Postcoloinalism
Postcolonial Novels
Postcolonial Theory
Heart of Darkness
Cambridge
Abeng
Disgrace
Americanah
Homi Bhabha
Edward Said
Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak
Frantz Fanon: "On National Culture"
Identity
Subaltern
Mimicry: the way in which hybridity expresses itself. A behavior, when the colonized people act in accordance with the behaviors of the colonizers. Neither pure obedience nor pure disobedience. #
Hybridity: a mixture of two (or more) cultural identities #
1st person narrative
3rd person omniscient narrator; free-indirect discourse
Rape
Racial Hierarchy #
The Hungry Tide
Changing time
Importance of History
Is discussed in
Is represented in
"The subaltern cannot speak" (Spivak, 104) Since the subaltern cannot speak, they must be characterized by the superior group.
Has no voice in:
Politics #
History
Sati/suttee
"White men saving brown women from brown men" (92-3) #
Native vs. Visitor
Colonizers vs. Colonized
Mary Louise Pratt: "Through Imperial Eyes"
Imperialism
The English Book
English Book: physical, literary embodiment of the colonizer's power over the colonized #
Ambivalence: in culture, a contradiction between 2 (or more) groups--mainly "us" vs. "them," which is inherently contradictory
"Creole Self-Fashioning": a more conscious idea of hybridity, gives the colonized people more agency than they may truly have
"Autoethnography": natives writing about themselves through the framework of European culture #
"Contact-Zone": culture doesn't just flow one way, there is an exchange between the colonizer and the colonized. This exchange makes it seem like the parties are on level ground, but they are not. #
Belatedness: something being a product of "colonial difference"
Assimilation #
Christiania as subaltern #
Ifamelu
Orient: "The East"
Occident: "The West"
National Culture: gained after a fight for liberation from the colonizer, when the colonized are able to come together politically and culturally after their fight for independence. #
"Colonized Intellectual": a colonized person who has been educated by the colonizer, but uses his/her education to fight against the colonizer. #
The idea that a group of people must have liberation from another group of people before they can build their own culture.
Cultural Identity #
Culture is the expression of a nation #
Imperialism: a politically powerful group asserting their dominance over other groups for their own territorial gain
Nation
Politics #
Moral dilemma in Lusibari with refugees/hospital funding
David Lurie's attitude towards women
Africa as a place of darkness
is similar to the idea of
There is no "right" way to go about colonization; annotations (in a Russian) in the novel's English book disrupt the authority that the book might have
Authorship and content don't really matter, Marlow focuses on the care that was taken of the book
Represents evidence of civilization in a place that seems like it couldn't sustain civilization
Characters
David Lurie
Lucy Lurie
Bev Shaw
Melanie Isaacs
Soraya
Representation #
Doesn't feel like she fits in anywhere, lack of true representation (in America and Nigeria)
Attempts to somewhat fit in with the cultures of wherever she is
Kurtz
Has given up some of his European culture (to survive)
Has no real voice in the novel
"like a vapor exhaled by the earth" (75)
Sati: the practice of widow sacrifice
Suttee: the English misconstruction of Sati (outlawed it without understanding the cultural significance behind it)
"The women wanted to die" (92-3) #
Creates and instills power dynamic
No voice
Brown women doubly oppressed
Passive
Widow sacrifice
No subjectivity
These two sentences legitimize each other
Englishness assumes a kind of purity
Emily as a narrator is very shielded in the ways she thinks about the world and the culture that she sees around her. #
Emily creates an identity for the Caribbean
Argues that one must resist and critique Derrida's view that one the third world discourse can only be understood if it assimilates to our discourse
Cambridge as a narrator was an attempt to insert unheard voices into the postcolonial setting
Claire attempts to find her own ethnic identity
Brings into question the definitiveness of beginnings and ends
Latent Orientalism: Assumed to be based on knowledge; stays the same throughout time
Manifest Orientalism: can change over time; based on views of the Oriental society
Kanai thinks he knows what's best for the Sundarbans
Tiger attacks are really personal for natives, while Piya feels bad for the tiger when people torture and kill it out of revenge #
Do tigers have agency?
Both examples of epistemic violence
Ifamelu's blog #
Side note: I had a node for race connected to everything on this map... however I removed it because the links were even more confusing than they are now. I would like to include that race has played an important role throughout the semester, in the theorists work and the novels we have read. Race and racial hierarchy are intrinsic to all of these works. #
Victimization
Coming-of-age sorry
Colonialism is a product of imperialism. The idea of something being "postcolonial" creates the assumption that the colonial era is over and that imperialism has ended.