Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context (review) (original) (raw)

Towards Understanding the Patterns of Narratives: A Postcolonial Perspective

Scholar Critic , 2019

Towards Understanding the Patterns of Narratives : A Postcolonial Perspective Narratives make literature an everlasting source of inspiration from which flows the force of life which reverberates and echoes the songs of freedom and voice for liberation. Letting the narratives disnarrate would be an injustice in the context wherein conscience is suppressed, voice muffled and words buried. Silence is guilt and fearless speech has become a basic courage. One of great roles that literature plays in a democratic set up is that it reserves the force and energy to stand up and speak to the power the truth that has to be told without fear or favour. This is where Narratives assume greater significance not just in literary sense of the term alone but also in political sense. Hence, in this paper an attempt has been made to reconstruct the key concept of identity in postmodern context in order to understand how ‘identity’ as a concept evolves and how that evolution is reflected in the pages of literature. And in the second part of the paper , a dialectical discourse is initiated to argue the need for having multiple narratives in order to understand and encourage the process of identity reconstruction in postcolonial contexts.

REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE PEOPLE IN SHORT STORIES A POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

The objectives of this research are to describe the representation of native people in “The Man Who Would Be King” by Rudyard Kipling, “The Revenge of Her Race” by Mary Beaumont, and “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad and to find the reflection of colonialism based on the representation of native in the short stories. This research uses Postcolonial studies as approach and applies Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics as the methodology. This research is classified as qualitative research. The data are divided into main data and secondary data. Three short stories written by different authors are used as the main data. They are “The Man Who Would Be King” by Rudyard Kipling, “The Revenge of Her Race” by Mary Beaumont, and “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad. The first two stories are taken from anthology Stories by English Author: Orient (1902) published by Project Gutenberg. The last short story is taken from anthology entitled Tale of Unrest (1888) published by Free Classic e-book. The secondary data are taken from other sources related to this research, both printed and online resources. The three short stories analyzed in this study contain the representation of native people. The authors construct two contradictory places to show the white men’s superiority to the native people. The native people are presented as a primitive race while the white people pictured as a civilized race. This representation is not accurate because the authors only have partial knowledge of the native people. The native people are placed as second class in class division. The ambivalence occurs within the native people both negative and positive. The ambivalence in “The Man Would Be King” and “The Revenge of Her Race” are negative while it has positive atmosphere in “An Outpost of Progress”. Keywords: British short story, Postcolonial, Hermeneutics

Touching the future: nation and narration in some contemporary Canadian fictions

Journal of English Studies, 2000

This paper intends to revise Canadian narratives of identity vis-à-vis the changing nature of recent fictional production in English. Cultural nationalism no longer seems to hold in the face of the contradictory movements of globalization and fragmentation of the national culture. The writings of Rohinton Mistry and Thomas King can be seen, I will argue, as paradigmatic of the physical and cultural displacements implied by those two instances of change respectively. I will then focus on two recent and very successful novels, M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets (1994) and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (1996), which are partially or totally set outside Canada and have an emphasis on place as open text, as the site of complex negotiations of identity at the turn of the century.

“The Marginalization of the Discourse in Recent Western Canadian Fiction.”

Minority Discourses in a Cross/ Trans-Cultural Perspective. Eds. E. Sojka, T. Sikora. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Slask, 2004

Multicultural societies essentially experience countless encounters, clashes, mutual enrichment and transformation of the cultures involved in their ever-changing facet. The present paper aims at calling attention to the distinct North-American literary scenario and the dynamics of inter-racial character metamorphosis. It focuses on biracial counter-passage rites, and the contextual and textual markers of the clash of cultures, the so-called zebra aesthetics in particular. Catchwords that signify this kind of literature are: gone colored stories, trauma or passing narratives and satires on race. One of the most significant features is the post- colonial challenge to the physical, spiritual, attitudinal and behavioral consequences of colonization. Further significant shared features in the literary texts are the subversion of identity aesthetically marked by fictional boundary breaking that is based on the dynamic concept of identity, i.e. orbiting (referring to the title of a short story by Bharati Mukherjee), and the formulation of a cross-cultural identity. Related broader questions are: how does the construction of identity change in the context of literature on biracial relations by U.S. and Canadian authors of different ages? To what extent is the gender (family/ marital) setup specific, i.e. to what extent does the aesthetic discourse differ in the macro versus the micro social environment? Last but not least: what is the gift we can obtain studying the patter of counter passage (going colored) stories?

HYBRIDITY, NOSTALGIA, AND ALIENATION IN THE SELECT SHORT STORIES OF POSTCOLONIAL DIASPORIC WRITERS

Transstellar Journals, 2022

Migration of people from one country to another has taken place since the early times and has affected postcolonial diasporic writers' ideas. The study investigated the five short stories of postcolonial diasporic writers. It used critical discourse analysis to identify the postcolonial themes of cultural, economic, and political issues and concerns and the concept of hybridity and alienation. Findings show that the history and geography of the authors' homelands form the backdrops of their stories. The characters, especially the protagonists, resemble the authors' experiences. The stories were heavily loaded with melancholy and isolation caused by the economic, political, and cultural struggles. This feeling was magnified by the various poignant experiences of being discriminated, oppressed, and deceived and the deep longing for family, relatives, and friends back home. Nonetheless, the stories' characters showed ways of disabling emotions and getting the good side of the situation rather than folding their arms in despair and obscuring themselves in lonesomeness. Further, the study reveals that migration in this postcolonial period has taken people from previous colonies into diaspora searching for greener pasture, especially in the colonizer's host land. They adapted to the host land's culture and became a hybrid to fit in yet not lose their identity.