Postcolonial literature

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 the literary canon, made me aware of the political aspect of literature and the political forces that shape both the writing and reading of literature. It awakened a new understanding of the world that I could not neglect, not only when reading literature,…

“An Outpost of Progress” in terms of a Postcolonial Gothic reading. Within the domain of Postcolonialism, scholars differentiate between literature, whose plot occurs in the height of European colonialism, and works that emphasise the certain effects of colonialisation. However, both types of colonial texts reinforce the crucial exploitation undertaken by Europeans as well as their forcibly imposed civilisation, which causes the enormous sufferings from the Africans. Further, it emphasises the…

Revising History Using A Different Lens As the daughter of a Palestinian living in the diaspora, this class has helped me to appreciate the significance and the content of postcolonial literature. While authors such as Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie appeal to me, because of my connection with Palestine, I am more likely to seek out authors that focus on the Middle East—especially Palestine, such as Edward Said. To me, the significance of postcolonial literature is more than just a…

Postcolonial author Zadie Smith offers “a new rhythm of life” in her fiction (Fanon 1442). Born in London, England to a Jamaican mother and British father, Smith’s stories of multicultural families and the-search-for-self narrative examine the postcolonial world with humor. Her novels and essays, including White Teeth, The Autograph Man, and NW, invoke the existence of a new type of character, the displaced but hopeful hybrid. Psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon describes postcolonial…

The origin of Postcolonial criticism was marked, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by critics’ efforts to “undermine the text of colonial authority as well as to install a distance from the concepts of anticolonialist theory” (Parry, 2004: 67). It was referred to as ‘colonial discourse analysis’. Postcolonial criticism emerged with Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, it acquired the name ‘postcolonialism’ in the late 1980s. It is concerned with historical, political, cultural and textual outcomes of…

in an undetermined manner. Incorporating reviews and critiques of Said will help me present a rounded, unbiased view of his work within my dissertation. In this article, Mortimer discusses the work of Edward Said and the continuation of his concepts in the works of Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. He offers a contrapuntal reading of Said and Djebar, ultimately addressing the Maghrebian colonial experience which is an area which Said does not cover in Orientalism. This article is a valuable…

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,…

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…

the particular time of his confinement. He feels obliged to utter the fact that he was born at the exact time of the liberation of India which was on Midnight of 15th August , 1947. Hence of Saleem’s precise stand as a midnight’s child born at the same time India gained its independence from the British colonial imperative, his life story enterprises together with with that of the nation. Saleem fuses his life with the political life of his nation. This insinuation of his birth gives the chance…

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…