of literary works and the colonial perceptions of socio-political movement inspired by the ideologies of Islam, communism, and the Just King ( Ratu Adil ). The main sources for this study are four short stories published by the Resident of Yogyakarta, Louis Frederik Dingemans (1924–1927). It employs post-colonial literary theory to analyze the colonial authority's perceptions of Islam, communism and Ratu Adil, and examines how colonial rulers (as colonizers) positioned themselves as above indigenous society (the colonized) as the guardians of moral, social, and political order.

Integrating research, teaching and practice in the context of new institutional policies: a social practice approach

Most research on the implementation of research-informed teaching has focused on influencing the individual practices of academics. However, social practice theory has criticised individualist approaches, arguing that attention must be paid to the context of practice, which in the academic context requires a focus on how academics articulate agency in their teaching practices in relation to specific contextual opportunities and constraints. This small-scale qualitative study in a UK university explores how academics across eight disciplines reshaped their understandings and practices of research-informed teaching in the context of a change in institutional mission from teaching and professional practice to incorporate expectations around research, drawing on developments in social practice theory when applied to academic workgroups. Understandings of identity and agency developed in postcolonial literary theory are used to further explore the academic work involved in creating new narratives for research-informed teaching in the context of changing, and often contradictory discourses of research, teaching and practice. This has implications for approaches to implementing research-informed teaching, which should recognise the work of academics in developing new narratives for research-informed teaching in the context of unique configurations of the nexus between research, teaching and practice in different disciplines. Social practice theory provides a lens for considering the contextual elements impacting on academic approaches to research-informed teaching, while approaches to narrative borrowed from postcolonial literary theory foreground the agency of academics in working across contradictions that surfaced with changes to the nexus between research, teaching and practice, to create emergent practices of research-informed teaching.

The Racial Discrimination from Romantic Perspective: A Postcolonial Study of Langston Hughes's Selected Poems

.Postcolonial literary theory critically studies the cultural, societal and historical analysis and modes of discourse of the people of the colonies in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Third World. Moreover, postcolonial studies deal with forms of imperialism particularly the domination of some nations and people by other nations. Thus,"this rethinking of empire has brought the United States into focus as an object of postcolonial [studies]both as a contemporary empire and as itself a postcolonial nation"(Abrams,1960:307,8).African-American studies, however, fit together well with postcolonial studies as it "forms a number of angels interrogates the relations between the west pretty much the rest of the world in the light of the history or Western expansion and military and economic domination"(Bertens,2001:112).On this basis, it is possible to read and analyze the African-American literary themes through a postcolonial vision. However, the prevailing theme that most African-American poems tackle in common is the theme of racial discrimination, but it is rather meticulous to say what the poems share in terms of theme instead of mode. The present study aims at examining Langston Hughes's selected poems to judge whether the modes of these poems are romantic or racial and the motive behind this. This will give a better understanding of the personal and the psychological factors that affected the life of the African-American individual in the heyday of the racial segregation