Anti-colonial book clubs: Creating a different kind of language for a new consciousness (original) (raw)
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Resistance from within" : reading and Neocolonialism
Links Letters, 1997
Colonial discourse analysis at present seems to need to be radicalised so that it may become a more sensitive instrument to counter the ernergent colonialisms negotiated by contemporary literature. I believe this radicalisation rnight be achieved through a study of changing textual patterns and the changing societies which shape them. To support this argument-which involves an understanding of how the present adapts the past to suit its needs-1 offer a reading of the way in which Kipling's character Mowgli is reworked by two contemporav writers: Hanif Kureishi and Sara Suleri. The predicates of race, class and gender-and the causes and consequences of their fracture in societies both generated and threatened by new colonialisms-are examined.
2024
Literature has always been read in various ways, some of which struggle to uncover the latent ideologies behind its aesthetics. Postcolonial theory is, by definition, the best in this regard. This study compares Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa and Maishe Maponya's The Hungry Earth through postcolonial perspectives. The study uses a qualitative method, analysing texts from Gilbert's Postcolonial Plays, which includes contemporary masterpieces of postcolonial literature. The analysis reveals that Anowa and The Hungry Earth are exemplary anti-colonial plays. They reflect the cruelty and oppression of Western colonialism in Africa and expose its colonial discourse and ideologies. They condemn and document the aspects of discrimination and exploitation while implying different strategies to resist colonialism, with mimicry, hybridity, and armed fighting being prominently highlighted. This study could benefit students of postcolonial literature by providing a foundation for further research. It also recommends applying other literary theories, such as Feminism and Marxism, to these plays. Additionally, themes of patriarchy, social inequality, and class distinction are developed alongside the postcolonial-oriented analysis.
On Pedagogy and Resistance: Unraveling the Post-colonial Politics in the Literature Classroom
The pronounced universalism, standardization and elitism of the American literary tradition in English departments in countries of former experience of colonization have created an enduring relationship between the center and the margin through processes of assimilation, integration and ambivalence. The literary text has become critically open to contestation among differentiated components: the old military conquest, daily institutional compulsion, and in progress ideological interpellation, which have become the basic features of the post-colonial culture. However, in place of opposition and contestation of the authorized colonial hegemonic performances, different forms of assimilation and integration were articulated and attended in these departments. In the long run, opposition discourses have developed strategies to cleave from the Center, and in order to achieve this, and, by adopting borrowed means from the Center, these opposition discourses cleave to the Center itself, which creates an ambivalent relation between the Center and the Margin. Within this understanding, the need for post-colonialist discursive negotiations that require the native rewrite him/herself (not) as an object of imperialism, but as a subject of contestation remains one major aspect of discourses of resistance. In this paper, we address the various interpellation processes in post-colonial literature classroom by which the critic and the literature teacher address the post-colonial subject and produce him/her as a subject proper of colonization or Americanization. In addition to rehearsing the existing literature of resistance discourses, we investigate the role of the authoritative text as a means by which colonial and post-colonial regimes have enforced this tradition in past and post-colonial territories. We probe the various processes by which colonial subjects assimilated, incorporated or disallowed and rejected the extended processes of their literary education. Drawing on our investigations and analyses of these processes, we propose further outlets for resistance and dissent to these practices.
NWSA Journal, 2004
This article establishes an experimental methodology for the literary practice of feminist standpoint theory through analysis of Jamaica Kin-caid's Lucy. It offers an outline of the processes by which a standpoint is achieved and refl ects on larger questions of identity and authority. It argues that Lucy does in fact have a privileged standpoint as an "out-sider within," and contends that Lucy's lack of an easily categorized identity allows for multiple standpoints that inform one another and offer a powerful understanding of her situation as a woman and postco-lonial subject. Finally, this article questions the authority of the literary standpoint critic.
The present research study attempts to investigate Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease in terms of Gayatri Spivak Marxist-Post colonialist conceptions of subaltern, colonial discourse and false consciousness. In Post-modernist fiction, there is anxiety that historical concerns such as the scale of violence in the Second World War, the Nazi genocide, the paranoiac politics of the Cold War and European colonialism have made fiction a medium for history. Chinua Achebe's novels, indeed, are manifestation of colonialism and its subsequent impact on the literary text and dominant discourse. In exploring these terms, this dissertation endeavors to closely examine Gayatri Spivak's concept of subaltern in the Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. Furthermore, the present paper demonstrates Spivak's voice to differences: that is, class categorization and marginalized subaltern subjects. By the emergence of colonialism, the significance of social class and social discourse became predominant; therefore, colonial discourses instilled into the social, cultural construction and literary text, particularly novel. In this regard, the investigation of the dominate discourses is pursued, and this helps to show how colonialism resulted in discourse inculcation. The resistant perspective against ruling ideology, as the Italian Marxist political activist, Antonio Gramsci calls it cultural hegemony is presented through language, tradition, and customs. Finally, the study focuses on Marxist concept of false consciousness from the viewpoint of Antonio Gramsci to Louis Althusser.
2012
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia took her doctoral degree in English Studies at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 2005. Her areas of expertise are Postcolonial Literatures and Contemporary Fiction in English. Here she presents a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fields – postcolonial and feminist theory – through the prism of the grotesque. The author is interested in the deconstruction of postcolonial and gender politics. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess is a comprehensive study, drawing in a complex weave of theories and contemporary fictions. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque divides into two sections: the first third of the text is devoted to cultural and literary criticism and the location of the Grotesque; the remaining section is given over to dialogical readings and practices of the postcolonial and feminist grotesque. Pimentel Biscaia systematically accounts for the canon, a pantheon of names whose usefulness as references...