Postcolonial feminism

Abstract: Bapsi Sidhwa’s third novel Ice-Candy Man was published in 1991. In America, her publishers Milkweed Editions published it under the title of Cracking India. Using a child narrator named Lenny, the novelist presents the Kaleidoscopically changing socio political realities of the Indian sub-continent just before the partition. This extremely sensitive story takes up the themes of communal tensions, using religion as a way to define individual identity, territorial cravings political…

Saleem to remark on the political as well as historical chronicles in the nation’s past. Meanwhile Saleem is, chained to history by his inadvertent birth; his biography emulates not only his individual memoir but also the complete antiquity of postcolonial India. This is the goal…

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British writer who has experienced movement from his home to a new place. Rushdie expresses the benefits of migration and how it helps create “hybridity” in a place. Russell Sanders analyzes Rushdie’s essay and has a different opinion. In response to Rushdie’s belief about migration, Sanders’s Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World essay, contradicts the opinion of Rushdie’s essay that migration is bad. Through Sanders’s quotes and information he uses in…

There is currently a growing body of research in postcolonial criticism and analysis of Renaissance literature. Inspired by efforts to decolonize the canon, I am interested in studying the roots of colonialism in the Renaissance and its influence on the modern world. In my second year of undergraduate study, I was introduced to postcolonial literature and theory in an introductory course with Dr. Stanka Radović. Reading polemic texts, as well as ‘subalterns’ writing back or breaking away from…

When we think of someone being silent there are many reasons for that and sometimes we think the worst of it; we may think that they are ignoring us, they are mad at us or just plain rude. This is a very American concept as in other countries silence is common and normal, but we don’t look at it as a defense mechanism to continue surviving. This is shown by looking specifically at countries within Africa that were affected by the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. You would think they would…

Bunkered within an icy Helsinki restaurant, a hundred marketing experts embarked on the journey to pen a simple, yet iconic slogan. Their desire was to attract tourists across the globe. However, this was no easy task. There was a variety of ideas tossed around, from nudity to a holistic quote on nature. Yet in this search, these Finnish experts derived a brilliant slogan from out of nothing. In 2011, thousands of adventurers flocked to Finland because of the words it echoed: “Silence, please.”…

Chinua Achebe did not initially set out to write a novel that emphasized the triumphs of African culture. Nor did Achebe embark on a campaign of denigrating slander towards European attitudes. Achebe’s contentious novel Things Fall Apart situates itself post-colonially and, having been written in 1958, the novel came at a time of racially charged civil rights movements. Chinua Achebe remarked upon the injustice of Eurocentric African literature prior to writing his infamous novel. For example,…

Racism is something that has been something occurring in the world for a very long time. The novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad represents the time period of imperialism; when Belgium colonized the Congo. Conrad depicts the racism that occured in the Congo of Africa because of the Europeans colonization. The main protagonist named Marlow, a European sailor, goes on an adventure with his crew through his perspective going up the Congo River with the goal of meeting an idealistic man, Kurtz.…

Colonialism took many different forms throughout history; political, economic, social and cultural. Literature itself can serve colonial objectives through the use of a colonial language that describes the Non-western countries as inferior, uneducated, uncultured and uncivilized. This type of colonial discourse mainly serve the colonial powers who give false image about the other in order to emphasize their superiority and to defend the real intentions behind colonizing other countries such as…

3.3.1 Hermeneutics of Suspicion: The Role of Genealogy in Historical Sense of Midnight’s Children: The historical sense in the novel invokes the idea of Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ history. Genealogy is the study of ‘family history’ which often possess the desire to historically ‘situate’ one's family in the larger historical picture. In the poststructuralist discourse of Foucault and other postmodern theorists, it has assumed a special significance owing to the fact that it eschews history of its…