“Eavan Boland’s Subversive Use of the Imperialist Language: A ‘Mimetic Appropriation’ of English” (original) (raw)

Para, por y sobre Luis Quereda. Eds. Marta Falces Sierra, Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio, Juan Santana Lario y Salvador Valera Hernández; ISBN: 978-84-338-5170-3 Universidad de Granada, pages: 693-705 , 2010

Abstract

This article revaluates Eavan Boland’s work in the light of postcolonialism by drawing on the theoretical claims of Bhabha, Said, and Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. Many of the strategies of decolonisation they find in postcolonial literary productions surface in her poetry: reclaiming a history previously unrecognised by imaginatively recreating it; the production of alternative poetic representations to those offered by authoritarian discourses; the way in which exile, migrancy, and hybridity are combined to resist the binary politics of imperialism and nationalism; and finally, the subversive use of the imperialist language. This article focuses on this last strategy of decolonisation. In its discussion of poems such as “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951”, “Witness”, “A Habitable Grief” and “The Mother Tongue”, it shows how Boland carves out new and subversive territories within the English language for herself. Her “appropriation” of the imperialist language allows her to dismantle authoritarian (imperialist and nationalist) discourses, occupying a productive space where new decolonising identities can emerge.

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