...receives from the media (E!, People Magazine, DailyMail etc.) when she opts for a bra-less attire. Repeatedly told by these “news” reporters that she should “Invest in a bra!” (DailyMail) or is “desperate for attention”. The pages turn, however, when white stars like P!nk pose topless for photoshoots. Suddenly, the attitude shifts from degrading a woman’s body to praising it for its statement of feminism. P!nk was greeted with overwhelming support, her picture talked about as a “statement and form of activism for women’s rights and a symbol of owning your sexuality.” (People Magazine). Again, Western feminism, with its racial tendencies, is establishing itself as the only “true” form of racism (Amos & Parmar). Through interpreting the works of Spivak, Mohanty Parmar and Amos and reflecting these observations in the modern world, it is apparent that Western feminism is in fact, imperialistic and racist in its methods. This is not to devalue its cause nor to eradicate the need of feminism the West, but rather shed light on the voices that are silenced daily by this specific...
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...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 Years of Solitude (1967) Salman Rushdie—Midnight’s Children (1981) Isabel Allende—The House of the Spirits (1982) J.M Coetzee—Foe (1986) Arundhati Roy—The God of Small Things (1997) Peter Carey—Jack Maggs (1997) Further Reading: Peter Childs—Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader (1999) Edward Said—Culture and Imperialism (1993) Gayatri Spivak—“Three Women’s Texts...
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...Postcolonialism By Patricia Waugh Summarized by Syed Saad Mukhtar M.Phil English Literature 1st Semester The Islamia University of Bahawalpur An academic discipline and theory featuring the methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain and respond to legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for economic exploitation of native people and their land. The term postcolonialism addresses itself to historical, political, cultural and textual branches of colonial encounter between West and Non-West dating from 16th century to present day. Postcolonialism is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies but it also designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across 20th century and beyond. The two very different traditions of Postcolonial thinking — the theoretical Post-Structuralist and Practical Political are thus linked in so far as some of the key concepts in postcolonialism. Postcolonialism therefore refers to 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...
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...In Search of Her: A Postcolonial/ Feminist Enquiry into the Identity of Indian Woman Kochurani Abraham “The home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the nation’s culture and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality. No matter what the changes in the external conditions of life for women, they must not lose their essentially spiritual (ie feminine) virtues; they must not, in other words, become essentially westernized.” - Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”* “What was gradually and carefully constituted, brick by brick, in the interaction between colonialism and nationalism is now so deeply embedded in the consciousness of the middle classes that ideas about the past have assumed the status of revealed truths…It has led to a narrow and limiting circle in which the image of Indian womanhood has become, both a shackle and a rhetorical device that nevertheless functions as a historical truth.” - Uma Chakravarti “Whatever happened to the Vedic Dasi?: Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past.”* Who/where is the Indian woman? Since this conference focuses on the theme “Identity, Difference and...
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...James Clifford T. Santos Dr. Jocelyn Martin LIT 127.2 (Postcolonial Literature II) Ateneo De Manila University 10 February 2014 Of Interpreters, Schools, and Courts: An Analysis of the Postcolonial Themes of Language, Education, and Power in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Through his awareness of the European literary tradition of negatively stereotyping the African natives as uncivilized peoples and putting the West in the pedestal in terms of cultural superiority and advancement (Guthrie 51-52), it can be asserted that the renowned African novelist and intellectual Chinua Achebe may had realized, at one point in his life, that in order to have a more realistic portrayal of the dynamics of Western and non-Western contact, there is a need to break such convention which undeniably favours the West. Perhaps, this is the reason why Achebe had written Things Fall Apart in such a way that it provides readers the African point of view of culture, identity and colonization thereby eradicating the dominant and unwarranted perception that the peoples of Africa are mere savages that have no customs, beliefs and traditions. Indeed, by providing a somewhat balanced approach in portraying the dynamic societal changes experienced by the Ibo people due to the conflict between their traditional culture and the foreign culture brought by their English colonizers primarily through religious and educational instruction, Things Fall Apart indubitably qualifies as a relevant and interesting...
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...afforded certain privileges that are not accessible globally (Mann & Patterson, 483). Additionally, Western women have more power because they have access to avenues through which to speak for themselves and their issues and have thus come to speak for other women across the globe. Spivak asked “can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak, 500) or are we speaking for her? Western feminism speaks towards the ways that the global women are oppressed by their cultures and religions but they do so without consulting these women who are being “oppressed”. As women of the Western world we cannot fully understand the scattered hegemonies that these women face from the regional forms of tradition, the local structures of domination, and the unique laws and judicial constrictions placed upon women in a specific geographic location. As white women cannot fully understand the oppression that women of color in the US face, women of the Western world cannot fully understand the oppression that is faced by women of the global world (Mann, 4/14/16). So, the question becomes not “can the subaltern speak?” but can we, as we exist in current Western feminism, including intersectionality, allow her to speak for herself? As Douglas said about women in the 1800s, we are able to say about global women: “we can neither speak for her, nor vote for her, nor act for her, nor be responsible for her” (Douglas, 232) and we must allow the global woman to speak for herself. Intersectionality is an important school of thought...
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...Second, lack of diverse flowers and limited access to real nutrition are the reasons bee are vanishing. When weed grows on farmlands, cultivated plants do not get lots of nutrition, so farmers use herbicides to get rid of it. Farmers are decreasing the variety of flowers by using herbicides for their own profit. In her speech, Spivak said, “Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival”. In addition, the narrator said, “Like humans, bees do best when they eat a balanced diet from many different sources” (qtd. in It’s okay to be smart). When bees are starved of pollen, or receive from a single plant source, their lifespan and immune functions decrease. In addition, the monoculture of California almond tree leaves the bees few choices of flowers....
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...thesis “The Heart is A Lonely Hunter: Carson McCuller’s (sic) Young Woman with a Great Future behind Her” that it is a helpless compromise for Mick to accept her femininity at the end of the novel. Some feminist critics also tried to compare Carson McCullers with other female writers. In her collection of essays, Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, Louise Westling compared McCullers with other Southern female writers to illustrate that those writes constantly question and challenge the femininity concepts established by the orthodox American South ideology. In 1980, the famous post colonialism theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published her journal: Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas. In this article, Spivak advocated the readers to interpret the novel from an unconventional perspective. She made an attempt to analyze The Heart is A Lonely Hunter under the macro-structure which combined race- class- and sex- struggle, rather than the limited perspective of orthodox feminist sexual struggle. In 1992, L. Taetzsch in her paper Crossing Trajectories in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, made an innovative research about the development of “androgyny” image of Mick and Biff. In the 1990s, the rise of queer theory provided a new outlook for the research about McCullers. Some examples are Lori Kenshaft’s Homerotics and Human Connections: Reading Carson McCullers ‘As a Lesbian’ which is the first essay using...
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...ANALYZING THE CONCEPT OF DERRIDA’S DECONSTRUCTION IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAITING FOR GODOT ANALYZING THE CONCEPT OF DERRIDA’S DECONSTRUCTION IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAITING FOR GODOT Deconstruction is a literary theory and philosophy of language derived principally from Jacques Derrida's 1967 work Of Grammatology. The premise of deconstruction is that all of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a metaphysics of presence, where intrinsic meaning is accessible by virtue of pure presence. Deconstruction rejects the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or intrinsic meaning. Due to the impossibility of pure presence and consequently of intrinsic meaning, any given concept is constituted and comprehended from the linguistic point of view and in terms of its oppositions, e.g. perception/reason, speech/writing, mind/body, interior/exterior, marginal/central, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture. Derrida says that one member is associated with presence (more highly emphasized) while the other is associated with absence. He proposes “difference” - a perpetual series of interactions between presence and absence - where a concept is constituted, comprehended and identified in terms of what it is not and self-sufficient meaning is never arrived at. Derrida's theories on deconstruction were influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and literary theorists such as Roland Barthes (whose works were an investigation...
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...IRWLE VOL. 7 No. 2 July 2011 1 Arundati Rai’s The God of Small Things – A Post- Colonial Reading Rajeev. G The adjective “post colonial” signifies the notion that the novel or be it any piece of writing for that matter, goes beyond every possible parameters of the locality, region and nation to participate in the global scenario today which is an aftermath of European colonization. The God of Small Things written in the post colonial Anglophone by Arundhati Roy does reveal a decisive post colonial condition; through its dialogues, characters and various events and instances it encompass. Ms Roy refers to the metaphor “the heart of darkness” in the novel which is a sort of ridiculous reference to Conrad’s novel the heart of darkness. She says that, “in Ayemenem, in the heart of darkness, I talk not about the White man, but about the Darkness, about what the Darkness is about.” (Frontline, August 8, 1997). The God of Small Things tells the story of one family in the town of Ayemenem in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth from 1969, when Rahel and Estha, a set of fraternal twins are 7 years old, to 1993, when the twins are reunited at age 31. The novel begins with Rahel returning to her childhood home in Ayemenem, India, to see her twin brother Estha, who has been sent to Ayemenem by their father. Events flash back to Rahel and Estha’s birth and the period before their mother Ammu divorced their father. Then the narrator describes the ...
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...KEY CONCEPTS Part I: Modern Politics: State and Citizens You will find listed below the key concepts for each lecture and chapters from the text. These concepts are what you will be tested on. They will appear on the midterm quiz, in the form of multiple choice questions and in the final exam will be the basis of both the short answer and longer essay questions. Please note that some of the concepts listed under lectures are also covered in the readings, sometimes in more than one chapter. Lec. 1-2 What is Politics? Concepts from the Lecture: Politics ‘Polis’ Plato Machiavelli Modern Age Thomas Hobbes Leviathan Concepts from the Texts: ‘Simile of the Cave’ ‘fortuna’ philosopher-king Behavioural Approach Class Analysis Elite theory Pluralism Institutionalism ‘Power to’ vs. ‘Power over’ Lec. 3 What is the State? Concepts from the Lecture: Treaty of Westphalia Social Contract Legal-institutionalism Branches of State Levels of State Elitism Pluralism Additional Concepts from the Texts: Night Watchman State Neo-liberal state Welfare State Liberal Democracy Lec. 4 The State: Power, Authority, and Sovereignty Concepts from the Lectures and Readings: Power Authority Sovereignty Weber’s Typology of Authority Concepts from Readings: See Lec. 3 concepts Lec. 5 Political Ideologies: Liberalism Concepts from the Lecture Ideology Left vs. Right ideologies John Locke/ Two Treatises of Government J.S...
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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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...Milton Friedman Jordan Locke Economics 10 April, 2013 Jordan C. Locke 10 April, 2013 Period: 2 Ms. House Milton Friedman Milton Friedman once said, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand”. Due to Friedman's many accomplishments and published works in the Economics field, I felt that he would be a great economist to write about. Milton Friedman was born in 1912, to two Jewish immigrant parents that lived in New York City. He earned his Bachelor's degree at Rutgers University at the age of twenty. He then went to the University of Chicago in 1933 to earn his Masters. In 1946, he earned his Doctorate at the Columbia University. He received the John Bates Clark Medal, honoring economists that had achieved the most outstanding levels of achievement by the age of Forty. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy. He served as an adviser for President Richard Nixon, and he was the president of the American Economic Association in 1967. He retired from the University of Chicago in 1977, and became the senior researcher at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. He was the premier spokesman for the monetarist school of economics and a pioneer in promoting the value of free market economics, when the position was not popular. Milton Friedman was...
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...Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk HEIKE HÄRTING N HIS REVIEW of Anil’s Ghost, Todd Hoffmann describes Michael Ondaatje’s novel as a “mystery of identity” (449). Similarly, Aritha van Herk identifies “fear, unpredictability, secrecy, [and] loss” (44) as the central features of the novel and its female protagonist. Anil’s Ghost, van Herk argues, presents its readers with a “motiveless world” of terror in which “no identity is reliable, no theory waterproof” (45). Ondaatje’s novel tells the story of Anil Tessera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist working for a UN-affiliated human rights organization. Haunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation, Anil takes up an assignment in Sri Lanka, where she teams up with a local archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to uncover evidence of the Sri Lankan government’s violations of human rights during the country’s period of acute civil war. Yet, by the end of the novel, Anil has lost the evidence that could have indicted the government and is forced to leave the country, carrying with her a feeling of guilt for her unwitting complicity in Sarath’s death. On one hand, Anil certainly embodies an ethical (albeit rather schematic) critique of the failure of global justice. On the other, her character stages diaspora, in Vijay Mishra terms, as the “normative” and “ exemplary … condition of late modernity” (“Diasporic” 441) — a condition usually associated...
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...Critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of feminist standpoint theory. Feminist standpoint theory is a theory which argues that the social science which is feminism should be practiced from the standpoint of women, or from particular groups of women, as some believe that women are better equipped to understand and comprehend certain aspects of society and the world. A feminisms standpoint epistemology proposes that it makes women’s experiences the main point of thinking, rather than it being a man’s. Nancy Hartsock is a female philosopher and is widely known for her work in feminist epistemology and standpoint theory, particularly her Feminist Standpoint essays. Hartsock came up with the theory that standpoint feminism is founded in Marxist ideology. She argued that feminist standpoint could be developed from Marx’s understanding of experience, and could be used to criticise patriarchal theories. She also adds how a standpoint view of feminism is essential when examining the systematic oppressions in a society in which standpoint feminists claim devalues and disregards women’s knowledge. Standpoint feminism draws on the idea that because women in all different types of societies all have significantly different lives and roles to those than men have, they believe that because of this, women hold a different type of knowledge. As women are a subordinated group, it allows them to see and understand the world different and in ways that differ completely and challenge...
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