Bibliography of Books, Chapters and Journal Articles on Colonialism and Imperialism Published in English in 2016

Building on interdisciplinary exchanges between postcolonial cultural theory and literary criticism, this thesis examines the idea of self in context of intercultural encounter, literary hybridity and globalization. The project locates and analyzes self in Anglophone literatures emerging from British colonies in Africa and the subcontinent through the critical lens of dialogical self theory, borrowed from the social sciences, and textual analysis of writers’ creative narrative strategies. The project examines and interrogates four pairs of texts over the colonial, postwar and post-9/11 eras in order to delineate different strategies of selfhood across four diverse fields of literature: autobiographical life writing, folk anthology, metaphysical fabulism, and contemporary realism. The eight texts under consideration, Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1794) alongside Sake Dean Mahomet’s The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), Henry Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions and Histories of the Zulus (1868) and R.C. Temple’s The Legends of the Punjab (1884-1900), Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1972), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not (2011) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), are organized under these generic headings and have been arranged chronologically. Foremost a literary undertaking, the project engages the critical perspectives outlined in Jane Hiddlestone’s introduction to Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form and seeks to ‘bring littérarité [literariness] to the fore’ with a focus on ‘the specific mechanics of particular texts and genres, and on the ways in which the experience of colonialism has triggered a range of innovative forms of literary creation in response.’ The central purpose of this study responds to this renewed emphasis on the narrative strategies and creative choices involved in a literary construction of self. Threaded through this investigation is the idea of globalization, or the intensification of intercultural and dialogic complexity over time. The thesis couches its literary analysis within the framework of dialogical self theory, the imagining, expression and representation of selfhood through dialogic processes and interactions within a text.

The global turn : representations of the self in South Asian and African Anglophone literatures in the colonial and postcolonial eras

In this chapter, we discuss self and identity in the context of spatial relationships—the subject’s movement through different cultural spaces amid intensifying global interconnection in the mid-twentieth century. Our readings of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1972) reveal how time-space compression, facilitated through technology and travel, renders the distant and unfamiliar nearer and knowable. We examine how this newfound sense of mobility elides cultural boundaries in Tutuola’s and Desani’s texts as each novel’s protagonist moves between such markers as language, behaviour and dress. Both texts’ use of language demonstrates how these diverse and disparate cultural markers and signals do not necessarily need to coalesce into a unified or homogenous structure of selfhood. In Hatterr, the titular character uses language to position and re-position subjectivity; in Drinkard, Tutuola’s distinct approach to self-translation illustrates how language itself can come to represent hybrid selves. Through the critical lens of dialogical self theory, we discuss how both authors instrumentalize the idea of difference to create new cultural spaces. 

The Divisible Self—Global-Local Journeys in Desani and Tutuola

While critics have begun to consider G.V. Desani’s Anglo-Indian novel All About H. Hatterr, few have considered the novel’s paratextual structure—composed of a series of fictional prefaces, a primary narrative, and an appendix—in any considerable depth. More often, critics view the novel in terms of its supposed apoliticism and ahistoricism. My essay argues that an investigation of its form can re-invigorate discussions of historical critique in Desani’s text. I read the novel’s experimental structure as a means to critique Western complicity toward colonial oppression in India, in that the paratexts repeatedly urge the reader to ignore and belittle questions of politics and history that pervade the primary narrative. As such, I reveal how the paratexts that frame the narrative engender misreading and misinterpretation. I thus link the novel’s form with questions of colonialism, and I examine how Desani’s text, in encouraging readers to misinterpret it, provides a critical investigation into questions of colonial authority.

Jason R. Marley

Papers

"Misunderstanding is Universally Rampant": Misinterpretation, Mistranslation, and Colonial Authority in G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr