Postcolonial

Jerome Vadackel       
Guest Lecturer, St Berchmans College, Changanassery  & PhD Researcher, Christ University, Bengaluru.

Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.05
[Article History: Received: 08 November 2023. Revised: 29 December 2023. Accepted: 30 December 2023. Published: 31 December 2023]
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Abstract

A pathbreaking novel in Malayalam literature, Khasakkinte Ithihasam (Legend of Khasak), was written by O V Vijayan and published in 1969. It is a novel that weaves together the existential journey of the protagonist, Ravi, with the religion, characters and culture of the fictional village Khasak. The paper is written to place in relief Ravi’s inability to complete his education and analyse it in the background of the contrast Vijayan brings between Eastern and Western modes of thinking. The subsequent struggles he encounters in the single-teacher school in Khasak are read as being born of a more acute subliminal struggle. Drawing useful parallels for comparison from Jacques Derrida’s essay “The Gift of Death,” Ravi’s character, particularly his indifference towards Western education and death drive, is studied, which interestingly provides insights also into his problematic sexual life which lies at the centre of his journey to Khasak.

Keywords: Deconstruction, Politics of Education, Coloniality, Sexual Politics, Translation.

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, Gender Equality
Citation: Vadackel, J. (2023). The Self-made Victim in the Crosshairs of East-West Confrontation: Ravi’s Odyssey in O V Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.05 

Somy Manzoor^1*  & Balkar Singh^2 
1,2 Lovely Professional University, Punjab, India. *Corresponding Author.

 Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.16
[Article History: Received: 15 November 2023. Revised: 29 December 2023. Accepted: 30 December 2023. Published: 31 December 2023]
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Abstract

The present study focuses on the concepts of the Discourse of Racism and the Identity crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Last White Man. The term ‘discourse’ is propounded by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his various books. Discourse is an ideology which produces knowledge and meaning about an object. The knowledge is not the truth about the object. It is the constructed knowledge which is propagated by the dominant power. In the study, the novel The Last White Man, will be explored through the discourse of Racism which is a constructed and discursive knowledge that the dark people should be hated and treated as inferior ones. It is beneficial to a certain section of the people (whites) and others (blacks) who go through an identity crisis because of this discursive ideology. In the novel, the characters Anders and Oona go through an identity crisis because of the discourse of racism that blacks are inferior to whites, which is not the reality. It is just the colour which changes, their intelligibility remains the same. Over time the whole neighbourhood is changed. All the people in the beginning feel the identity crisis, but in the end, they accept this change as the notion of racism is all constructed by the dominant white people. It is an ideology (a discourse) which is beneficial to a few. The main idea threaded in the novel is that race should not be given a universal meaning nor be made into a recurrent topic in contemporary writing as biological essentialism is untenable.

Keywords: Discourse, Ideology, Power, Dominance, Racism, The Last White Man, Identity Crisis.  

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Manzoor, S. & Singh, B. (2023). Interrogating the Discourse of Racism and Identity Crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.16 

Ananya Buragohain^1*     & Lakshminath Kagyung^{2    
1,2} Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India. *Corresponding author.

 Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.10
[Article History: Received: 11 October 2023. Revised: 24 December 2023. Accepted: 25 December 2023. Published: 27 December 2023]
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Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the techniques and strategies used by African and Afro-American writers to disseminate a sense of Black interdependence and solidarity on a global level. It will examine how Black authors are unceasingly using a planned strategy in their literary works to encourage Black people to envision a sustainable future for themselves. We contend that Black authors and critics are incessantly using the literary medium to inspire Black audiences to self-heal themselves from the trauma associated with European colonization of Africa in the bygone days and this issue is yet to receive a noteworthy observation in the literary field. Hence, this paper will examine various dimensions associated with the Black literary genre to explore more about the philosophies and strategies imbibed by Black writers to encourage their people to self-heal from their past while comprehending the significance of mutual interconnectedness. The select works this paper seeks to study comparatively are Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (2010), Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple (2014), Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes’s fantasy fiction The Deep (2020), and Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction Lagoon (2014). The frameworks used for this study are Postcolonialism, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, and African feminism which are treated as the vantage ground for this reading.

Keywords: Black solidarity, Gender, Racism, Interdependence, Sustainable future.

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Buragohain, A, & Kagyung, L. (2023). Exploring Black Writers’ Literary Strategies for Interdependence and Global Solidarity. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.10 

Aparajita Dutta Hazarika^1*  & Smita Devi^{2    
1,2} Department of English: Assam Don Bosco University, Assam. ^*Corresponding author.

 Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.12
[Article History: Received: 10 October 2023. Revised: 25 December 2023. Accepted: 26 December 2023. Published: 27 December 2023]
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Abstract

At a time when Gordimer was writing her short stories and novels which stretched over four decades beginning from the 1940s to the 1990s, several historical and political events were taking place in South Africa. Gordimer’s entire oeuvre of fiction was her way of responding to those historical and political events that unfolded in the country. Many writers and critics believed that the history of the Nationalist Government from 1948 onwards has been faithfully recorded by the novels of Nadine Gordimer and they “will provide the future historian with all the evidence required to evaluate the price that has been paid by the people”. (Green, 563) She published her first collection of short stories in 1949, a year after the first Nationalist Government was elected to power. Her body of work from 1949 to 2000 covers the entire period of apartheid in South Africa. Therefore, she was a writer with serious intent and meant to convey through her novels her rigid stand against apartheid. The term ‘apartheid’ means ‘apartness’, a policy meant to segregate people on the foundation of their race and colour. In The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988), Gordimer noted that it was not the “problems” of her country that set her to writing; rather, it was learning to write that sent her “falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life”. (Gordimer 1988, p. 272) This paper shall attempt to study how Gordimer constructs identity in her novel July’s People (1981). The paper posits that the most important theme in Gordimer’s novels has been identity, an issue that she has been dealing with since her childhood, due to her situation as the daughter of immigrant parents, and living and writing in South Africa at a time when her country was divided based on colour.

Keywords: apartheid, identity, politics, history

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Hazarika, A. D. & Devi, S. (2023). The Narrative Construction of National Identity in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.12 

Nihal Zainab¹    & H. Sofia^{2  
1,2} B. S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science & Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.

 Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.11
[Article History: Received: 13 October 2023. Revised: 25 December 2023. Accepted: 26 December 2023. Published: 27 December 2023]
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Abstract

India is a country that is home to 1.4 billion people. These people are part of wide and intricate groups, communities, castes and tribes. While close to 91.4% of the Indian population has progressed into the colonial standard of civilization, according to the Census Report 2011, about 8.6% of people are still living in their original and natural way of life. These people are the tribes of India whose way of life has been romanticized as the ‘Indian Culture’. A section of tribal people continues to live in mountains, and forests and construct only mud houses or huts. They have little access to basic amenities like healthcare, education, electricity and water. While few tribes have moved out of their original ways of life by converting to other religions, certain tribes are still governed by their respective leaders, following the religions and customs that were taught to them centuries ago. It is at times difficult for the State Governments to reach the tribes since most of them resist any such advancements. European Colonization of India led to the discovery of several tribes that were until that point in time living in harmony with nature and forests. This paper will analyze through literature the pre-colonial and post-colonial lives of certain Indian tribes living in the mountains of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Keywords: tribes, trauma, assimilation, resistance, decolonization, Indian Culture.

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Zainab, N. & Sofia, H. (2023). Postcolonial Trauma in the Lives of Indian Tribes. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.11 

Nitisha Seoda¹  & Devendra Kumar Sharma^{2      
1,2} Department of English & MELs, Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan, India

 Rupkatha Journal, Special Issue on Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.06
[Article History: Received: 11 October 2023. Revised: 26 December 2023. Accepted: 26 December 2023. Published: 27 December 2023]
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Abstract

This study situates itself in the literary representations of the interplay of gender, class, color, race, postcoloniality, power politics, violence, identity, and the African self in a Bildungsroman. It focuses on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus as a Bildungsroman of woman, written from a postcolonial outlook. The narrative centers on the growth, development, and experiences of the female Bildungsheld, Kambili, who eventually attains epiphany, and explores her true self and identity. In other words, the study follows an eclectic approach, which further focuses on Kambili’s odyssey of encountering freedom by tearing out the different challenges, and insecurities during the process of subjectivization, objectification, and interpellation towards her journey of becoming in a political context of a military coup in Nigeria. As a result, the article emphasizes the confluence of history and literature, as well as Africans’ experiences in the postcolonial world in general, and accounts for Kambili’s becoming in particular.

Keywords: Gender, Female Bildungsroman, Patriarchy, Postcolonialism, Self

Sustainable Development Goals: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Citation: Seoda, N. & Sharma, D.K. (2023). Poetics of Self in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus:  A Postcolonial Bildungsroman Study. Rupkatha Journal 15:5. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n5.06