...POSTCOLONIAL THEORY & LITERATURE Postcolonial theory: John McLeod in Beginning Postcolonialism (2000) states that it “involves the challenge to colonial ways of knowing, ‘writing back’ in opposition to such views” (32). Within a literary context it involves “reading texts produced by writers from countries with a history of colonialism” (McLeod, 33). From ‘Commonwealth’ to ‘Postcolonial’: 1950’s-60’s—Field of ‘Commonwealth Literature’: Studies of individual national literatures Late 1970’s-80’s—Theories of colonial discourse: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said 1980’s—Turn to postcolonial theory Founding Work: Albert Memmi—The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) Frantz Fanon—Black Skin, White Masks (1952), The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Edward Said—Orientalism (1978) Notable Theorist: Homi Bhabha—The Location of Culture (1994) Gayatri Spivak—“Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) Writing Back—Some Examples of Postcolonial Literature: Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back: Theory, and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) express that the“…crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place” (38). Naguib Mahfouz—Palace Walk (1956) Chinua Achebe—Things Fall Apart (1958) V.S. Naipaul—Mystic Masseur (1959) Jean Rhys—Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) Gabriel García Márquez—One Hundred...
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...a grasp in order to define their weaker counterparts. Post colonialism is the study of exclusion, denigration ‘othering’ and resistance which takes place under systems of colonial control where countries struggle to deal with colonial legacy. When one looks at the text Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee, the ideology of Orientalism and Mimicry unfolds and speaks of the unspeakable encounters of the Empire as opposed to the Barbarians thus, creating the distinctions between the empire and the colony. Therefore, it is the purpose of this essay to justify how the foretold philosophers theory, excavate understanding of Morrison and Coetzee’s text. Orientalism as according to Edward Said “Orientalism is the product of circumstances that are fundamentally, indeed, radically fractious.” To simply state, orientalism is the result of circumstances that revolves around misunderstanding of another inferior race that however results in anger and prejudices. This is evident when we look closely at Coetzee’s novel where there is an unnamed Magistrate who serves as the radical self and the other. As the novel progresses, the natives do not fit into the label ‘Barbarians’ despite the fact they live on the boundary, uncivilized in the face of the Empire, barbaric and inferior. These barbarians are then blamed for things that they do not even commit and are tortured on the terms of the command of the Colonel Joll. For instance, “Those pitiable prisoners you brought in – are they the enemy...
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...www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Empire and Excess: Kipling and the Critique of Said’s Orientalism Sourit Bhattacharya Edward Said’s Orientalism remains one of the most influential books of the last quarter of twentieth century. In an informative manner, Said locates the seeds of Orientalism right in the medieval European imagination that solidifies itself in the nineteenth century. It is through knowledge, power, reason, scientific technologies and disciplinary set-up, philosophical supremacy and commercial benefit that the Europeans tried to redefine and restructure the East. The result was the emergence of a new form of ‘power’ based on information and control. Behind all the sacrificial and religious garb of the ‘white man’s burden’, Said notes, there runs hideous machinery that distorts the forms of knowledge, and remoulds the subject-object relationship in a Eurocentric mirror reflection. The orient becomes a textual study, a place, seen in mass, and considered to be transformed in such implacable homogeneity. Said writes: “In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient.”1 The Orient, like the ‘terra nullius’ notion of Australian imperialism, never exists, or exists in a manner which is vast, amorphous...
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...kilometres) bordered by Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China. The modern nation emerged during the eighteenth century by Pashtun tribes in reaction to the decline of the Persian and Indian empires. For a long period in history, Afghanistan has been ravaged by invasions, civil wars and terrorist activities. As the country continues to rebuild and recover, it is still struggling against poverty, poor infrastructure, large concentration of land mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as a huge illegal poppy cultivation and opium trade. Afghanistan also remains subject to occasionally violent political jockeying. Khaled Hosseini, a native of Afghanistan left the country at the age of eleven and settled in the United States. Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner arrived at the perfect post-9/11 moment, hooking reader curious about the suddenly notorious Islamic nation of Afghanistan, and then reeling them in with a deeply affecting and sentimental melodrama of undying friendship, treachery, Taliban cruelty, and redemption. The present paper discusses Khaled Hosseini’s two novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns set against the background of civil war and the rule of Taliban in Afghanistan and looks at Afghan Diaspora in a newer perspective. The paper proposes primarily to explore the representation of Afghan history. It also attempts to explore the story of a nation, Afghanistan, who is the real protagonist, victimized from within and without. The term...
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...postcolonialism is a period of time after colonialism, and postcolonial literature is typically characterized by its opposition to the colonial. However, some critics have argued that any literature that expresses an opposition to colonialism, even if it is produced during a colonial period, may be defined as postcolonial, primarily due to its oppositional nature. Postcolonial literature often focuses on race relations and the effects of racism and usually indicts white and/or colonial societies. Despite a basic consensus on the general themes of postcolonial writing, however, there is ongoing debate regarding the meaning of postcolonialism. Many critics now propose that the term should be expanded to include the literatures of Canada, the United States, and Australia. In his essay discussing the nature and boundaries of postcolonialism, Simon During argues for a more inclusive definition, calling it “the need, in nations, or groups which have been victims of...
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...those theories, texts, political strategies that engage in such questioning that aim to challenge structural inequalities and bring about social justice. It is often helpful to view Postcolonialism in comparative framework alongside political practices, with which it shares key objectives and expressions: Feminism. It is possible broadly speaking to trace three main historical and cultural genealogies (families) of contemporary Postcolonial critical practices; there is, first, the shaping force of anti-colonial and non-Western national liberation struggles by Marxist revolutionaries. Secondly, there is deconstructive impact of French post-structuralist thinking (of Derrida) which has shaped the influential postcolonial theories of critics like Edward...
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...Edward Said is one of the forefathers of Orientalism and thus he pushed that East played a major role in shaping the West. Next, he would go on to write a book called “Orientalism” in which he claimed that Asia and India gave false justification to the West which made them want to capture and colonize Eastern countries. Two main arguments that Said claimed was that the East and the West were divided into two separate boundaries of the world. Said also felt that it was the job of the West to civilize the East. The West was considered to be the civilized boundary and the East was uncivilized. Finally he believed that stereotypes would give false justification towards Western boundaries about the East. Said believed that it was the job of the West who were the civilized people to educate and change the uncivilized. He felt that East needed guidance and help in order to stay a float as a country and be successful. You see that in the movie Madame Butterfly Said’s ideas played a major role in it. You can say that in the movie René Gallimard played the role of the West and Song Liling represents the East. Throughout the play you can see Said’s main ideas run through the love affair of René and Song. You watch as Song tries to teach René ancient riddles and traditions. She tried to show him the good in the East by having him explore the mysteriousness of he arts. Then on the other hand you see René try...
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...The Location of Culture, by Homi K. Bhabha; 285 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $49.95. This book assembles several of Homi Bhabha's most significant essays, allowing for an examination of his contribution to contemporary literary theory. As a self-described postcolonial critic, often compared with Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity, which he develops in "Signs Taken For Wonders" and several other essays included in this collection. Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects, "[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid" (p. 111). This hybrid trace contradicts both the attempt to fix and control indigenous cultures and the illusion of cultural isolation or purity. His project thus adapts poststructuralist challenges to stable or fixed identities, attempting to "rename" postmodernism from a postcolonial perspective (p. 175), and allowing sustained attention to the ways in which race, gender, community, and nationality converge. One of his major contributions to theories of cultural production and identity is that he examines these various intersections closely, and avoids simply listing them or elevating one aspect of his analysis over others. Eight of the twelve chapters in this volume have...
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...or historical source reveals the full and unvarnished truth, so memory is a imperfect guide. Sometimes the significance of recovered data is hard to determine. Furthermore, many rumored "histories" can be shown to have been invented; at the same time, however, these fabrications still tell us much about a society's beliefs and dreams. In reality, the best histories are the best stories. History is anything but an endeavor that should be consigned to some dusty shelf on the top floor of a library nobody ever visits. It's, ironically, the most modern, most relevant, most incendiary discipline there is, to judge by nothing more than the number of car bombings, shootings and other atrocities committed in the name of warring pasts. Edward Said’s “Orientalism” has reverberated in each of the disciplines that collectively constitute Middle East Studies, including history. The book had positive effects. It forced us to take seriously the reality of the power relations produced and reinforced by British and French colonialism, and to detect the way in which those power relations are reflected in texts. As a result of Said’s work, most historians of the Middle East have produced scholarship that is strongly critical of the British and French colonial projects in the region. These are works that have exposed the power of colonialism to destroy not only lived lives but also imagined futures. Most recent historians of the Arab Middle East have drawn the lesson that...
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...Post-colonialism theory is focused on analyzing and explaining how the effects of colonization and imperialism have on people and nations (. In a simple sense, this theory can be broken down into three categories: person, nation, and world. These three categories examine how imperialism impacted the psyche of humans from a micro level (person) up to a macro level (world). While the story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is most likely analyzed through a feminist lens, the core of the story does allow it to be examined through a post-colonialism lens also. At its center, the story is about the other (a woman seemingly held captive in a man’s world). We see three key characteristics displayed by our other, self-doubt, her inability to protect/provide...
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...1 AMERICAN IMPERALISM 19TH CENTURY HIS204 AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1865 INSTRUCTOR: JOSEPH SCAHILL AUGUST 16, 2010 VANESSA HARVEY 2 AMERICAN IMPERIALISM 19TH CENTURY Imperialism played a huge part in the economics of large industrial or military – powerful nation and even the world economy in the last two centuries. Imperialism has benefited the citizens of the imperial nations, including the United States by expanding foreign commerce and thereby helping the domestic economics of each nation. By having control over lands overseas a nation can have more output for itself and foreign trade, It exports would be greater than its imports; therefore by increasing its wealth. For many imperial nations, control over a land meant more than domination. It means repression and brutality as in the case with Britain, even the United States particularly in the Philippines. Throughout the 19th century, Americans expanded their influence across the continent through the West Ward movement. Although sovereign Native American nations were suppressed and even eliminated in the process, America was not acting as an “imperial power.” At the start of the 19th century, Imperial China, under the Qing dynasty, represented a stable and prosperous nation. There was no reason to believe that the next hundred years would change that, yet the start of the next century, the dynasty had rendered powerless, and the armies of various Western powers were descending on Peking to...
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...The Concept of a Community is imagined Communities are imagined so basically Anil’s ghost which is her national identity is imagined and colonial war goes out prove and reveal the truth that these imagined identities are fake and that the only true identifies are ones carved by individuals. The concept of "nation" is truly a cultural construct Nation, and identity, begins with one's family and closest friends, and slowly moves out from this center. In our contemporary example, two residents of the same country may live in completely different geographical climates, having very little in common with each other. In such a case, one may have a personal identity, and identify with a more local "nation," yet be part of a political nation as defined by demarcated boundary lines, drawn on a map. In his definitive book about the concept of "nation" and "nationalism," Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson says, "In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson 5). This does not necessarily mean that the imagined nation is a concept that is fundamentally bad. Although merely imagined, a national identity is something that holds a diversely different group of people together to prevent war. As Anderson says, "All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" (Anderson 6). Identity...
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...Who is Edward Snowden? Edward Snowden, 30, was a three-month employee of a government consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. At Booz Allen (he has since been terminated), he worked as a systems administrator at an NSA Threat Operations Center in Hawaii, one of several facilities detect threats against government computer systems. In other words, he was a low-level intelligence government contractor. Background: Edward Joseph Snowden was born June 21, 1983, he grew up in Wilmington, N.C., but later moved to Ellicott City, Md., he told The Guardian. His mother, Wendy, is the chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology at the federal court in Baltimore, a court official told NBC News. His father, Lonnie, is a former Coast Guard officer who lives in Pennsylvania, the Allentown Morning Call reported. A neighbor said he has an older sister who is an attorney. Education: He did not complete high school. He told The Guardian that he studied computers at a community college and obtained a general equivalency degree. A spokesman for Anne Arundel Community College confirmed that a student with the same name and birth date took classes there, from 1999 to 2001 and again in 2004 and 2005. Military service: He spent four months in the Army reserves, from May to September 2004 as a special forces recruit to a 14-week training course, the Army said. "He did not complete any training or receive any awards," an Army statement said. No other details were given...
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...In Tim Burton's 'Edward Scissorhands' it is evident that the Boggs family's actions are responsible for the banishment of Edward. This is shown through them treating him as an object and disregarding his feelings as well as treating him as if he is capable of taking care of himself. Throughout the film Edward is treated as an object by the Boggs Family. This can be shown through many subtle actions and things that the family says. "Man, those things are cool. You know I bet they're razor sharp. One karate chop to a guy's neck," Kevin said in the movie demonstrating that he is only interested in his scissors. This point is shown clearly again when Kevin states, "can I bring him to show and tell on Monday?" When Kevin interacts with Edward he is treating him as if he is an object, or a pet. This idea is also demonstrated when Bill, the father of the family, says: "No, no, no. That's a terrible...
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...this was later on said to be wrong by Gestalt psychologists. Behaviourism was influenced by an article written by John. B. Watson. He stated that psychology must reject all reference to consciousness. Behaviourism...
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