Showing papers in "Postcolonial Text in 2010"

Writing Biafra: Adichie, Emecheta and the Dilemmas of Biafran War Fiction

Abstract: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun quite explicitly responds to earlier fictions of the Biafran war, including Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra, Chukwuemeka Ike's Sunset at Dawn, and Eddie Iroh's The Siren in the Night. As an oeuvre, Biafran war fiction seems to have been characterized by – and frequently defeated by - its desire for what Eddie Iroh calls "an unbiased, total assessment of the whole great tragedy." Half of a Yellow Sun negotiates the dilemmas implicit in fictionalizing war more successfully than most of its predecessors precisely because it dramatizes its own incompleteness, its inability to fully comprehend (in both senses of the word) the events it narrates.

British Muslim Identities and Spectres of Terror in Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers

Abstract: This article invokes Judith Butler's reconceptualisation of terror in "Precarious Life" (2004) and her call to broaden the lens on the geopolitical distribution of security and vulnerability in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 Moore considers ways in which a contemporary British novel testifies to experience in the interstices of power/knowledge networks and imaginatively intervenes in local, national and global constructions of terror Nadeem Aslam's second novel, "Maps for Lost Lovers" (2004) is the case study, and twenty-first century constructions of British multiculturalism in the aftermath of 9/11 the context under consideration One aim of the article is to foreground faith as a component of individual and community identity, hence combating a common oversight in postcolonial literary studies; another is to re-centre British social and literary space The analysis attends to the novel's articulations of gender, ethnicity, religion, class and faith in a northern British location The overarching argument is that structural aporia, the interplay of speech and silence, and the conceptual figure of the ghost in Aslam's novel can be engaged as elements of a transformational postcolonial haunting The reading responds to the plea made by Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams, for "a new grammar of response" to 9/11 and the ensuing "war on terror"

Remembering the Nation's Aching Spots: Yvonne Vera's Authorial Position of a Witness and Healer

Abstract: In her production, the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera (1964–2005) has dealt with the violence-shaded past of her home country. Marginalized stories of women and specific moments in the national history are closely intertwined in Vera's work, challenging thus the wavering boundary constructed between the private and the public. Vera's iterative return to the past bespeaks the author's commitment to make visible some disturbing and violent memories in the nation's history, including gendered violence during the years of the freedom fight. By engaging in the task of coming in terms with the traumatic memories of the past, the writer undertakes the position of a witness and a healer, articulating through her work an ethical gesture towards a better future and a viable communality.

Three Children's Critical Perspectives on Aspects of the Contemporary East African Social 'Web of Relationships': Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them

Abstract: This paper will take Hannah Arendt's concept of "the subjective in-between" outlined in The Human Condition (1958) as a starting point for an analysis of the social disruption experienced by children in the three short stories of Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them (2008) that are located in the wider East African region – "An Ex-mas Feast" (Kenya), "What Language Is That?" (Ethiopia) and "My Parent's Bedroom" (Rwanda). This analysis of Akpan's short stories will concentrate on how forms of intra/inter-family and inter/intra-cultural communicative exchange are affected by the violent restructuring of the social "web of relationships" (Arendt, Human Condition 183) emphasising the stories' potential in laying the foundation for a new 'subjective in-between'. The second part of the proposed paper will concentrate on the East African regional setting of the stories and scrutinise its relevance from an international perspective. How does the West feature in these stories of social break down? What options of social regeneration and reconciliation do the stories outline for today's youth and tomorrow's leaders?

Resistances of Literature: Strategies of Narrative Affiliation in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose

Abstract: Etel Adnan's novel on the Lebanese civil war, Sitt Marie Rose (1978), was written as a literary act of resistance to war. Based on a real event, the torture and murder of a Christian woman who betrayed her camp to defend the Palestinian refugees of Beirut, it denounces what Edward Said has called the "embattled identities" of postcolonial nationalism. Using Said's seminal essay "Secular Criticism" as its point of departure, this paper explores the ways in which Adnan's novel articulates a specifically gendered critique of filiation through a figure of affiliation: that of the Palestinian refugee. Marie-Rose's transgression of gender, national, and religious lines (as a Christian Lebanese woman who is sexually and politically involved with the Palestinians) paradoxically indexes the heterogeneity within the same, and advocates for the inclusion of the enemy other (the hostis that is the guest, enemy, and stranger) in the space of the nation. Yet as a literary text, the novel also complicates the militant message it has come to be equated with. Paying close attention to the discursive, narrative, and poetic strategies deployed in the text, I argue that the narrative form of the novel problematizes the very notion of resistance, pointing to the risk of reproducing filiative ties within affiliative communities. Following Jacques Derrida, I propose the notion of "resistances of literature", in the double genitive sense of the term: Sitt Marie Rose constitutes an act of literary resistance; but it also resists discursive appropriation, leaving a remainder that cannot be excised to fit the frame of the national narrative.

Choreography, Sexuality, and the Indigenous Body in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

Abstract: This paper focuses on the body and dance as central categories of analysis in Tomson Highway's novel Kiss of the Fur Queen The paper examines the ways in which the indigenous body in the novel is not only subjected to the colonial violence that sexually inflicts it, but also disrupts this violence through dance which homogenises indigenous community and transgresses colonial stereotypes in Eurocentric Canada While tracing various moments of unreadability in both Gabriel's dance and Pow Wow ceremony, the paper suggests that the novel intervenes in the contemporary debate around the elusiveness of dance and choreography from the perspective of indigenous collective memory The paper maintains that while building a bridge between indigenous and contemporary theories of dance, the novel never undermines the colonial dynamic that problematises the connection between the two The paper clarifies that the queer relationship between Gabriel and his ballet mentor and lover Gregory Newman illustrates this dynamic as it revolves around the Canadian colonial history that conditions it and the institutional power of choreographic knowledge that regulates it

Postcolonial Affects:Victim Life Narratives and Human Rights in Contemporary India

Abstract: This essay looks at life writing by homeless children, prisoners and child abuse victims to argue that such narratives serve as claims narratives in the field of human rights. These claims generate affective narratives. Such narratives, the essay argues, move across various stages. They open as trauma narratives, detailing suffering, brutalization and injustice where the narrators describe the denial of agency. In this component the narrator adopts two primary modes: of the "captivity" and "demoralization" narratives. In the second moment, these narratives move toward a detailing of affect. Human rights require the establishment of identity as human. It is through affective speech and emotion narrative that the victim begins to articulate a self, a subject with a certain amount of agency. Through affect the victim also speaks for other victims, and appeals to us, readers. This is the making of a "moral web." Finally, the victim asserts agency – and therefore their identity as humans requiring human rights – by proposing a break with the past. It is in the conscious decision to choose a different life that the subject emerges out of the traumatic past. The affective rhetoric sentimentalizes public culture. Affect, the essay suggests, is an important mode of articulation of human rights within postcolonial India.

Refusing to Tell: Gender, Postcolonialism, and Withholding in M.G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which M.G. Vassanji's novel The Book of Secrets (1994) engages with postcolonial feminist theory in the context of a fictionalized Muslim community in present day Kenya. While previous studies have examined the text in light of such concepts as postmodernism, history, memory, and space, there has been no sustained feminist analysis of the novel to date. Examining the character Mariamu as the primary locus around which gendered powered relations operate, this paper argues that the text paradoxically reveals its resistance to patriarchal and colonial discourses by withholding multiple secrets and refusing narrative closure. By using a female character as an allegory for Africa, Vassanji both panders to traditional colonial discourses that view the land as a feminine entity to be penetrated and conquered while also subverting those discourses through the process of withholding. This alignment of gender and incomprehensible mystery is potentially dangerous, as it risks marginalizing Mariamu and other voices deemed deviant or suspect, such as that of the gay poet Gregory. However, the text is able to subvert the gendered tropes that objectify and silence women, opening up complex questions of agency and the ability to speak and be heard.

Rewriting Strategies in Tariq Ali's Post-Colonial Metafiction

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to study some of Tariq Ali's metafictional strategies of rewriting the authoritative discourse of colonial history, including the rewriting of the document, the other, the subaltern, and the colonial language. The paper hypothesises that metafiction can function as an efficacious post-colonial act of rewriting and hence recuperating the history of the colonised. Post-colonial metafiction is hence defined as a narrative mode that accommodates the self-questioning ambiance of the postmodern and the politicised stance of the post-colonial. To demonstrate this I will focus on two particular historiographic narratives: Tariq Ali's Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) and The Book of Saladin (1998).

"Young man, you keep insisting that this is your thing, and what should your fellow men seduce?": Sex, HIV/AIDS and Tribal Politics in the Benga of Okatch Biggy

Abstract: This article argues that the celebration of sex in the music of Okatch Biggy is a response to the ethnicized politics of post-colonial Kenya. The argument is that as a Luo ethnic nationalist Okatch Biggy defends and promotes the stereotypical characterization of the Luo as epicurean hedonists, regardless of the fact that Biggy's music was recorded in a context in which HIV/AIDS was an important feature. Biggy's motivation for doing this is the political necessity to have his people have pride in their identity -- an important point in a political context where tribal competition for power spawns practices that demean members of ethnic communities defined as the enemy.

The Body as a Figurative Code in Luo Popular Culture, Vernacular Literature, and Systems of Thought

Abstract: Popular culture is commonly viewed as a process of producing meanings from social experience as well as the way such meanings are expressed by respective groups of people in their daily lives. Popular culture (as opposed to "high culture") may be viewed as folk culture that is favored by many people. This notion of popular culture encompasses a people's systems of thought and also embraces the cultural meanings that are woven into their language. The premise of my argument is that according to Luo popular culture , oral literature, and systems of thought, the human body is deployed as a figurative code for modes of thought, feelings, and characteristics that do not coincide with English idiom. The Luo people's conception of "self" and "person-hood" is therefore, quite different from Western systems of thought.

Dialogical Theology as Politics in Mongo Beti, Wewere Liking, and Chinua Achebe

Abstract: The postcolonial literature of sub-Saharan Africa has produced a powerful critique of Western discourses of domination by offering Francophone and Anglophone readers an analysis of religious discourse and its connection to political power. In such texts, hitherto silenced speakers—the voices of the colonized people—speak loudly through the technique first called dialogism by the Russian formalist M. M. Bakhtin. This essay will frame its analysis with work by two Cameroonian writers, Mongo Beti and Werewere Liking. The Bakhtinian theoretical framework will then expand into a more detailed examination of several novels by Chinua Achebe. My argument will reveal the ways in which religious discourse invariably takes on a political dimension in postcolonial settings. At the same time, the essay will show how African fiction often reveals the tensions inherent in any attempt to unite traditional, Moslem, and Christian ways of thinking. These conflicts most often fail to unify the culture in question, yet the dialogue thus produced can succeed in limited ways by exposing complex interactions between language and human experience.

Revisions, Reroutings and Return: Reversing the Teleology of Diaspora in Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain

Abstract: There is significant agreement amongst theorists of diaspora and migration that the teleology of diaspora and a search for home is necessarily linear. Vijay Mishra writes about 'the hybrid experience of diaspora people for whom an engineered return to a purist condition is a contradiction in terms' (Mishra, 421) and Avtar Brah argues that home for diasporic people is 'a mythic place of desire' and therefore it is 'a place of no return.' (Brah, 192) William Safran describes the "return' of most diasporas as 'a largely eschatological concept' that is used 'to make life more tolerable by holding out a utopia - or eutopia - that stands in contrast to the perceived dystopia in which actual life is lived.' (Safran, 194) Despite such agreement against the myth of return, in Sunetra Gupta's novel, Memories of Rain, we see the protagonist returning to the city she had left ten years ago. For Moni a spiritual return to her originary home is not enough. She must return in body to Calcutta, thus making her journey a circular rather than a linear one. In this article I will examine the reasons for and implications of Moni's return to the homeland after her rejection of the space of diaspora. I consider this return and reversal of diaspora teleology as a move that unsettles and seriously disturbs dichotomies of colonialist and heterosexual desire that are firmly established earlier in the novel. Gupta's novel sets up a series of binary oppositions, the incompatibility of which ultimately lead to Moni's fragmentation and inability to form a diasporic identity for herself.

Psychopathology and Healing in Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers

Abstract: This paper situates Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers within the scholarship of Akan belief systems. Argued in this essay is that these two novels present an alternative perspective on godhead, gods, ancestors and human person. Premised on the view that illnesses symbolize an imbalance among human beings, ancestors and gods, this paper holds that Armah's interpretation of these formative elements of being and becoming provides a different understanding of illness and healing.

Dealing with Another Culture's Ghosts: Diaspora and Contact Zones in M. G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets

Abstract: Stuart Hall, in 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora,' reminds us that the old, imperializing and hegemonizing definition of diaspora refers 'to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea' (244). Hall goes on to describe the diasporic experience as one that is marked by difference, transformation, and hybridity, and he challenges us to conceptualize diaspora in a manner that does not depend upon the centrality of the homeland. At the same time, we must not erase the distinctions between various forms of transnational mobility and displacement. While diasporic and immigrant experiences can be similar, they are not necessarily interchangeable; not all immigrants are members of diasporic communities, and not all members of diasporic communities are immigrants. What we must acknowledge when speaking about diasporas is the overarching presence of at least one outside force, such as imperial power, colonial authority, natural catastrophe or economic, social or political upheaval, to name just a few. M. G. Vassanji is one author whose fiction illustrates this difference through its multigenerational scope, which shows how the Shamsis' ethnic identity, while enduring in the diaspora, becomes transformed as it comes into contact with other ethnicities and cultures.

The "swaying sense of things": Boey Kim Cheng and the Poetics of Imagined Transnational Space, Travel, and Movement

Abstract: This article discusses the ways in which Singapore-born poet Boey Kim Cheng wrestles with the idea of travel as an inevitable part of poetic being, negotiating with the multiple meanings of place as geographical location, private memory, personal association, and past fragment. While the act of journeying provides Boey with an occasion for poetry, I argue that it is, more crucially, an ambulatory mode of signification that allows him to figure as well as to figure out the complexities of the craft of poetry-writing itself.

History, Nation, Ghetto: Kenyan Women's Literature and the Ethics of Responsibility

Abstract: As they contemplate the fate of those displaced by anti-Semitic persecution and genocidal violence, the award-winning narratives of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor ("Weight of Whispers") and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (A Farm Called Kishinev) examine the exclusionary rhetoric of race and nation. In an attempt to find alternatives to the epistemic and physical violence directed against unwelcome strangers, Owuor's short story and Macgoye's novel reflect on the extent to which modern institutions are only able to produce moral apathy towards those marked as different in terms of race and ethnicity, religion and class, and therefore excluded from the protection of the nation-state. As "difference" mutates into a source of conflict and even genocide, leaving women and children especially vulnerable to organized hostility, these fictional works demonstrate the dark sides of modernity that betray the etiological myths equating the modern with civilizational progress and the social production of moral responsibility.

Disseminating Shahrazad in Postcolonial Algeria

Abstract: This article examines the turn of two postcolonial Algerian writers, Assia Djebar and Mourad Djebel, to the frame narrative of Alf Layla wa Layla, or 1001 Nights, as a critical template for exploring contradictions for social and political agency in the postcolonial public sphere. I argue that although both authors rewrite the figure of Shahrazad for distinct thematic purposes, their works intersect in the extent to which the figuration of the feminine, or the production of woman as a representation of authentic cultural identity, establishes an aporia that must be worked through in postcolonial critiques of gendered legacies of colonial and nationalist violence. I examine three approaches to this problematic in Assia Djebar's novel Ombre Sultane, as well as her short story "Femme en Morceaux," and in Mourad Djebel's novel Les Cinq et Une Nuits de Shahrazede to establish how these texts negotiate the literary inheritance of Alf Layla wa Layla as a textual corpus that in its nonlocalizable and infinitely disseminating status establishes a possible counter narrative to attempts to consolidate identity in orientalist and nationalist imaginaries. However Alf Layla wa Layla's imbrication in the fantasies underpinning colonial conquest as well as the contradictory impetus for creative agency embodied in the production of narrative under a threat of death is taken into account by Djebar and Djebel to suggest that their turn to Alf Laya wa Layla is premised upon the contradictions underpinning the history of the text and its interpretation. The critical reinstantiation of the frame narrative by Djebar and Djebel reveals the tensions underwriting the ambiguity of Shahrazad's status as a feminist heroine to suggest a series of impasses in "Femme en Morceaux" and "Les Cinq et Une Nuits," and an emergent possible for feminine agency in Ombre Sultane.

Feminization of the Ugandan Nation in John Ruganda's The Floods , The Burdens and Black Mamba

Abstract: This paper seeks to tease out the extent to which John Ruganda's three plays are part of the literary feminization of the Ugandan nation of the 1970's and early 1980's in which political decline is captured through the iconography of a 'troubled motherhood' Drawing from critiques of the Mother Africa figuration in post independence African literature, the article demonstrates how Ruganda's use of this trope in his plays is in fact a rereading of the Ugandan nation, not just as a 'troubled mother' but a resilient and subversive one who rides through all the tumult and turbulence with enviable stoicism With focus trained on his construction and deployment of female characters, the article hopes to illustrate how Ruganda attempts to frame his sometimes stereotypical female characters as subversive symbols of femininity, who consciously or otherwise, seek to affirm and dismantle the seemingly contradictory Mother Africa trope even as they symbolize the Ugandan nation

The Stimulus of (Postcolonial) Violence: Interview with Peter Onwudinjo

Abstract: Bio Information Peter Chukwunenye Scholastica Onwudinjo is a Nigerian poet, born in Ihiala in Anambra State in 1950. He is an affiliate of the Benedictine order of the monastic tradition in Catholic religion from where he took the name 'Scholastica'. Among his published works include Women of Biafra and Other poems (2000), Songs of the Fireplace (2006), Because I'm Woman (2006), Songs of Wazobia (2006), De Wahala for Wazobia (2007), Camp Fire Songs (2007). He lectures in the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Calabar, Nigeria. He is married with six children, five boys and a girl.

Which Tongue To Speak With? Philippine Poetry and the Nature of Language

Abstract: In attempting to examine and imagine the intertwined relationship between language, literature, and community, the Philippines provides an illuminating case because it is one of the few countries in the world where books are published in both an indigenous and a colonial language at comparable rates. This paper examines the work of one poet, Cirilo F. Bautista, because not only is he one of the leading figures in contemporary Philippine poetry, but he has established his reputation by writing in both his native Tagalog and borrowed English. The paper questions these oppositions of nativeness and foreignness along both linguistic and cultural lines. By focusing on two of Bautista's works, Boneyard Breaking and Sugat ng Salita (Wounds of Words), collections of lyric poems written at around the same time, the paper shows how language affects literary production and perceptions of community. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that a native language has the ability to imagine a community outside its own boundaries at both a thematic and a linguistic level, thereby questioning the opposition between native and foreign, as well as a metaphoric that places native language in close proximity to a biological function. For Bautista, it is precisely the combination of an appeal to the commonality of biological observation and strategic use of language that allows him to transcend the boundaries of a native/foreign dichotomy. However, this paper also argues that Bautista accomplishes this transcendence in more nuanced ways through Tagalog, and must thus also speculate on the conditions under which these nuances can become translatable to an English-speaking readership.