Postcolonial Writers Research Articles

Alien Encounters in Twentieth-Century Arabic Science Fiction: Talib Imran’s Ashbah as a Case Study

This essay surveys alien encounters in 20th-century Arabic Science Fiction (ASF). It points out that two characteristics prevail: first, aliens exclusively encounter Arabs; second, aliens are predominantly superior but indifferent to inferior humans. While the first characteristic is understandable, the second one is peculiar; it is odd that a genre written by colonized people and has been described as “emphatically postcolonial” dismisses the power struggle embedded in the superior colonizer-inferior colonized dichotomy. The author of the essay argues that understanding the difference between Jaques Lacan’s concepts of big Other and small other within an Arab postcolonial context allows us to understand this peculiarity better. While these two concepts normally occupy distinct orders in the psyche, they overlap in the collective postcolonial Arabic one. As a result, Arab postcolonial writers are more nuanced in their approach to the colonizer-colonized dichotomy in their works. The author exemplifies this in Talib Imran’s short story Ashbah. Understanding the perception of other in ASF significantly enhances our understanding of postcolonial literature. It also allows us to appreciate the diverse approaches postcolonial writers employ in their endeavors toward decolonization.

The Postcolonial Unconscious in North African Migrant Fiction

The impact of the postcolonial unconscious on North African migrant fiction has been extensively explored and revealed through both theoretical frameworks and literary practices throughout the postcolonial era. Scholars and writers alike have delved into how the psychological remnants of colonialism continue to influence the narratives, themes, and character development in this body of work. This ongoing examination highlights the deep-seated cultural and psychological legacies that shape the identities and experiences of both individuals and communities within North African migrant literature. As a reflection of the long-lasting consequences of colonial history on people and society, North African migrant writers, like other postcolonial writers worldwide, tackle themes of identity, displacement, and post-colonialism. Theorists like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Derrida have theorized that the unconscious influences language and subject creation, which in turn shapes their narratives. This analysis uses Fanon’s concept of the postcolonial unconscious, which explores the psychological effects of colonialism, such as internalized trauma and cultural hybridity, as a major framework. This study examines how postcolonial unconscious and related themes appear in the writing of North African writers who have immigrated to Europe and the USA, emphasizing the psychological and cultural effects of colonization on both individuals and groups. In addition to offering in-depth examinations of some texts, the paper presents a comprehensive view of the importance of postcolonial literary criticism in comprehending the complexities of postcolonial societies.

Implicated Subjects in Leila Slimani’s Lullaby: A Transnational Feminist Approach

Postcolonialism has been criticized for its binary oppositions, dichotomy, and othering. However, recent postcolonial writers and novelists developed new projects such as Afropolitanism and transnational feminism which have opened new insights and perspectives into the postcolonial disputes and agendas. Leila Slimani’s Lullaby (2018) is a novel that deals with feminist issues par excellence. This study delves into the interconnectedness between transnational feminism and “the Implicate Subjects,” as an approach, to examine the complexity of feminist issues in the novel. The paper tries to unravel how social and cultural norms infiltrate and entangle with discrimination, gender roles, power dynamics, and social-economic inequality that are practiced at the small-scale and large-scale in our contemporary societies. Besides, the intersection between Slimani’s transnational feminism and Rothberg’s Implicated Subjects offers new readings and insights, and bridges connections between Western and non-Western feminism which needs global solidarity and cross-border entanglement.

Socio-Cultural Dynamics and Women’s Identity in Post-Colonial Kenya: An Interrogation of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's Coming to Birth and the Present Moment

Published two decades after Kenya's independence, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's Coming to Birth and The Present Moment are post-colonial writings that explore the struggle for both national and personal identity. Through the eyes of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, the mentioned texts explore the construction of women's identity through social and cultural dynamics. Leaning on the Feminist Theory that seeks to provide an understanding of the women's and girls' situations, roles and responsibilities in the societies they live in, within the cultural and societal dynamics and expectations, this paper seeks to analyze the social and cultural dynamics in the post-colonial societies the two texts are set in, in relation to the individual identity of the female characters. The paper has the objective of interrogating how the social and cultural dynamics work to shape the identity of female characters. Consequently, this paper concludes that the identity of the female characters in Coming to Birth and The Present Moment is shaped by societal social and cultural dynamics and norms. The female characters, through self-autonomy and active participation in societal aspects, reassert themselves in a bid to reconstruct and accord themselves a new image, different from that which had been shaped and distorted, given the patriarchal socio-cultural dynamics. The paper concludes that the female characters in Coming to Birth and The Present Moment remain resolute to eventually egress from the subjective societal demands and dictates to attain cultural and social independence

Emerging Evils in Post-Colonies

The colonial and postcolonial are two different ideological eras in the colonized peoples’ history, which are taken up by post-colonial literature. Without rehashing the ex-colonized beings’ painful past from a rebellious and revanchist perspective, postcolonial writers’ literary projects aimed at revitalizing the ex-colonized beings’ experience in the form of collective memory. In such a creative art, the narrative devices in force decry retrograde and dehumanizing practices. In terms of vision, the call for improving the relationship between ex-colonizers and ex-colonized subjects is highly prescribed. All neocolonial policies and related influences are systematically proscribed, thus favouring the creation of a global village free from inequalities, exclusions, and other injustices. In essence, the poetization of “Bournehills” in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and “Kosawa” in How Beautiful We Were is part of those narrative techniques. Today, in a disguised form, Westerners, with their seducing offers or projects, corrupt tiny groups of undeveloped people won over to their cause and keep the masses in misery. In this context of political paradigm shift and sociocultural mutation, the study of the forms of life in the post-colonies remains a challenge. This helps to disclose on the one hand how the former colonial maintains their ex-colonies in perpetual dependence and on the other hand, highlight how the ex-colonized beings or heirs react and overcome neo-colonial policies. To account for the features of neo-colonialism, the use of Perussetian semiotic approach will be helpful. This will contribute to looking into the prevailing forms of life in both fictional imaginaries. Two points of interest will be scrutinized: “post-colonial order features” and “ex-colonized beings’ resilience”

Blogs, tweets, and Insta: Digital paratexts in the postcolonial cultural industry

Exploring the work of Hanif Kureishi, Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, and nayyirah waheed, this essay examines digital parataxis in the work of South Asian and Black diaspora writers. These writers create content on social media to engage audiences in complex ways, not exclusively motivated by marketing and literary celebrity. The social media content they produce are best understood as digital paratexts that become new, essential texts of their oeuvres and identities, irreducible to market logics and creating inroads with audiences in and beyond the postcolonial cultural industry. Through their work, this essay offers a framework for understanding the digital paratexts that postcolonial writers are producing as an integral part of world literature.

EVOLUTION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN INDIAN WRITING THROUGH THE POSTCOLONIAL LENS

English as a language has undergone many fundamental and linguistic changes over the ages. From Old English, or Anglo-Saxon that was spoken in England and Scotland in the early Middle ages, to the Middle English, which underwent a lot of changes after the Norman conquest until the late fifteenth century. English saw many changes during the Renaissance all through to the modernist period to finally become what it is today. English, consequently, emerged as a language that is ever-changing in nature, a language that adapts and accommodates all. One such evolution in the language can be seen through the postcolonial experience of the former British colonies. The adoption of English in India, like other colonies, was a result of the Raj. Indian writing in English emerged as an honest enterprise that has turned out to be a new form of Indian culture and voice that has been adopted and adapted by the native people. Indian writers- poets, novelist, essayists and dramatists, have been making great contributions to world literature while gaining immense recognition and fame. It has achieved independent stature in world literature. Subsequently, the use of English became essential for postcolonial writers as it works towards the enlightenment of both the colonizer and the colonized about the ‘Self and the ‘Other’. This paper attempts to highlight the evolution of the English language by navigating through the postcolonial narrative of writers who have not only adopted the language but also have changed it

Re-Fashioning Femininity and Motherhood in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the postcolonial writers who has made her literary contribution by introducing Nigerian culture to her readers in English. This paper aims to present a re-fashioned postcolonial perspective on the understanding of femininity and motherhood in Nigerian culture and to demonstrate how the perception of these concepts has evolved over generations as illustrated by the mother-daughter relationship in Adichie’s “Zikora: A Short Story” (2020). “Zikora” deals with various issues directly related to the situation of Nigerian women, such as single motherhood, polygamy, sexism and the preference for male children. The article draws on African feminism to explore womanhood as an identity and to emphasise the role that contact with a foreign culture plays in women's self-determination and development as individuals. In the story, the eponymous character is a single woman whose expected child is not wanted by her father. In the final stages of labour, Zikora reflects on her mother's relationship with her father and how she had to stay in the polygamous marriage just because she did not bear her husband a son. This study also shows that “Zikora: A Short Story” is a boldly written story that draws attention to the many injustices faced by Nigerian women in a patriarchal society.

I, Too, Am John Clare: Becoming a new kind of postcolonial writer

I, Too, Am John Clare: Becoming a new kind of postcolonial writer

Role Reversals and Permeable Bodies in the Modern Robinsonade: From Postcolonialism to Ecocriticism

This essay argues that the particular lens of Bakhtinian body theory as developed for the Robinsonade by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower will help to shed light on a process observable over the past fifty years, in which colonial and postcolonial authors first embraced and then quickly abandoned the technique of role reversal in drafting their castaway stories. Enamoured of its comedic potential, Adrian Mitchell wrote Man Friday (1973). Derek Walcott was somewhat more circumspect in his Pantomime (1978), based on the realisation that role reversal demands the ascription of univocal roles and identities, something he did not see in evidence in the creolised world of the Caribbean. Later colonial and postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Patrick Chamoiseau were then at pains to avoid questions of identity altogether, making epistemology and discourse their preferred topics. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the clichéd identities formerly applied to Indigenous peoples (physical strength, close connection to nature) could be brought to bear on the idea of nature itself, thus making animal Robinsonades such as Life of Pi (2001) and The Red Turtle (2016) tremendous successes that could forgo the messiness of human affairs and simply champion the everlasting superiority of nature over civilisation as an expression of contemporary environmental preoccupations.

Negotiating Linguistic Boundaries: Language Appropriation in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

The current study attempts to investigate the language-appropriation strategies in post-colonial Afghan-American authors particularly in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. Appropriation is the act of adopting another culture and language by modifying it to your own goals and requirements. This method is generally used by post-colonial writers who appropriate English in their literary works due to resistance or/and necessity. During the colonization, the colonizer suppressed all other native languages. They employed the English language as a tool to exercise control in establishing a system of authority based on linguistic dominance. Nevertheless, the writers of the post-colonial era have stood against this dominant force of colonial language and undermined it by implementing different strategies into their own social and cultural context. Various language appropriation techniques are used to investigate the data from this research as recommended by Kachru (1983) and Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin (2002). Findings from the investigation revealed that the language appropriation techniques of glossing, untranslated words, code-switching, lexical innovation, rhetorical and functional styles, translation equivalence, and contextual redefinition have been employed in the text. Among them, glossing, untranslated words, and code-switching are utilized frequently. The strategy of interlanguage has not been utilized by the author in the novel. The study contributes to broader discussions on language appropriation, cultural representation, and decolonization in contemporary literary discourse.

“Where Everything Starts Unraveling:” Sensibility, Rupture and Possibilities in V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds

V.S. Naipaul is one of the widely read postcolonial writers. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, had roots in India, migrated to England for higher studies and took British citizenship. He died as a British citizen in 2018. His writings distinguish themselves in having a wider coverage of the postcolonial world, like the trajectory of his life, and accordingly larger experience with the problems of this world. In the same line, he has a world readership. However, the greater part of this readership sees him as a colonial and offensive writer rather than voicing their issues and suggesting solutions to them. However, the discourse of Naipaul, as it evolves in the texts like Half a Life and Magic Seeds, being explored in this paper, is quite different and tends to have a counter-discourse to such views; it is neither colonial nor offensive. It can be seen pointing to larger future possibilities beyond the crisis of the postcolonial world and this can be understood in the light of the terms like historical sensibility, mimicry, rupture and bildungsroman.

Colonial Resistance and Cultural Revival: Insights from African Postcolonial Writings

The impact of colonization on native cultural life, modernization, and anticolonial nationalism led African writers to reflect on colonial encounters and their effects on social, economic, and cultural aspects. They felt tension between traditional and colonial values, seeking to re-discover cultural roots. Through a critical evaluation of the significant works by key African postcolonial writers such as Cyprian Ekwensi, D. O. Fagunwa, J. P. Clark, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, this article seeks to explore how these African authors have dealt with the issue of colonial encounter in their writings. The focus is also on highlighting how these African authors have voiced their opposition to colonial legacies and have actively engaged in the resuscitation and celebration of local customs and cultural heritage through their writings in the postcolonial era. This research highlights the significant role that literature has in creating and expressing postcolonial African consciousness by analysing topics such as resistance, identity, tradition, and cultural pride. The study also examines how these literary contributions have actively questioned and dismantled colonial narratives, creating an opportunity for the genuine voices of African nations to emerge and thrive.

Construction, Deconstruction, and the Question of Authorship in Magical Realist Narratives

Colonial discourse in particular has constructed fixed frames and grids in which to place and separate individuals according to their class, race, gender, culture, nationality and ethnic models of unified and stereotypical representation of otherness and difference which postcolonial writers challenge. Writers from across the globe have adopted and adapted magical realism to fit their own cultures and within their own frame of reference. As a dominant literary mode, it can be considered as a decolonizing agent in a postmodern context. What the narrative mode offers is a way to discuss alternative approaches to reality to that of Western philosophy, expressed in contemporary fiction. Specifically, this paper argues how magical realism is positioned in relation to the two contrasting operations of construction and deconstruction. What is its capacity to affect either or both of these outcomes? A prominent view has developed which understands the mode as one that structures an exclusively deconstructive narratology. I explore the narratives of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirit, Tony Morrison’s Beloved and Hashem Garaibeh’s The Cat Who Taught Me How To Fly that reiterate realist narrative conventions subversively to critique the effects of colonialism as a decolonizing device in the contemporary literary scholarship. This study utilizes the ideas from Stephen Slemon’s “resistance to colonialism,” Theo D’haen’s “decenter privileged centers,”, Wendy B. Faris’s “Questioning the colonial subjugation,” and Christopher Warnes’s ‘deconstructive notions of subjectivity” and “recover and affirm identities.” Thus, the narratives in opposition to the notion of absolute history emphasize the possibility of simultaneous existence of multiple truths and plural meanings.

Precarious Migrancy, Community, and Resilience in Debendranath Acharya’s <i>Jangam </i>

Literary narrative provides a new perspective of looking at the historical past, often questioning the credibility of representation. Interrogating what Hayden White calls history’s tropic prefiguration, the prominence given to key historical figures, the erasure of subaltern individuals or communities, literature foregrounds the role of narrative in constructing the way one understands the world, meaning, and truth. A postcolonial writer, in their critical re-interpretation of the historical archive, creates a hybrid text that combines historical evidences and imaginative reconstructions, and historical as well as invented characters. With this interplay, history is stripped of its objective quality. This article seeks to explore how Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam presents the precarious condition of the migrant Burmese Indian peasants during World War II and the manner in which they establish a community during their historically forgotten long march to Assam. What Acharya attempts to reconcile in Jangam are the “analytical” histories through utilising the rational categories of modern historical thought and the “affective” histories which account for the plural ways of being-in-the-world.

Conflict as a Narrative Tool in Postcolonial Writing - The case of Margaret Mascarenhas’ novel ‘Skin’

This study investigates the significance of conflict in Margaret Mascarenhas' novel ‘Skin’ as a literary tool, using Robert Stanton's notions of internal and external conflict. The primary goal is to investigate how conflict progresses the narrative and creates thematic discourse in the text. Internal conflicts are caused by characters' inner struggles with opposing emotions, impulses, and ethical dilemmas, whilst external conflicts are caused by fights with nature or supernatural factors. This study underlines the centrality of conflict in literature, impacting character development, narrative advancement, and thematic exploration. It offers light on the complexity of Goan literature, identity formation, and the interplay between colonial and postcolonial forces, by merging postcolonial concepts and conflict analysis, highlighting the critical role of conflict as a catalyst for narrative development.

Nabeul … Taroudant . El Jadida . . Tangier

Beckett’s knowledge of the history of imperialism has left abundant traces. Irish colonial history in particular provides a fertile ground for allusions and residual echoes in many of his texts, and this facet of his writing has received close attention. His alertness to the history of colonial conquest, exploitation and oppression is evident on the peripheries of his bilingual oeuvre too – notably, in his translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology and Octavio Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry, and in minute alterations to some of his manuscripts revealing a careful reflection on the historical and political weight of words. Charting Beckett’s exposure and responses to the history of decolonization in its French and francophone contexts, however, has proved more challenging, owing to the difficulties posed by the work’s multiple cultural and linguistic positionalities, which are often treated as matters of secondary importance. This essay attempts to destabilize and expand the coordinates commonly used when thinking about Beckett as a postcolonial writer, by considering his relation to the postcolony through the prism of his long stays in the Maghreb between 1969 and the early 1980s. Retracing Beckett’s steps in Tunisia and Morocco, I delineate postcolonial and neocolonial imaginaries around Beckett’s creative process that are more challenging and uncomfortable than the evidence previously scrutinized elsewhere, and I pay particular attention to the awkward sense of colonial presence underlying marginal texts such as his Tangier mirlitonnades. The extended periods Beckett spent in Tangier proved immensely generative for him; here, I examine his relation to Tangier in light of the city’s colonial history as an International Zone and a much-fetishized haven for expatriate Anglo-American writers, offering a portrait of Beckett that conveys his simultaneous involvement and non-involvement with his surroundings.

Identifying National Identities in Jabulani Mngadi’s Inaugural Novel, Imiyalezo

This article aims to discuss national identities as depicted by Mngadi in his debut novel, Imiyalezo (1978). Affirming du Bois’ (1903) notion of the double consciousness and Anderson’s (1983) concept of ‘imagined communities’, the article contends that the national identities are not only a depiction of the idealised past but also the author’s wrestling with the present. Just like people generally remember the good old days when they face the bad new ones, these national identities are essentially hybrid in nature, representing both the past and the present. Rooted in the backdrop of the postcolonial theory and based on the textual approach of the qualitative research method, this article asserts that Mngadi is a postcolonial writer, he ‘writes back’, rights the wrongs of the past, as he attempts to reassert the somehow lost and threatened identities of his nation and in the process speaks on behalf of the subaltern. The article provides a deep understanding of identity issues in South Africa’s post-independence epoch, with reference to Mngadi’s debut novel, and locates the significance of this novel during colonial oppression and in post-independence.

Dublin 1904: Conflict in ‘The Dead’

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the role of futurity and hope in memory studies. This paper contributes to this conversation by examining futurity in a city marked by colonial conflict in the context of “The Dead”, the final short story from Dubliners by James Joyce. Drawing on discursive analysis, I argue that the postcolonial writer can rewrite the city, ripe for a new and unknown future. To support this argument, I analyze layers of the colonized urban space. Specifically, I look at the Wellington monument and the statue of Daniel O’Connell. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that futurity is an ambiguous concept capable of holding all possible iterations of the future after conflict. This paper contributes to ongoing debates about surpassing the current focus within memory studies on traumatic memories by drawing on research on hope, as it is lifeaffirming and inherently futureoriented, by Ann Rigney, and David P. Rando. In addition, it challenges conventional readings of conflict and trauma by extending hope to the dead. Thus, it exhibits how death helps to conceptualize an unknown future.

HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

ABSTRACTHistorians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti‐colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present‐day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti‐immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.