Postcolonial literature

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.”…

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.…

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…

concept of visualizing the postcolonial situation as a kind of binary opposition between authority and oppression, authorization and de-authorization. He states ahead that all modes of imposition including the demand on the colonized to be like the colonizer results in mimicry. According to him, the mode of asserting authority over the colonized gave rise to mimicry. He further asserts that mimicry can be taken as a way of eluding control that also gives rise to postcolonial…

The second interrelated principle of Postcolonial eco-poetics is the dialogic paradigm developed and introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin. The dialogic paradigm seeks to unmask and unsettle dominant discourses in colonial and anthropocentric discourses. Bakhtin’s affiliation and appropriation to both postcolonialism and eco-poetics has been recently acknowledged by scholars and critics. Bakhtin is cited to lend prestige and weight to the theoretical sphere of postcolonial eco-poetics as he “emphasises…

Colonialism in The Native Problem In Robert Sheckley’s The Native Problem, Darko Suvin’s definition of cognition and estrangement can be used to explore contemporary ideologies about colonialism. Sheckley examines the effects of colonialism projected into a futuristic setting and aspects of colonialism are both changed and unchanged in different ways. In the story, colonialism is both successfully and unsuccessfully reimagined in ways that allow readers to reflect on contemporary ideas about…

Post-colonial literature deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies through literature. This term has been started using after the Second world War in terms such as the post-colonial state and has carried a chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. It was Gayatri Spivak who first used the term Post-colonial in the collection…

trope is “a figurative or a metaphorical use of a word of expression”. The use of cannibal trope is not left by chance in the case of diasporic narratives. Postcolonial writers aim at rewriting the History through the eyes of the oppressed people during the Colonized Era, they embody the Otherness, and write about it. Postcolonial literature as a literary movement emerged at the same time that many colonies were fighting their way to gain their independence. Cannibalism and Imperialism are…

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…