Postcolonial Writers Research Articles

REPRESENTATION OF THE OTHER IN WESTERN HISTORY: A POSTCOLONIAL READING

Much of the European discourse on the Other has been informed by canonical figures like Kant, Hegel, and Freud, who have misrepresented the non-European non-white with special emphasis on women who were believed to be generally inferior to men.This has urged postmodern and postcolonial writers like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and Luce Irigaray to counter those writers in order to rewrite the history and identity of women and the non-European. This paper traces the history of ideas regarding the representation of the Other and offers a postcolonial critique of theories advanced by Kant, Hegel, and Freud. Kant represented the Other as lacking judgment faculties whose taste and moral judgment cannot be compared to the wise European. Hegel excluded the Other from history and alleged that the only history is European since he believes that the Other is incapable of writing history. Finally, Freud portrayed the Other as savage and primitive whose mind resembles his neurotic patients. He also represented women’s sexuality as inferior to men. Such misrepresentations have resulted in a long history of dehumanization and prejudices towards the Other. This has triggered the emergence of the postcolonial discourse in order to balance the Othering process. For instance, Spivak attacked Kant for disempowering and excluding the non-Europeans from his Critique of Judgment.She also critiqued Hegel for creating Oriental stereotypes in his Philosophy of History. Hegel’s master/slave dialectic has been deconstructed by Franz Fanon, who argues that the black cannot attain self-recognition through the gaze of the white, since the black has always been portrayed as inferior in the white’s discourse. Irigaray challenged Freud by arguing that he lacks an understanding of female sexuality. Edward Said contradicted Freud’s ambivalent notion of the non-European. Such revisionist history aims at rewriting the Other’s image and identity.

Altering Time, Altering States: Contemplative Geopolitics in the South Asian Anglophone Novel

A high orientalist text, but one that influences many postcolonial writers, Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths” imagines a Chinese garden-text that tracks all courses of actual and possible events, making all timelines, both real and virtual, seem equally present and deeply connected. Versions of this enhanced, multi-dimensional temporal awareness appear in the work of several Asian and Asian diaspora writers as they grapple with cataclysmic historical moments, from WWII to contemporary violent outbursts, and consider counter-narratives, ways events might have been otherwise. Using Haruki Murakami’s fiction as a departure point for examining South Asian diaspora fiction writers Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, and Karan Mahajan, this paper explores factors that enable the presentation of enhanced time consciousness as linked to a mindfulness practice or that conversely predispose such apprehensions of deep temporal connectivity to become fleeting epiphanies, ones often tragically tied to global politics and globalizing technologies.

Revisiting the Elements of Postmodernism in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Postmodern literature is thought to be typically anti-traditional and anti-foundationalist. It can be said that the major body of postmodern literature is thought to have started from the 1950s onwards. The major postmodern literary features are metafiction, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, writerly text, hybridity, magical realism, foreshadowing, irony, parody, anti-novel, anti-hero, fabulation, surfiction, hyperreality, use of language games etc. The prominent themes in postmodern literature are such as crisis of identity, cultural hybridity, experiences of migrants and their feeling of alienation, the general feeling of rootlessness. Postmodern fiction also emphasizes the disbelief in God as well as the disbelief in the conventional notions of the unified or coherent individual. Salman Rushdie has been studied and researched as a postcolonial writer as there are obvious postcolonial themes in his novels. But we can also study him as a postmodern writer. The paper makes an attempt to discuss the postmodern literary concept of meaningless of life as prevalent in Rushdie’s Shame and to put forth Rushdie as a postmodern writer.

Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown a Postcolonial Representation of the Past India

Salman Rushdie is one of the most important postcolonial writers in English literature. Through his literary contributions, he ushers in a new era of postcolonial literature. Rushdie is a world-renowned novelist whose outstanding works have garnered him accolades, thrills, and controversy throughout his illustrious career. Several Indian authors, including Amitav Ghose and Rohinton Mistry, have been greatly influenced by his unquestionable creativity. As one of the world’s most controversial and provocative contemporary novelists, Salman Rushdie stands out. Postcolonial and postmodern writers like Gabriel Garca Márquez, Günther Grass, Milan Kundera, and Jorge Luis Borges were considered to be among his contemporaries during the 1980s and 1990s. Allegory, multiculturalism, magic realism and other postcolonial techniques are used in Rushdie’s works to create alternative views of the colonial situation in a postcolonial context.

Formulating a Translation Model for Postcolonial African Literature Through the Study of Selected Works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland and Ola Rotimi

Postcolonial theory focuses on addressing gaps that are encountered when dealing with literary works or contexts that are minor or peripheral. It explores ways in which dominated or colonized culture can adapt tools of the dominant discourse to fight against its political or cultural dominance. Postcolonial studies serve as a useful tool for translating texts from one language to another. One has to be conversant with the approaches used by postcolonial writers to be able to appreciate their texts and eventually translate them. This paper used the methodology of textual analysis to examine portions of the selected works of four postcolonial African writers; namely, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland and Ola Rotimi, to bring out key strategies by which these writers decolonized the minds of their African audience. The main decolonizing strategies discussed include adaptation, vernacularization and pidginization. Based on the findings from the analyses, the paper proposes some translation principles for dealing with postcolonial texts. The paper contributes not only to translation studies in Africa but also contributes to the decolonization of Christianity in Africa.

Post-colonial Feminist Representations in Coetzee’s Novels

As a Noble Laureate, John Maxwell Coetzee has been one of the most prominent post-colonial writers in feminist literature. This study reveals significant role of women characters in Coetzee’s novels with much attention to their representation in post-colonial Africa. This article carefully analyzes Coetzee’s selected novels; Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Foe (1986) Age of Iron (1990) and Disgrace (1999), thus, shedding light on the treatment of African women by the colonizers and how that knowledge will help propagate the message of equality and tolerance by eliminating the evils of injustices and inequality. This study will significantly contribute to a greater awareness of women in post-colonial literature.

Bilingualism in Pakistani Fiction: The Analysis of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali

This research aims to find code-switching occurrences in Twilight in Delhi written by Pakistani English postcolonial writer Ahmed Ali. He uses many Urdu terms and expressions in his narrative to keep alive Eastern culture and traditions that would otherwise lose their essence if translated into English. In this way, he reconstitutes English language in his work. The frequency of Urdu words is recorded, and the data obtained is analyzed on semantic, phonological and syntactic grounds. The writer also tries to experiment with the form and brings creativity, and in doing so, he applies English structure on Urdu terms and introduced a new vocabulary. The deliberate use of code-switching in the novel shows that language is no one’s property neither someone’s hegemony. Keywords: Bilingualism, Code-switching, Pakistani English, Post-colonialism

Fugitive Archives: Translation, Sea, and History in Indian Ocean Fiction

Abstract This article explores the representation of multilingual Indian Ocean pasts in novels by Amitav Ghosh and Abdulrazak Gurnah, two key contemporary postcolonial writers from the opposite shores of the ocean. It theorizes the historical impulse in the novels as anarchival drift, which refers to the self-conscious mode of rewriting the past that subjects the archive to the instability and fluidity of the sea. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2006) and Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) both tell stories of forced displacements in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean; both rewrite colonial archives in order to depict cross-cultural interactions, employing various self-reflexive textual strategies that draw attention to the linguistic and archival mediations operating in those encounters. This article examines these textual moments alongside the novels’ archival sources—specifically, nineteenth-century colonial dictionaries and Swahili travelogues—to argue that the self-reflexivity results from the multiplicity of linguistic registers on which these texts operate, making visible the translative processes imbricated in transoceanic historical forces. While both novels appeal to the linguistic aspects of cross-cultural interactions, the article traces the divergent ways in which the semantic drift among languages stage the materiality and historicity of trans-oceanic encounters.

Review of Displacement, Space, and Identity in the Postcolonial Novels of Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry and Manju Kapur

Purpose: This study focuses on the themes of displacement, space, and identity depicted in the post-colonial novels of Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, and Manju Kapur. Post-colonial writings, particularly novels, deal with two major issues concerning the ‘modern people’ - displacement and search for identity. This study tries to analyze the treatment of these themes in the selected novels of the authors selected for the study. Design/Methodology/Approach: For the study, many research articles, books, and research theses have been reviewed. Previous studies on similar lines have been thoroughly read and reviewed to get a comprehensive idea of the work that has been done so far. Both offline and online resources have been consulted for the study. An exploratory analytical discussion approach of research methodology is adopted to carry on the study. Finding/Result: After reading and reviewing the resources available on the topic selected for the study, it has been found that the theme of displacement, space and search for identity has been a recurrent theme in the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, and Manju Kapur. These issues have been dealt with in the novels of these writers either explicitly or as an underlying theme. Originality/Value: The study proposed to be conducted will be original since the study dwells mainly on displacement it focuses on space in the formation of identity. Space excludes and includes individuals and communities. The analysis on displacement in connection with space and identity in the writings of the diasporic writers and writings on diaspora sheds a light on the aspects of the formation of identities in the postcolonial scenario. Paper Type: Review Article

A Postcolonial Feminist Appraisal of Pakistani English Literature

This research explores women’s position in Pakistani society. Women are considered an interesting topic for researchers. The following research will show women’s empowerment in male-dominant backgrounds. This research offers a close analysis of women’s presentations by Pakistani English writers. This research is qualitative in nature. It provides a detailed account of information about postcolonial feminism and feminist writers of contemporary times. Portraiture of women is clear in the works of Pakistani English writers. The whole task will be accomplished with the impact of Colonialism. Pakistani modem writers have analyzed and discussed different issues related to women by portraying female characters in their works. Pakistani feminism is considered a part of Post Colonial fiction. Writers have introduced multiple dimensions of feminism. The main purpose of this research is to highlight different aspects which were caused by feminism. The study presents a detailed examination of females adjustment and its effect with great respect to Post Colonialism.

Philip Dickinson, Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 184 pp.

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Fabricated Intellectual Hegemony of the Colonizers: A Comparative Analysis of Post-colonial texts

The purpose of the research is to analyze the postcolonial texts from the perspective of “Orientalism” with its aspect of “Fabricated Intellectual Hegemony”. It is a process in which the Orients are constructed, represented, and described by Europe as the corporative institution. It deals with the Orient by making statements about the Orient, authorizing the views about it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it. In “Orientalism” the binaries are set to maintain power over the colonized. “Strategic Location” is about the position of the writer in the novel and “Strategic Formation” deals with the relation of postcolonial texts with one another. The article applies Edward Said’s theory of “Orientalism” (2003)1 to three novels by different authors in order to highlight the fact how “Orientalism” exploits the colonized by fabricating reality. This study applied a qualitative approach with Catherine Belsey’s method of thematic content analysis with the conceptual framework of “Orientalism” in a Postcolonial context. The study is significant and unique because it showed a comparative analysis of the postcolonial writers and texts as well.

Surviving Subjectivities: Negotiating Subaltern Agency in South Asian Novel

This paper critically analyses The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Brick Lane by Monica Ali with Spivak’s work as literary practice. This enabled the understanding of both the problems and possibilities that Spivak’s work holds while the paper also extends and repositions South Asian women’s writing. While interrogating the subaltern agency and subjectivity within the dominant ideological paradigms, the paper engages with the politicized readings of the South Asian novel written by women which is brought into dialogue with attention to literary form. This research also highlights the need for further investigation of literary forms used by postcolonial women writers to develop a deeper understanding of the interconnections between realist and postmodern styles and the representations of female experience. The different conclusions of the chosen novels suggest diversity and complexity not only in methods and strategies of representing women but also in degrees of agency, discrimination, oppression, and choice of action among the leading female characters. This results in interpretive diversity and variety in the texts which resist simple conclusions about homogenous subaltern oppression which the readers make. Through characters like Ali’s Nazneen, Roy’s Ammu, and Rahel, the selected authors succeed in creating complex models of women with heterogeneous experiences, where a woman is modern and traditional, marginalized and resistant, silent and resilient. Postcolonial women writers depict female characters that showcase the social problems as well as their solutions.

A Study of Post-colonial Issues in the Novel Exist West by Mohsin Hamid

In the colonial era, the oppressed were labeled with different names by the oppressor and mostly, their identity was snatched. Their liberty was diminished, they were, criticized, and they were put under different barriers including language, culture, religion, and many others. And most of the people were manipulated. The present study tries to explore the postcolonial issues in modern novel Exit West. The present research uses textual analysis as a method of data analysis. For this purpose, selected passages have been analyzed for finding the postcolonial issues. In this study, post-colonialism has been used as a general framework. Different postcolonial writers include Bhabha’s (1994) mimicry, ambivalence, and Hybridity, and Edward Said’s (1995) stereotyping, otherness, and representation, which have been used. These issues are the issues of the countries once controlled by the oppressors that compel the protagonists to suffer.

(Re)Shaping The Self: The Construction of Identity in Things Fall Apart

Postcolonialism incorporates all cultures affected by colonialism from the beginning of colonization to the present day. Aiming to express the ways the colonizer shapes society, postcolonial writers frequently reverse the colonial discourse and maintain that colonized countries have a national identity. In this respect, prominent Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe indicates the effects of colonization on both cultural and individual levels in his works. Besides, he highlights the postcolonial subject in a manner that not only the colonizers but also the colonized find themselves in a situation of ambivalence. The purpose of this study is to present the ways in which the characters in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are first shaped by the colonizer and later reshaped by the colonized counterpart. The process the characters undergo to achieve integration in society and whether they are liberated is discussed with references to the novel.

Women, Violence, and Magical Realism in the Fiction of Mohammed Hanif

Women, Violence, and Magical Realism in the Fiction of Mohammed Hanif Pooja Sancheti By and large, most discussions of magical realism in South Asian English fiction appear to start and end with Salman Rushdie’s celebrated Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children. This is despite Homi Bhabha’s oft-quoted proclamation that magical realism is the most favourable/favoured literary mode for/of postcolonial writers (7). It is beyond the scope of this study to go into any depth as to why this has been the state of literary affairs in South Asian Anglophone fiction. Suffice it to say that magical realism-understood as a literary mode arising from Latin America and eventually gaining traction with writers located in different parts of the world, did not develop deep roots in South Asia for political, historical, and aesthetic reasons. Except for a few-and sometimes contentious-cases, such as some works of Begum Rokkeya, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra, O.V. Vijayan, and others, magical realism is mostly identified with Rushdie’s writing and remains a largely untouched literary mode in contemporary South Asian Anglophone fiction.1 Given this spotty history, Pakistani Anglophone author Mohammed Hanif’s novels are anomalies: they are magical realist and their literary lineage can be traced back to commonly accepted features of the genre; at the same time, these novels also display a mistrust of both the realist and the magical narrative strands, setting them apart from more conventional examples of magical realism. Hanif’s narratives adapt magical realism in very specific ways to articulate the experiences of several oppressed communities within modern Pakistan, yet offer neither hope or succour. His three novels to date-A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2009; hereafter cited as CEM), Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011; hereafter cited as OLAB), and Red Birds (2018)-are certainly magical realist in their use of the supernatural and abnormal alongside the historically ‘real’ events and places. The identities, histories, and socio-cultural makeup of the characters bring to life very local worlds, while oppression [End Page 136] and violence in the wake of dictatorships and religious fundamentalism make their appeal immediately global. However, the strands or elements of magic in CEM and OLAB are developed in a manner distinct from the majority of magical realist novels. To substantiate this claim, it would be useful to briefly summarize the key narrative and politico-ethical features of magical realism. While magical realism, as the name suggests, operates on the binary of the realist and the magical, the two exist as “natural” extensions of each other, as “two codes that [are] interwound, […] in a tight choreography of antitheses” (Wilson 212). Neither code is hierarchically superior or more credible to the other, which implies that magical realism questions the limits of realism, but is also an extension of the articulation of the experience of reality itself. It works by bringing the conventionally “abnormal” into the very folds that have declared it abnormal, so that it appears as though these abnormal events “had always already been there; their abnormality normalized from the moment that their magical realist worlds were imagined” (220). Just as realism would not need to justify itself, magic-the unnatural or supernatural-does not justify its presence. Magic, like realism, is imbued in communities and/or landscapes, and cannot be effected by magicians or entertainers, nor is it a means of (fantastic) escape from the banality or brutality of the realist world within which it creates and operates. Anne Hegerfeldt argues that magical realism is not a new literary or cognitive technique; rather, it is simply “tracing the various strategies by which individuals and communities try-and always have tried-to make sense of the world” (64). There is a crucial ethical and political dimension embedded in this argument. It opposes the singular, Western, rationality-heavy mode of channelling experiential truth and narrativization, and it is almost always “a mode of writing that responds to a particular cultural situation (marginalisation, multiculturalism, displacement, and so forth)” (Bényei 150). Colonial and official historiography often tend to discredit local events, petit-histoires, and belief systems for more hegemonically normative modes of remembering and telling. Magical realism is a way...

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity

This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, I argue that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. I contend further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.

Politics and poetics of witnessing: Choman Hardi and Nazand Begikhani’s poetry of witness in English

ABSTRACT This study is a reading of selected poems of Choman Hardi and Nazand Begikhani—two Kurdish-Iraqi poets—from their collections of poetry in English. It approaches these poems by classifying them as ‘poetry of witness’, a term coined by Carolyn Forché for the poetry that is written after an experience of extremity or in response to an experience of extremity. Drawing on Forché’s (1993; 2011; 2014) theory of poetry of witness as well as Elleke Boehmer’s (2018) position on poetics of trauma and terror in postcolonial writings, this study attempts to investigate both the politics and poetics of witnessing in Hardi and Begikhani’s poetry in English and explores why and how these two poets have borne witness to their experiences and Kurdish traumatic history in a new language and for a new reader. The analysis this study provides will also reveal how poetry bears witness and how it acts as testimony; it identifies the characteristics and literary/aesthetic properties of poetry that make it a particularly powerful means of testimony, expression, and communication.

Elements of ontological magical realism in Ibi Zoboy's American Street

The article explores the novel American Street by contemporary US writer of Haitian origin Ibi Zoboy from the perspective of using the technique of magical realism. The novel embraces magic, faith in spirits, otherworldly forces as well as strategies of realism. The narrative mode of magic realism dominates in postcolonial writings as well as in fictional works that describe migration experience. The development of magical realism in different national traditions caused its variety and diverse forms of expression. Therefore, in this paper, the term magic realism or marvelous realism is considered from different theoretical perspectives. The term and the phenomenon it denotes started its history from the Weimar Republic modernist movement when German art critic Franz Roh coined the term. Then, in 1955 the narrative mode of magic realism became popular in Latin America. Alejo Carpentier, Angel Flores underlined that it is different from its European counterpart as its main task is to express the unique and extraordinary reality of Latin America. They argued that magic and magical elements are derived from the 'supernatural' elements of 'local' or 'indigenous' myths, religions and cultures. Moreover, magical realism relies upon the presentation of the imagined or magical as if they were real.The article focuses on how these different definitions are related and discussed by various theoreticians. It is concluded that the most relevant is Echevarría’s typology. He differentiated two kinds of magical realism: the ontological and the epistemological. Ontological magical realism has as its material beliefs or practices from the cultural context in which the text is set.The author considers the notion of ontological magical realism to analyse Ibi Zoboy’s novel American Street, in which magical beliefs and rituals help the main character survive in a difficult situation. It is emphasized that the religious component is an important part of migration fictional discourse.

Materiality, Postcoloniality, and the Phenomenology of Mental Health

Abstract This article approaches mental health of postcolonial bodies through the lens of colonial gender politics. Using postcolonial feminist writings on Hindu mythology as a starting point, I discuss how trauma has been imbibed into women’s bodies through concepts such as pativrata. This problematises our contemporary, uncritical understandings of the mind/body dichotomy posited by popular discourses on yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness techniques. Then, moving on to feminist writings on Indian indentured labour history and Bahujan communities, this article asserts that these traumas have continued throughout history, imbibing a mind/ body dichotomy textured by various forms of violence. I argue that these histories can neither be ignored nor completely overcome, and for a deeper engagement in mental health that is contextualised within these histories.