Postcolonial Novels Research Articles

Колониальные мотивы в английском неовикторианском романе: к постановке проблемы

The article focuses on the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and on the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives. The article explores genre peculiarities of these modifications of the late neo-Victorian novel. The article focuses on the problem of Britishness as a base of an English identity. ‘British’ features are the peculiar characteristics of any Victorian or modern Englishman. Understanding English national character with its Britishness is a key to the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives appropriate reading. To achieve the aims of the article the following methods of literary analysis were used: typological, cultural and historical, comparative methods and intertextual analysis. Through the careful analyses of the neo-Victorian novels the author of the article concludes that Victorian colonial novels are the predecessors of the neo-Victorian novels with colonial motives as well as the neo-Victorian postcolonial novels. The basic differences between these varieties of the late neo-Victorian novel are determined by the origin of their author. As the author of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel originates from the former colonies, such novels focuses on the postcolonial problematics and correspond to the postcolonial canon but not to the neo-Victorian one. On the contrary neo-Victorian novel with the colonial pastiches and parodies Victorian fiction. The prospects of the research include the further exploration of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives.

KONSTRUKSI RUANG KOTA POSKOLONIAL DAN RESPONS SPASIAL DALAM NOVEL THE KITE RUNNER KARYA KHALED HOSSEINI

; > In the time of war, people usually migrate from troubled places to the safe and sound cities, promising a better life. However, the position of cities as a promising space is questionable. It is due to the close relation between city utopia and colonial city. In fact, there are indications of colonial continuation through industrialization which ends up to domination in many aspects; economy, social, and cultural. One of postcolonial novels written by a diaspora writer, Khaled Hosseini, takes up a theme of migration from a city (Kabul) in a troubled country, Afghanistan, to a city (Fremont) in a more stable country, America. Sara Upstone’s method of reading on spatial politics in postcolonial novels is used here to read how Fremont is constructed in the novel and the spatial respond occurred. The analysis showed that Khaled Hosseini’s construction upon Fremont is that utopia is denied from the beginning of the novel. Fremont becomes oppressive space and yet, it offers possibilities for spatial responds such as displacement and carnivalisation to occur. These are strategies used by those who are subjected to oppression in the city space. Keywords: City space, postcolonial, spatial respond.

Reading between the “posts”: Systemic violence and the trope of hybridity in the postcolonial novel

The late-20th-century convergence of post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial theories has engendered a critical discourse network that privileges hybridity. These accounts contend that it (re)inscribes the agency of minority subjects, destabilizing hegemonic discourses, but, paradoxically, hybridity has become a stabilizing trope for – as well as the dominant way to read – the postcolonial novel. This essay discusses three postcolonial novels that “disidentify” with this master narrative of postcolonialism: Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. When reread as performances enacted between the “posts”, these novels suggest that hybridity can expose the systemic violence of colonial rationality.

JOHN MARX, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011.

AFTER the linguistic, cultural, and transnational turns, we now encounter the ‘adminstrative turn’ in literary and cultural criticism (1). John Marx situates his monograph within a new scholarship of governance in the humanities, ‘literary governmentality’ (8). If this sounds Foucauldian, it is: Marx’s book confirms the return to Foucault already signalled in Timothy O’Leary’s Foucault and Fiction. Where O’Leary’s focus is the Irish novel, Marx’s is postcolonial novels of the early twenty-first century and imperial fiction written on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which is contemporaneous with the (beginnings of) the passing of empire itself. His contention is that Conrad, Forster, and their ilk ‘helped forecast a world after European imperialism by identifying problems with empire’s adminstrative strategies and by laying the conceptual foundation necessary to generate new schemes’. In the twenty-first century, novelists who have inherited that legacy of imperialism, among them Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, and Ahdaf Soueif, ‘continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale’. Their work proves Marx’s point, that ‘fiction refurbishes government as well as criticizes it’ (1).

Postcolonial Recycling of the Oriental Vampire in Habiby's Saraya, the Ghoul's Daughter and Mukherjee's Jasmine

This article examines Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989) as two postcolonial novels seeking to rewrite the history of Palestinian and Indian diaspora according to their respective myths of Oriental vampires. Habiby's recycling of the Palestinian folktale of the ghoul and Mukherjee's recuperation of the Hindu myth of Lord Shiva aim to spotlight the classical vampiric topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial Gothic writing is thus shown to foreground gender, nationality, and ethnicity as sites of both power conflict and cultural exchange. Adopting a counter-Orientalist approach, the study sheds light on the different strategies these two postcolonial texts employ to deconstruct the demonic and ghostly constructions of Arabs and Indians.

Postcolonial Recycling of the Oriental Vampire: Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter and Mukherjee's Jasmine

This essay examines Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991), and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989) as two postcolonial novels seeking to rewrite the history of Palestinian and Indian diaspora according to their respective myths of Oriental vampires. Habiby's recycling of the Palestinian folktale of the ghoul and Mukherjee's recuperation of the Hindu myth of Lord Shiva aim to spotlight the classical vampiric topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Postcolonial Gothic writing is thus shown to foreground gender, nationality, and ethnicity as sites of both power conflict and cultural exchange.

Domesticating the subaltern in the global novel in English

This essay analyses prizewinning postcolonial novels in English from the last two decades that render labourers legible by enfolding them in the domestic novels still dominant in metropolitan reading practices. The figures of Hassan in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Triton in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef, Velutha in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and Ugwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, though they initially enter the novels as labourers, are ultimately transformed through their roles in these domestic novels into exceptional figures who transcend class. At the same time, the novels address forms of violence that would seem to challenge the domestic novel’s representational capacities. These novels then perform a double movement, gesturing toward class as a category in their inclusion of these domestic labourers, only to evacuate that category in rewriting the violence they portray as answerable by the personal relationships and identitarian transformations that constitute the genre’s meanings. That the novels thus raise questions of class and subalternity – of relations of domination and subordination – and then translate those relations into other categories posited as primary bearers of textual and social meaning renders the category of class itself subaltern in these texts.

At the crossroads: culture and cultural identity in the novels of Achebe

This article examines culture and cultural identity in the novels of the African writer Chinua Achebe (1930–). Culture may be studied from the viewpoint of Weber and Durkheim as an analysis of cultural patterns in a society or from Rosaldo's postmodernist perspective as an exploration of cultural borderlands. In Things fall apart and Arrow of God, novels set in the period before colonisation, Achebe sketches cultural patterns in social institutions to counter stereotypes of Africa. However, even as he traces these patterns, he reveals schisms in Igbo society that foreshadow change in the existing social order. Colonialism fractures the society further, accelerating change. While delineating the processes of change, Achebe outlines the complex nature of cultural identity, a result of both the intrinsic nature of Igbo society and the advent of colonialism. In the postcolonial novels, No longer at ease, A man of the people and Anthills of savannah, cultural identity becomes problematic since the margins between the centre and the periphery become indistinct and social institutions collapse. Dominant Weberian patterns now yield to Rosaldo's cultural borderlands where cultural hybrids, equally sceptical about African and western values, struggle for identity. Stationed at the crossroads of history, these characters embrace the complexities of cultural change, demonstrating the vibrancy of Igbo society as they adapt to move on.

Ghostly Girls in the “Eerie Bush”: Helen Oyeyemi's <em>The Icarus Girl</em> as Postcolonial Female Gothic Fiction

in his study African Oral Literature, isidore Okpewho describes the Yoruba oral tradition of “tales told by hunters of extraordinary confrontations with supernatural creatures and spirits in the eerie bush” (305). a haunted forest or wasteland, the bush is a symbolic space where solitary male protagonists test their mettle and, implicitly, their masculinity. Okpewho goes on to discuss the bush as an important site and source for modern Yoruba writers such as D. O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola. Fagunwa’s first and best-known novel, Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, was published in Yoruba in 1938 and translated into English as Forest of a Thousand Daemons by Wole soyinka in 1968. The most famous examples from Tutuola’s oeuvre are The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). This article focuses on a recent addition to this trajectory of fantastical Yoruba writing on the bush. Helen Oyeyemi arguably ushers this historically male tradition into the new millennium with her debut novel The Icarus Girl (2005). like her literary predecessors, Oyeyemi characterizes the bush as a treacherous realm that must be carefully navigated. Specifically, the child protagonist Jessamy Harrison, a surviving twin, must traverse the bush in order to restore balance to her soul. also like the bush landscapes of earlier writers, Oyeyemi’s “wilderness of the mind” integrates Yoruba belief systems with Western myths, literatures, and technologies. In imagining a twenty-first-century version of the bush, Oyeyemi answers the call of the anonymous scribe at the end of Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons: “You men and women of Yorubaland, the wisdom of others teaches us not to think an elder a madman—put the story of this book to wise use” (139). Oyeyemi puts the paradigmatic stories of her Yoruba “elders” to “wise use” and creates her own next generation narrative of the bush. admittedly, Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons and Tutuola’s The PalmWine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts cannot be considered postcolonial novels in a temporal sense (post-1960 when Nigeria gained independence) and they are rarely considered postcolonial novels in the academic sense of “writing back” to European stereotypes and models. Nonetheless, these texts engage with and

New African Writing and the Question of Audience

Postcolonial novels that tend to become popularly acclaimed in Western Europe and North America share a number of features: they are predomi- nantly written by women; they are presented from the perspectives of culturally innocent or marginal protagonists; they thematize the emotional consequences of familial or public upheavals; and they are not too long but, if they are, they compensate by being thematically, formally, or linguisti- cally unadventurous. This is the primary context of reception of much con- temporary African writing, and it is not surprising that new works of fiction by African writers feed into this typology. The novel remains about the most inclusive of literary forms, but a certain kind of novel has become so dominant today as to be viewed as the gold standard, especially when this is measured by popular or critical success. This paper discusses these fea- tures in relation to three issues: the structure of the prose form, especially the novel; the external factors of economics and symbolic capital; and the politics of postcolonial stories. The paper argues that the process of cultural politics through which symbolic capital is reproduced in postcolonial sto- ries is a function of what writers perceive to be the market of their works. By reading against the grain of Allah Is Not Obliged (Ahmadou Kourouma) and Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), the paper suggests that con- temporary African writing remains fraught with a paradox, the productive foreignness of a sensibility that is estranged from its own interests.

The Postcolonial Novel. Richard J. Lane . Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. Pp. v+146.

<i>The Postcolonial Novel</i>. Richard J. Lane . Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. Pp. v+146.

Deconstructing Identity in Postcolonial Fiction

With the destabilization of political and cultural boundaries between peoples and nations, the concept of identity, with its implications in the dialectics of self and other, becomes a philosophical challenge in a globalised cosmopolitan world. The challenge resides in the fact that in such a postmodern situation where identity is viewed as shapeless, shifting and moving beyond the fixity of Manichean thought, a process of questioning is enacted to interrogate identity in its past, present and future implications. This paper will attempt to look at the ways in which some postcolonial novels set out to deconstruct the concept of identity by constructing ambivalent texts, blurring the borders between self and other, laying the foundations for hybridity where otherness reigns as a process of signification which rests on interpretation.

Crossing the Borders of Identity Politics

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat (2004) by Marlene van Niekerk.

The Problem of Realism and African Fiction

Until recently, studies of postcolonial African novels emphasized the genre's relation to anticolonial critique and its expression of collective resistance. In response to the overwhelming assumption that novels from Africa were primarily anthropological artifacts rather than works of the imagination, literary critics sought to emphasize the palimpsestic nature of text by pointing to the unsayable and the indeterminate, and they devalued that which appeared mimetic, no matter what the text itself looked like. I explore the question of genre or narrative mode with special attention to realism, which I read as complex. African novels' relation to realism is not simply naive, as Anthony Appiah or Pascale Cassanova would claim. With complexity in mind, I ask what happens when readers shift attention away from the question of resistance that has so defined the field, and ask instead: how does the novel produce its effects? An answer to this question requires close attention to form because that is where the novelty of the novel lies. I look primarily at two novels: Le Devoir de violence (Mali) and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Ghana), both published in 1968.

Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives Sandra Manoogian Pearce Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Kathryn LaingSinead MooneyMaureen O’Connor, pp. 252. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006. Distributed by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs PA. $39.95. Edna O’Brien, prolific and controversial, has been the subject of many glossy magazine interviews but of few full-length scholarly studies. Three notable exceptions were Grace Eckley’s 1974 monograph, Bernice Schrank’s 1996 special edition of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Amanda Greenwood’s 2003 monograph. Now a new volume of essays fills this gap. Laing, Mooney, and O’Connor have assembled twelve essays, many from the April 2005 conference at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Another volume, edited by O’Connor and Lisa Colletta, appeared from the University of Wisconsin Press [End Page 146] in 2006. These two volumes indicate the growing body of scholars who are now challenging “existing hostile and repetitive readings of her work.” Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives opens with Rebecca Pelan’s excellent “Reflections on a Connemara Dietrich.” Pelan castigates the “otherwise astute” critic Fintan O’Toole’s criticism of three of O’Brien’s novels for—among other things—failing to notice that for years Edna O’Brien has “consistently cast a forensic eye on the most private aspects of... Irish life in order to show that the distinction between the private and public realm is a false one.” Pelan posits that O’Toole and others miss what O’Brien is precisely concerned with; as “one of the most commercially successful writers,” O’Brien is seldom taken seriously for her writing but assessed on her looks and behavior. The next essay, by co-editor Maureen O’Connor, “Edna O’Brien, Irish Dandy,” also cites Richard Holmes’s review, “A Connemara Dietrich,” but differs in perspective. Instead of cautioning critics to limit themselves to assessments of O’Brien’s writing rather than her manners, in direct counterpoint to Pelan, O’Connor explains the enduring attraction of the “dandy” throughout history and views it as an asset for O’Brien to use. The editorial decision to place O’Connor’s essay directly after Pelan demonstrates the controversial nature of, and mixed responses to, O’Brien’s still-alluring personality. O’Connor concludes that by accentuating her Irishness “as a way of marginalizing her,” critics are really only following her instructions; O’Brien “cannily manipulates her Irishness to place herself at both periphery and centre, to play the roles of insider and outsider with seemingly effortless style.” These two essays provide a provocative opening to play off each other, though the suspicion lingers that these scholars are, in a way, doing exactly what they accuse others of: paying more attention to the persona than the writing. Michelle Woods, in “Red, UnRead, and Edna: Ernest Gebler and Edna O’Brien,” explores the author’s famous marriage from a new angle. Woods analyzes two of Gebler’s novels in an effort to refute his claim that O’Brien copied his works and style. Surprisingly, Woods ends by suggesting a reassessment of Gebler’s work. Bertrand Cardin’s “Words Apart: Epigraphs in Edna O’Brien’s Novels,” takes a strikingly original approach. Cardin identifies and explores the relationship of eight epigraphs to their respective novels, concluding that “O’Brien’s systematic use of epigraphs, which borrows from other works on so large a scale, parodies parochialism and restricted, narrow-minded nationalism and the obscurest religious bigotry from which the author suffered so much.” Eve Stoddard’s essay, “Sexuality, Nation and Land in the Postcolonial Novels of Edna O’Brien and Jamaica Kincaid,” does exactly what its title purports to do: compare the two novelists. Those well read in O’Brien will be disappointed that Stoddard looks at postcolonial concerns in only two novels, House [End Page 147] of Splendid Isolation (1994) and Wild Decembers (1999). Loredana Salis’s essay, “‘Caring Nothing for Sacrifice’: The Drama of Solitude in Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia” calls for re-evaluation of O’Brien’s plays and themes: “The claim that her work is primarily female-centered (that is, anti-patriarchal) does little justice to this writer’s...

Chercher l'autre, devenir soi. La problématique identitaire dans la littérature féminine liée à la décolonisation des Indes néerlandaises Orientales

In this paper, we mean to analyse the theme of the identity problematic which ensues from the decolonisation of the Dutch East Indies in the work of the women writers Hella S. Haasse and Marion Bloem. In their postcolonial novels, they concentrate on the identity quest from which both former Dutch colonials and Indo-Europeans (of mixed Indonesian-European blood) suffer. In Haasse’s work, the identity conflict arises from the failed digestion of the colonial past, i.e. from the denial of its impact on one’s life. Marion Bloem concentrates on the schizophrenia of the second generation of Indo-Europeans who live between two cultures without completely acquiring either one.

The Death of the Novel and Two Postcolonial Writers

This essay, which examines the anxiety of influence of the postcolonial English-language novel, focuses on texts constituted by metropolitan (Western, European) forms of the realist novel, albeit in a reactive mode. I claim that postcolonial revisions of canonical novels reinvent the Eurocentric canon for a global age while enacting the death of the romance of the novel. The essay has three parts: the first examines V. S. Naipaul's vexed identification with and shadowing of Joseph Conrad; the second discusses J. M. Coetzee's deconstructive interpretation of the national and cultural provenance of the classic English novel; and the third explores contestations around questions of canonicity, fictionality, and the historical embeddedness of postcolonial novels.

Nationalism and Otherness:Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom

This essay examines the motives and fallout, both overt and tactical, that surround the materiality of postcolonial novels and critical texts in specific institutional and pedagogical contexts. At stake is both the ontology and materiality of the other—more specifically their representation at the hands of a self as center of political power that legitimates its own systems of knowledge and meaning. The specific institutional context and point of departure is the recent revision of the postgraduate English syllabus at Guahati University in northeast India. The essay examines this academic exercise for a larger ideological meaning by drawing to a logical conclusion the assumption that a so-called muffassil (provincial) Indian university that is implicated in the life of the people of its region stands committed to the human resource development of that region. The institutional assumption is that the university’s students of English studies in the socioeconomically challenged state of Assam should be sensitized to the complex issues of the nation and its otherness; it is also assumed that they should be able to construct a politically engaged reading of such texts, one informed by the problems of discontent of being on the nation’s margins literally and metaphorically. The texts, however, instead tend to generate anxieties and discomfiture as Assamese students—already the nation’s other—encounter postcolonial celebrations of the borderless nation, dissemination, porous borders, liminality, etc., which fail to empathize with the miseries of the Assamese people and the deplorable conditions of the region—the product of years of neglect by the metropolitan center, heavy immigration from Bangladesh and the resultant strain on the land and regional economy, and subnationalist aspirations being perceived as secessionism and terrorism. [End Page 71]

Book Review: Woman and Indian Modernity: Readings of Colonial and Postcolonial Novels

Book Review: Woman and Indian Modernity: Readings of Colonial and Postcolonial Novels

Liminal spaces and imaginary places in &lt;i&gt;The bone people&lt;/i&gt; by Keri Hulme and &lt;i&gt;The folly&lt;/i&gt; by Ivan Vladislavic

This article argues that the transcendent power of the imagination represented by literature and novels in particular, has played a major role in aiding societies to confront and deal with specific social and political realities in a multicultural global society. The fact that novels represent the development of fictional characters in time and space, enables the reader to experience the lives of the protagonists in a vicarious fashion. In fact, the concept of liminality (with regard to the different stages of separation, transition and re-integration into society) is emulated in the reading process. The interstitial space provided by liminality is especially pertinent to postcolonial novels such as “The bone people” by Keri Hulme. In this novel Hulme illustrates how fictional characters, in an individual and social sense, have to experience “rites of passage” in order to come to terms with traumatic changes in their lives and cultures. In a different way and with the bigoted South African apartheid society (including the reader) as target, Vladislavic exploits the power of the imagination to launch a subtle, yet stringent critique on people who lack imagination and consequently fail to use it constructively in order to transcend their narrow-minded reality – similar to Patrick White in his condemnation of restrictive social conventions in Australian society in his novel “Voss”.