Postcolonial Experience Research Articles

Review of: "Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience" By Rey Chow

Review of: "Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience" By Rey Chow

Not Like a Native Speaker: On Language as a Postcolonial Experience by Rey Chow

Not Like a Native Speaker: On Language as a Postcolonial Experience by Rey Chow

Language, Voice, and the Poetics of Trauma in Modern Levantine Literatures: A Yiddish-Arabic Dialogue

Language, Voice, and the Poetics of Trauma in Modern Levantine LiteraturesA Yiddish-Arabic Dialogue Victoria Biggs (bio) Defining Trauma, Defining "Levantinism" As a geographical and cultural region, the Levant has been fractured by intense political violence, with the result that its literature is rich with themes of loss and dislocation. These ethno-national, political, and religious fractures and attendant literary themes have frequently been examined through a postcolonial lens, with scholars rejecting the imposition of regional categories on literature (i.e., "Middle Eastern literature" or "Commonwealth writing") as a perpetuation of Eurocentric attitudes and colonial rule that saw territory being carved up and parceled out among the European powers.1 Postcolonial theory has been instrumental in sketching out alternative literary geographies through its acute sensitivity to language, which is "central to the colonial and postcolonial experience. . . . Language became an instrument of control and command, and anticolonial resistance therefore necessarily included as one of its dimensions resistance to the colonizer's language."2 However, despite this sensitivity to language, postcolonial terminology in itself is unable to fully convey the cumulative impact of war, population displacement, and military occupation on cultural and artistic life. As Ammiel Alcalay writes, "To speak of a 'postcolonial culture'—no matter what kind of intellectual gymnastics [End Page 1] are involved and despite the term's reference—obscures the fact that people are still colonized, albeit in new and different ways."3 Recognizing the need to develop a still more nuanced language that remains sensitive to the ongoing forms of colonial violence, this article examines the potential for trauma theory to enrich the conceptual vocabulary we use about contemporary Levantine writing and consequently to refine and reconfigure our understanding of the context from which this writing has emerged. The term Levant is itself contested due to its colonial past, but from the 1990s it began to gain currency in academic circles as a positive descriptor, with scholars such as Alcalay using it to describe a fertile "contemporary cultural space" rather than as a toponym.4 Its potency as a postcolonial term is derived from the sense of the Levant as "defined by categorical transgression and restless mobility . . . a discursive category of alterity . . . [that] does not represent the Oriental Other a la Said, but rather Mary Douglas's ambivalent unclassifiable."5 The term Levant has been reclaimed for the postcolonial lexicon through attention to the same notion of hybridity and its liberating power that distinguishes Homi Bhabha's work. This shift was foreshadowed in the work of the Egyptian Jewish writer Jacqueline Shohat Kahanoff, who envisioned the Levant as "a prism whose various facets are joined by the sharp edge of differences, but each of which, according to its position in a space-time continuum, reflects or refracts light. Indeed, the concept of light is contained in the word Levant as in the word Mizrah, and perhaps the time has come for the Levant to re-evaluate itself by its own lights, rather than to see itself through Europe's sights."6 Her concept of the Levant was informed by her own transplantation from Cairo to the nascent state of Israel and is distinguished by rupture and stratification—"the fracturing [of the region] into stubborn local subcultures and the multi-layered identities of the Levant's peoples."7 Rupture holds an equally central place in trauma theory, leading Michael Rothberg to comment: "It is difficult for me to imagine trauma as not involving dislocation of subjects, histories, and cultures."8 Such dislocation, while traumatic in nature, possesses a fertility that is epitomized by the richness of contemporary Levantine writing, several examples of which are examined by Gil Hochberg in her work on the limits of the separatist imagination in Israel/Palestine.9 The connection between creativity and dislocation is pithily captured in the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's [End Page 2] description of a meeting with an Israeli soldier: "His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land."10 Attuned to the significance of dislocation in both Levantine writing and trauma theory, in choosing texts for analysis in this article I have turned to one of the...

Polsko-postkolonialne podobieństwa? Recepcja tłumaczonej literatury postkolonialnej w Polsce (1970–2010)

Many studies of postcolonial translation feature analyses of translational and publishing decisions and their potential influences on the relationships between the colonizers and the colonized (e.g. Batchelor, Jacquemond, Spivak, Tymoczko). This article proposes a different methodology, focusing instead on the presence of translated postcolonial literature in Poland through a systematic, discursive study of its reception. Based on the results of an unpublished doctoral study, which analysed nearly a thousand Polish reviews discussing African, Indian, Caribbean and Middle Eastern writing and published between 1970 and 2010, the article demonstrates that Polish reviewers increasingly often affirm Polish-postcolonial similarities, even if Orientalist othering discourses remain present in the reviews. This finding contributes to timely debates about Polish self-perceptions. Emphasising otherness or exoticism of postcolonial texts and contexts, the reviewers tend to write from the position of Europeans and identify with Orientalist biases. Yet, the emerging discourse comparing postcolonial experiences of migration, independence struggle and post-independence complexes with Poland’s own past and present offers an interesting counterbalance to a long-standing tradition of othering perceptions. Focusing on specific similarities, as opposed to abstract universalist discourses of shared humanity, some reviewers seem to think of Poland and themselves in postcolonial terms. Furthermore, the article contributes to scholarship on Polish postcolonialism. Numerous incisive studies examined the Partitions of Poland (1795-1918), Nazi occupation (1939-1945) and Soviet domination (1945-89) in terms of colonisation, at the same time employing postcolonial tools to revisit issues of Polish domination over Belarusians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, as well as Polish attitudes to non-European colonised peoples (Bakula, Buchholtz, Cavanagh, Fiut, Gosk, Janion, Klobucka, Kolodziejczyk, Skorczewski, Thompson, Wojda and others). Notably, the themes of Poland’s status as a colonised and colonising country within the immediate region, on the one hand, and Polish perceptions of non-European postcolonial peoples, on the other, tend to be explored separately (cf. Wajda 2015). This article, however, suggests that a Polish postcolonial self-image might be emerging in response to an encounter with translated postcolonial writing and generally argues for bringing the two thematic strands together to explore further interdependencies between Poland’s postcolonialism and Polish attitudes to non-European postcolonials.

Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction 1958–1988 by Brian T. May, and: Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar

Reviewed by: Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction 1958–1988 by Brian T. May, and: Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar Celiese Lypka (bio) Brian T. May. Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction 1958–1988. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2014. Pp. 246. $62.50 CAD. Saikat Majumdar. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Pp. 232. $80.00 CAD. The interest in global and postcolonial literatures from the modernist period demonstrates an affinity between the two literary movements, particularly in their willingness to experiment with narration in order to reshape traditional modes of writing. Recent books by Brian T. May and Saikat Majumdar investigate the intersection of postcolonial literatures and modernism through readings that suggest these works extend modernism’s aesthetic expression in order to radicalize literary and sociopolitical structures. By asking how global and postcolonial texts espouse and transform modernist tropes, the books address the larger political significance of modernism’s revolutionary writing methods in texts that explore the postcolonial experience. May’s text specifically considers the concept of rich individuality in global writings via a selection of skillful close readings that uncover strange, unconventional, and extravagant male characters who act as expressions of purposeful creative forces rather than conforming to typical social and cultural practices. Shifting away from aspects of characterization and individuality, Majumdar focuses on the transnational experience of living in the colonial margins that reconfigures banality and boredom as valuable. According to these critical analyses, postcolonial writing’s introspection and an interest in experimenting with literary banality and boredom combine to address a postcolonial desire to revitalize the modernist aesthetic as a means of destabilizing the tensions of uneven relationships and crisis in colonial spaces. May builds on Satya Mohanty’s work, which dispels the widely held myth that non-Western literatures do not “value the notion of healthy individuality” (May 1), and seeks to unsettle the canon of “high postcolonialism” (4). Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction 1958–1988 rethinks the influence of modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett on a selection of postcolonial authors who portray “a particular corner of postcolonial masculinity” (2). May’s rich close readings of Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee trace the figure of the mimic man to [End Page 397] his moment of Joycean epiphany. May focuses on eccentric and fragile male characters whom he terms “extravagant” and exposes postcolonialism’s continuation of epiphanic moments—the “signature motif of modernism”—as an aesthetic confrontation that renders individuality with postcolonial consciousness (182). His extensive introduction provides a critical investigation into the convergence of postcolonialism and modernism. Moreover, in order to provide a balanced assessment of this motif, May interrogates not only his own investigation of the extravagant postcolonial individual but also the ethical and affective implications of the individual in theoretical works by Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Immanuel Kant. In attempting to dismantle the communal perspective of particular global literatures, Extravagant Postcolonialism acknowledges the aesthetic trace of modernity and humanistic values that move beyond articulating an abstract idealization of extravagant individualism. His study convincingly analyzes the phenomenon as a substantive social structure embedded within a particular postcolonial consciousness. Majumdar’s Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire also considers the link between high modernism and Anglophone postcolonial literature. His analysis explores the conditions of literary banality antithetically, reading the boringness of texts as a subversive challenge to traditional concepts of literature as entertainment. Rather than reading the banal as an “aesthetic failure,” Majumdar’s investigation reconfigures mundane moments as a radical motif that “aestheticize[s] the relation between the imperial metropolis and the colonial periphery” in a way that creates a narrative energy that revitalizes modernity (4). He situates his argument in relation to his insightful political understanding of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and discusses modernism’s disposition for replicating the banal, without giving into the spectacular or transcendent. This, Majumdar argues, is particularly true of postcolonial authors, who radicalize banality...

New Griottes of the African Sahel: Intersectionalities and Women’s Narrative Authority in Sanou Bernadette Dao’s <i>La Dernière èpouse</i> & Aïcha Fofona’s <i>Mariage on Copie</i>

African women have played a central role in the development of oral literary traditions of countries of the African Sahel historically, yet very few have actually written works and had them published. Among the few who have recently emerged, some have brought new perspectives on historical and contemporary issues as well as innovative techniques in style and narrative structure. Two novels in particular by contemporary women writers from the African Sahel engage issues of women’s agency and the power of narrative authority to interrogate the structures of intersectionality that impact women’s lives: La Derniere epouse (The Last Wife), by Sanou Bernadette Dao of Burkina Faso, and Mariage on Copie (Images of Marriage), by A?cha Fofana of Mali. These works confront the discursive authority of male fictive texts of the post-colonial experience as their female characters seize la parole (the word) to remap representations of traditional male/female relationships.

On memory construction and fictionalization

As a response to Ashis Nandy's article about memory work, this article argues that memories are closely linked to recognition, identity and historical construction while closely connected with local discourse based on post-colonial experiences. In some cases, the construction of memory involves mythical images. The article also addresses the tension between history construction and fictionalization, trying to indicate that some forbidden memories, such as those about revolution, can be reconstructed in literary writing.

Supervision as Cultural Partnership

The term cultural supervision has been coined as part of a strategy that implicates supervision in the support and development of culturally appropriate therapeutic practice. In Aotearoa New Zealand particular focus has been given to supervision where the client is Māori and the practitioner is a member of the dominant Pākehā culture particularly, or of other non-Māori cultures. However, while the phrase cultural supervision has entered common professional parlance, the practice has had little research attention in counselling/psychotherapy in New Zealand. Cultural supervision appears to encompass a range of understandings, and there is no clear agreement about practice implications. It is unclear what alignment there is between aspirations, regulations, and practice. This article reports on an exploratory qualitative study that investigated how supervision might work in supporting culturally appropriate counselling practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study’s findings are presented as a multi-voiced dialogue. This arts-based representational practice enacts the uncertainties of post-colonial experience. Its intention is to make assumptions, ideas, and practices available for discussion. Its contribution is to join current dialogue about supervision and culture, and to raise further questions about how supervision and culturally appropriate practice come together.
 Whakarāpopotonga
 Kua whakakaupapahia te kīanga whakahaere tikanga-ā-iwi ki tētahi peka o tētahi rautaki hono whakahaere tikanga ki te tautoko, whakangungu haumanu tikanga-ā-iwi tika. I Aotearoa tōtika tonu te aronui atu ki ngā wā he Māori te kiritaki he Pākehā o te ahurea matua, o te hunga ehara rānei i te Māori te kaiwhakawaiwai. Heoi, ahakoa kua putaputa noa mai tēnei kīanga i waenga i ngā kōrerorero ngaio, kāre anō kia āta rangahauhia kia arotikahia rānei i roto i ngā mahi kaikōrero/kaimahi hinengaro i Aotearoa. Te āhua nei he maha ngā mātauranga e tāwharauhia ana e te mahi nei, ā, kāre he whakaarohanga mō ngā hua o te mahi. Kāre i te mārama he aha ngā here mai i ngā whāinga ki ngā here me te mahi. Ko tēnei tuhinga he pūrongo rapunga matai wheako kimi me pēhea e tika ai te whakahaere tikanga hei tautokohanga kaikōrero whakawaiwai tikanga-ā-iwi i Aotearoa. Ko ngā rangahautanga kei roto i te reo maha. Ko tōna tikanga he whakatau mahara, whakaaro, mahi whakawai hoki hai matapakihanga. Ko tāna koha ko te hono ki ngā whakawhitinga korero onamata e pā ana ki te whakahaere tikanga me te tikanga-ā-iwi, ā, ki te whakaara pātai titiro me pēhea e hono tahi ai te whakahaere tikanga me te tikanga-ā-iwi.

“And that is not how Jamaica is”: Cultural Creolization, Optimism, and National Identity in Kerry Young's <i>Pao</i>

Kerry Young's recent novel Pao dramatizes a Chinese Jamaican experience against the backdrop of 20th-century Jamaican history. My article considers the novel, and especially its protagonist, Yang Pao, alongside theories and critiques of creolization and creole nationalism in Jamaica. I argue that, while Pao's own political beliefs perpetuate the ideal of a creole Jamaica in which different cultural groups can peacefully coexist, Young complicates this point of view, relying on the novel's women characters to represent a darker side of the postcolonial experience that specifically touches the black Jamaican majority.

Re-visioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China

This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis repudiates previous Eurocentric narratives of global capitalism and locates China at the center of the world economy in the early modern period up to 1800. Third, China’s revolutionary legacy (what was called ‘Maoism’) and its current ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in official parlance are considered by New Leftist theorists as a viable alternative to capitalist modernity. Fourth, universal modernity as such is regarded as a social and political imperative by the opposing camp of Neo-Liberalists as modernity is still an ‘incomplete project’ in Chinese history. Overall, such debates are efforts to chart out a cultural and theoretical landscape that does not easily fit in existing models of Western cultural studies that are often based on the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the Anglophone and Francophone world.Global modernity refers to a moment of the breakdown of the hegemony of a Eurocentric modernity and the fragmentation into many cultural spheres of the very idea of the modern without any promise so far of how modernity might be reconstituted and some coherence restored to its claims.... On the other hand, Global Modernity as a concept is also intended to transcend the situation of which it is the product, as this very situation enables the possibility of re-envisioning modernity, rescuing it from entrapment in a vision of history dominated by Eurocentrism and imagining it differently. (Arif Dirlik,Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity)1

The Church: Towards a Common Vision

The Church: Towards a Common Vision John St-Helier Gibaut (bio) Keywords church, ecclesiology, ecumenism, World Council of Churches, renewal, Christian unity Part I. Toward Theological Convergence A. Introduction: North American Contexts My thanks to Professor Mitzi Budde for her invitation to present The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV).1 Presenting this particular text to a Canadian and American2 audience is especially important for me, because what I present here is the culmination of what I left Canada to do seven years ago. My sense of Canadian—if not North American—identity has been shaped by being out of this context in this time. As a Canadian at the World Council of Churches (WCC), I am constantly caught off guard by assumptions from my own context that call me to step back, to be mindful of the diverse ecumenical contexts from which we all come, and to name some ways that our particular region might be ahead of other parts of the world and have something to share,3 as well as other ways in which we might lag behind and have something to receive.4 Both Canada and the United States have their particular histories of living ecumenically, going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Great Awakenings are an American phenomenon. The First Amendment [End Page 216] of the U.S. Constitution, with its clear distinction between church and state, cannot be reduced to Enlightenment ideology. It was an American way of dealing with the colonial experience of divided churches by ensuring that no one church is “established,” leaving the others as disadvantaged “dissenters.”5 In Canada, the granting of religious liberties to Roman Catholics in the 1770’s6 was not recognized in Great Britain for another seventy years. This is not the place to rehearse the background of North American ecumenical contexts. I would simply like to underscore that our histories and our particular ecumenical struggles and achievements are different from the European experience of living with a divided Christianity, and they are distinct from other colonial and post-colonial experiences of Christian disunity, not to mention Middle Eastern, Slavic, and other contexts, which are even more diverse. The experiences of estranged churches in North America are different, depending on which side of the border one lives, and they differ in various regions of both countries. B. Introduction to Faith and Order Before I begin any presentation on the work of Faith and Order, I have found it worthwhile to explain the very language of “faith and order,” which can easily be misunderstood, especially in English-speaking contexts, particularly in North America, and even among the most ecumenically minded. I note that the Canadian Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission became the “Faith and Witness Commission.” The words “Director of Faith and Order” and “Commission on Faith and Order” for many people conjure up visions of theology police. At the end of 2007, when I left Saint Paul University, a pontifical university, a colleague asked me in all seriousness whether I was going to be the “new Cardinal Ratzinger of the WCC”! Faith and Order is something entirely different. It is not the Congregation [End Page 217] for the Doctrine of the Faith for the WCC; our Roman Catholic equivalent and major partner is the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Since the goal of the ecumenical movement is to recover the visible unity of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, there needs to be a space to discuss the issues that divided Christians and keep us apart. That is what Faith and Order has provided for over eighty years: a forum to dialogue about divisive issues of the “faith” and the “ordering” of the churches. By “faith” I mean doctrine: what we believe about God, the Trinity, the person of Jesus Christ, the Bible, salvation, the sacraments, ministries, or the nature of the church. By “order” I mean the structure of the church. How are churches ordered or organized? Is it the local congregation served by its minister of word and sacrament? Or, is it a diocese with a bishop? What is the relationship between and among the...

Peripheral eyes: Brazilians and India, 1947–61

AbstractThe post-Second World War era witnessed the need for new political forms to accommodate the aspirations for national identity of newly decolonized nations within the hegemonic structure of the Cold War. Although both Cold War historiography and postcolonial studies have analysed these phenomena, the place of Latin America in general and Brazil in particular remains fraught with conceptual difficulties, largely due to the very different (post)colonial experience of this region from the rest of the ‘Third World’. This article examines how three Brazilian intellectuals and diplomats observed India from its independence until the annexation of Portuguese India by the Indian Union in 1961. In exploring their peripheral gaze, it shows how Brazilian self-identification with the West, and particularly its complex relationship with the heritage of European colonialism, prevented a truly commensurable experience, despite a sense of commonality with India based on their peripheral position in the global political structure.

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers: Icons of Marginalization in Post World War II Narrative

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers: Icons of Marginalization in Post World War II Narrative

Cinephilia and the Unrepresentable in Miguel Gomes' Tabu (2012)

Beginning with a discussion of the development of a transnational approach in Film Studies, this article argues that Miguel Gomes' transnational and festival-award-winning film Tabu (2012) engages with Portugal's legacy of colonialism, which is still part of living memory, by adopting a self-conscious, cinephilic address. Just as Gomes deploys a strategic, transnational cinephilia in his self-presentation through interviews, so Tabu as a film text may also be analysed through cinephilia, in particular, through its characterization of a cinephile protagonist in its contemporary Part 1, and its redeployment of silent cinema and Hollywood films about Africa in its 1960s-set Part 2. While recognizing shared filmic references flatters the viewers' knowledge, Gomes simultaneously stresses their lack of knowledge by also gesturing towards the unrepresentable. As the world of the unnamed Portugese colony in Africa begins to self-destruct, the unrepresentable unborn child indicates a postcolonial experience that lies beyond the reach of Gomes' cinephilic world. The article concludes by returning to the scene that connects Parts 1 and 2, and arguing for the centrality of the character of Santa in acknowledging this unrepresentability.

Negotiating postcolonial legacies: shifting conservation narratives and residual colonial built heritage in Ireland

Where they evolve in contentious political contexts, conservation and heritage can be framed by competing priorities reflecting collective remembering, cultural politics and identities intertwined with the symbolic representation of the built environment. Drawing on postcolonial experiences in Ireland, this paper explores the shifting representations of built heritage over the post-independence era and the extent that a residual colonial legacy can perform a role in framing contemporary place-making processes. Empirically, we focus on representations emerging within contemporary ‘elite discourses’ - built heritage policy-makers, leading conservation practitioners and civil society conservation groups - to explore how they negotiate this postcolonial context. The research on which this article is based was partly funded by the Irish Research Council through the Graduate Research Education Programme.

Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance

Research Article| January 01 2015 Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance Madeleine Dobie Madeleine Dobie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2015) 106 (1-4): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Madeleine Dobie; Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance. Romanic Review 1 January 2015; 106 (1-4): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2015 The Trustees of Columbia University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Not like a native speaker: on languaging as a postcolonial experience

Note on Non-English SourcesAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Skin Tones-About Language, Postcoloniality, and Racialization1. Derrida's Legacy of the Monolingual2. Not Like a Native Speaker: The Postcolonial Scene of Languaging and the Proximity of the Xenophone3. Translator, Traitor Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)4. Thinking with Food, Writing off Center: The Postcolonial Work of Leung Ping-kwan and Ma Kwok-ming5. The Sounds and Scripts of a Hong Kong ChildhoodNotesIndex

IN SEARCH OF CONTEXTUAL AND HUMANISTIC SOUTHEAST ASIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

English literature studies in Indonesia has to undergo a paradigm shift, given the demographic change of users and providers of English, to say nothing of the growing interests in Asian literature written in and/or translated into English. Mindful of our postcolonial experiences in today's cultural and political context, the use of more literary pieces from Southeast Asian countries in English Literature studies is all the more important. This paper locates Southeast Asian literature within the development of English as a Lingua Franca. Characteristic of our postmodern age is the recognition of people as human; and, in this case, Asian people as individuals, multilingual and multicultural subjects. As such, reading and evaluating works from the region may help develop a deeper understanding when defining our own place in relation to other people. It is through engaging in contextual and humanistic literary experiences that we measure and value the connection between literature and life.

PROSA, RUANG, DAN KOTA PASCAKOLONIAL

Today, the studies on post-colonial urban space in relation with Indonesian modern prose can be said to be minimal. On the other hand, in the history of Indonesian literature, we are endowed with writers like Armijn Pane, Idrus, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Iwan Simatupang, Budi Darma etc., who consistently write prose with the background of the ex-colonial towns. Unfortunately, there is no enough studies of the encounter between those writers with the city as a representation of a post-colonial experience. This paper tried to track the integral relationship between Indonesian modern prose writers to the city by using the spatial space theory in relation to the study of post-colonial literature in Indonesia. This analysis used the spatial theory by Sara Upstone as the approach, especially regarding to space (spatial) city. Keywords: spatial, city, postcolonial.

PROSA, RUANG, DAN KOTA PASCAKOLONIAL

Today, the studies on post-colonial urban space in relation with Indonesian modern prose can be said to be minimal. On the other hand, in the history of Indonesian literature, we are endowed with writers like Armijn Pane, Idrus, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Iwan Simatupang, Budi Darma etc., who consistently write prose with the background of the ex-colonial towns. Unfortunately, there is no enough studies of the encounter between those writers with the city as a representation of a post-colonial experience. This paper tried to track the integral relationship between Indonesian modern prose writers to the city by using the spatial space theory in relation to the study of post-colonial literature in Indonesia. This analysis used the spatial theory by Sara Upstone as the approach, especially regarding to space (spatial) city. Keywords: spatial, city, postcolonial.