Postcolonial - Page 6

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: Unveiling the Trauma of Adolescent Boys Trapped in Afghanistan’s Culturally Legitimised Paedophilia-‘Bacha Bazi’

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1.3K views

Pallavi Thakur

Assistant Professor, SHSS, Sharda University, Greater Noida. Email: pallavi.thakur@sharda.ac.in                                                                                     

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n5

Abstract

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a powerful narrative on ‘Bacha Bazi’, “same-sex pedophilia restricted to adult men and adolescent boys” (Powell, 2018, p.1), prevalent in Afghanistan. When marginalisation of Afghan women became the nucleus of major studies , especially during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Hosseini unveiled in The Kite Runner, the gruesome Afghan culture of ‘Bacha Bazi’ that disintegrates a boy’s social and sexual identity. ‘Bacha Bazi’ is not consensual rather coercion hence is equivalent to rape and reflects the grotesque violation of Afghan male children’s human rights. While the world viewed Afghanistan as a land of incessant wars, tribal conflicts, violence and female exploitation, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner provided a startling insight into ‘Bacha Bazi’ and its implications on Afghan boys. The novel reveals the socio-culture domain of Afghanistan and ethnic rivalry playing an instrumental role in the existence of Bacha Bazi. In the light of the above discussions, the present paper examines   the deleterious effects of Bacha Bazi on Afghan male children. It elucidates the psychological trauma of adolescent Afghan boys that evolves out of the sexual abuse and new androgynous identity imposed on them.

Keywords: Bacha Bazi, Sexual slavery, ethnicity, con?icts, androgyny, poverty, rape

Study of Trauma and Transgression of the ‘Adult-child’ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man

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306 views

Jharna Choudhury

Ph.D. Scholar. Tezpur University, Assam, India. Email: jharnachoudhury123@gmail.com

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0916-373

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n6

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa’s characterization of Lenny Sethi in her fourth novel, the 1991 historical fiction Ice-Candy-Man, is formulated by the heterogeneous impact of the 1947 partition of India on the psychopathology of children. This paper observes how the trope of trauma problematizes the embodiments of childhood, contradicting its axiomatic paradisiacal nature. Parallel to the chaos of communal massacre, mass migration, dysfunctional parenting and the marginality of women and children, Lenny’s traumatic experience surpasses a singular-episodic trauma, and is laden with a multiplicity of source factors, thereby generating “complex trauma” (van der Kolk et al., 2007, p. 202). The child narrator acquires symptoms of irregular curiosity, hyper-vigilance, somatic complaints, fear, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and transgresses specific social norms. Lenny is a choreographed child, a problem-child, taxonomized as the ‘adult-child’ in the paper. Now, the question is whether to see the ensuing malfunction symptoms as a diagnostic criterion or adaptative human resilience? Drawing from Anjali Gera Roy’s concept of “intangible violence” (Roy, 2020, p. 43) the paper examines textual openings where the stages of childhood and adulthood deconstruct itself, approximates, and overlaps inside each other; taking cues from a relatively less-documented narrative angle of the child victim of partition.

 Keywords: Ice-Candy-Man, Trauma, Transgression, Partition, Adult-child, Embodiment

Understanding colonial masculinity and native bodies: Rereading the discourse of homoeopathy as a feminist form of medicine

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205 views

Anjana Menon

PhD Research Scholar, E-mail: anjanaabhinavmenon@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-8959

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n2

Abstract

A body can also be read as a site for the production and maintenance of social power. In colonial India, western biomedicine often acted to reinforce the reason/nature split and made manifestations in dualistic divisions between mind/body, and men/women. With the advent of the ‘masculine’ western biomedicine, the indigenous population lost the authority and autonomy over their self-knowledge and social power of their bodies. Thus, Homoeopathy found a space in the spiritual discourse of Indian nationalism as a ‘feminine’ element. This paper is an attempt to analyse how the rhetoric on homoeopathy was effectively employed to redress the grievances of masculinity in health care unleashed by the British state. The study lays stress on power imbalance within the practitioner/patient relationship, the exclusion of social concerns from the biomedical model, and the trivialisation of knowledge within the clinical encounters.

Keywords: Colonial power, masculine body, medical encounters.

The Fear of Camp Life: Understand the Spatial Reality and Formation of Discourse

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234 views

Joydip Dutta

PhD Scholar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, E-mail: joydipdaju@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n2

Abstract

The paper makes an existentialist analysis of refugee Camps in West Bengal that came into being after the Indian Partition in 1947 when the state received a large number of asylum seekers from the-then East Pakistan. The objective of the paper is to discuss the construction of Camp life in terms of the affect of fear. Camps have been largely interpreted as the active agents of rehabilitation, space of political movements or supplier of informal labourers. The principal enquiry here however would be to interrogate if the camp is home for the refugees or it has a separate existential reality in the face of fear which goes beyond the questions of rehabilitation. Borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) the concept of fear in this paper does not indicate any specific character or definite future. Rather, fear unfolds as an ‘affect’. In West Bengal, construction of the Camp by the government was presupposed for rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Hence, in-itself a Refugee Camp functioned to control the population by its norms, rules, and regulations. On the other hand, it was constructed as temporary shelter for the refugees. Therefore, the temporal character signifies how Camp constitutes the refugees through ‘care’ and how they encounter reality in that situational condition. The paper will not focus on fear as only as detrimental to the life of the refugees. Rather, it tries to show how the affect of fear may also unfold the possibility of that space by engaging with the elements of speech, silence or listening that constitutes the discourse of Camp. The paper would explore how as a temporary shelter of the refugees, Camp life has been constructed as a discourse in terms of spatial boundary and limits. Coopers Camp in Ranaghat, West Bengal here is taken as a case study to explicate the discourse of camp life in the light of fear and ontologically address the refugee question in post-Partition subcontinent.

Keywords: Refugee Camp, Fear, Affect, Space, Rehabilitation, Experience

Partition of Bengal: a Posthumanist Study of Select Literary Works

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649 views

Indra Sankar Ghatak

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. E-mail: indrasghatak16@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n1

 Abstract

The Indian Partition ushered in one of the most historical migrations in human history where millions had to change their native affiliations. This event led to the formation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan) out of a single cultural geography and the drawing of boundaries (Radcliffe line) disrupted the emotional, cultural and spatial link of the people with the native countries. Selected short stories from Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories and the memoirs in Adhir Biswas’ Border: Bangla Bhager Dewal encapsulate the variegated experiences of the dislocated during 1946-1955, who were sabotaged by fellow Bengalis in the name of gender, community (bangal-ghoti), and religion. This paper looks at select samples from the collections mentioned above and correlates them with the history of the period. It raises the question “of which ‘human’ is the posthuman a ‘post’?” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 9) The narratives from the Bengal partition capture the phenomenon of border crossing which had led to fluid identities (refugees/migrants/infiltrators) as individuals had been deterritorialized and reterritorialized. The migrant bodies symbolize an anthropogeographic entity that had been exploited severely, and the refugees present themselves as the cultural metaphor in order to capture the traumatized and ambivalent condition of post-national human beings.

Keywords: partition, posthuman, identities, boundaries, cultural.

Re-orientalism in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls

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203 views

Urvashi Kaushal

Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat. E-mail: urvashikaushal6@gmail.com, Orcid Id. 0000-0002-6774-6849

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n5

Abstract

In his seminal work Orientalism Edward Said destabilized the Euro-American practice of constructing, approving and disseminating a stereotypical image of Asia as exotic backward called the ‘Orient’. This paper takes Said’s concept of Orientalism as a premise to highlight ‘self–orientalism’ or ‘re-Orientalism’ as a growing trend in South Asian diaspora writers, especially since the turn of the 21st century. It utilizes the idea of orientalism and reads Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls against the grain to accentuate the reification of Indian culture into a commodity and homogenisation of complex cultural differences in multicultural India for the consumption of the West. In its effort to find answers for this growing trend, it analyses the nexus between location and commodification of literature produced by diaspora writers.

 Keywords: orientalism, re-orientalism, new-orientalism, neo-orientalism, diaspora writers, commodification.

Negotiating Scottish ‘distinctiveness’ (?): Unmasking the British Conquest and the Construction of Empire in the 19th Century Indian Subcontinent

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194 views

Subhashis Pan

Ph.D Research Scholar, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, WB. Email: subhashis.pan6@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9178-3607

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s5n2

 Abstract

India in the 19th century encapsulates a very different and contesting Scottish dimension to the expansion of British Empire. The Scottish legacy in the field of British colonial enterprise has been blurred over the time. Scotland, which was once a colony of the English, was incorporated in the Great Britain in the Union Act of 1707. But distinction between Scottish and English was never made. Thus, in the field of literature we do not find distinct Scottish identity of the contributors like- Walter Scott, R. L. Stevenson, Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle- to name a few. They are placed in the ‘English literature’ without due emphasis on Scottish background and influence. Similarly, the common notion of the British imperial enterprise has masked the contribution of the Scottish administrators working under the British. Now, in the context of India when we talk about ‘Scottish Orientalism’, we need to focus on the already blurred identity of being ‘Scottish’ in the dominant English field. The Union Act (1707) between England and Scotland produced a space for the Scottish people to participate in the British imperial enterprise. This paper focuses to unmask the role of some of the Scottish scholar-administrators working under the British for a distinctively Scottish contribution to the expansion of the British imperial activities that helps to explore the nature of the intellectual and religious engagement. The study offers a distinctive Scottish Orientalist school as Scottish participation of empire remains open ended and it argues for a complex assessment of Scottish individuals who though shared some philological and philosophical interests and assumptions, nevertheless diverged in many other respects.

Keywords: Empire, hegemony, Orientalism, Scottish-distinctiveness, Scottish Orientalist school

Hope amidst Despair: Revisiting John Steinbeck’s Novel The Grapes of Wrath in the times of COVID-19 pandemic

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299 views

M. Shanthi1 & Ms. Lizella Faria Gonsalves2

1Associate Professor, Department of English, Dnyanprassarak Mandal’s College and Research Centre, Assagao, Mapusa, Goa. ORCID id- 0000-0002-6114-2366. Email: shanthimuninathan@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor, Department of English,Dnyanprassarak Mandal’s College and Research Centre, Assagao, Mapusa, Goa. ORCID id-0000-0001-5699-5412. Email: lizella.gonsalves@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s33n6

 Abstract

Death has always been co-existing amidst all life-forms. But when it turns its vehemence on humanity with all its force by means of pandemics, epidemics, wars or natural calamities then it gets its due, acting as a great equalizer. The Catastrophic Corona, today has revolutionized the face of humanity and the Existential Angst is acutely felt. The boundaries and demarcations of caste, creed, religion, region and gender have been ignored by the virus levelling all to the mercy of greater powers. The subversion of capitalism and deconstruction of the binaries like positive and negative, the physical and the virtual have induced discourse subjected to critical study. Since Literature and Life has always gone hand-in-hand, it is natural to witness the saga of human turmoil and suffering being portrayed in literary works. Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague is a classic example of the precariousness of human life and existential isolation. But as devastating as a pandemic or an epidemic is, equally ravaging are the forces of nature and crippling circumstances which lead to unsurmountable suffering and pain. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is an evocative saga of resilience and survival amidst the onslaught of the Dust Bowl and the Great Economic Depression. The Joad family in the novel represents a microcosm of the universal suffering and their story finds echoes in the hearts of many in such times as the present COVID-19 crisis. This paper aims at a study of the socio-economic and psychological factors affecting humanity during crisis through the study of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It would be an endeavor to evaluate the changes and adapt to the ‘New Normal.’

Keywords: Pandemic, Existentialism, Economic Crisis, Deconstruction, Despair and Hope.

Post-nationalism and Recollecting the Nigerian Civil War Memories through Hero Beer Brands Marketing in Igboland, Southeast Nigeria

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168 views

Obinna U. Muoh & Uche Uwaezuoke Okonkwo
History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Emails: obinna.muoh@unn.edu.ng, ucheokonkwo2007@yahoo.com

Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s33n3

Abstract

Since the failed attempt at secession from Nigeria in 1970, after a 30-month civil war, the Igbo ethnic nationality—who constituted the majority of the defunct Biafra Republic, have sought avenues to (re)create the memories of the short-lived country.In the political space, they attempted establishing Ohaneze Ndigbo—as an umbrella socio-political organization for recreating and projecting the Igbo agenda. This, to a large extent, has not achieved the desired objectives. Not surprisingly, militia groups have sprung up since 1999 when an Igbo failed to secure Presidential race ticket to agitate the actualization of the sovereign state of Biafra. These groups include Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), and recently the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). However, pop circle provided the much needed social space for Biafra nostalgic displays. In 2012, Hero Beer advert better known as O Mpa, a coined greeting style by Onitsha people for great achievers with reference to Ojukwu father figure in the Biafran struggle was launched. This study examines the nexus between beer advertorials and ethnic identity using the Igbo example. It argues that the advertorials successfully permeated into the psychology of Igbo beer drinkers, who attached ethnic connections to them and appropriated them as theirs, using the brands to recreate the memories of Biafran struggle of Independence from 1967-1970.

 Keywords:  Nostalgia, Ethnic Identity, Appropriation, Branding and Advertorials.

Hegemony, Exclusion and Equivocal Identities: Reflections on Israel’s Arab Minority in Sayed Kashua’s Dancing Arabs

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262 views

Neha Soman

ICSSR Doctoral Fellow, Dept. English, Bharathiar University, neha.efl@buc.edu.in, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3900-3607O

Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s33n2

 Abstract

Social consciousness forms in allegiance with the moral and political hegemonic power structures. Gramsci’s organic ideology defines this condition of hegemonic system where societal leadership is practised by the dominant class. With the emergence of cultural studies the prevailing hegemonic discourses are challenged, but defining liminality in this spectrum is still an ongoing process. In this context, the essay aims to demarcate the problematic aspects of personal and national identities against the hegemonic power structures, specifically with the case of the Arab minority in the State of Israel. Apart from the fundamental facets of hegemony, the aberrant conflict between nationalism and citizenship emerging from Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish democratic State, places the Arab Israeli identity in question. These arguments are validated through the fictional life narrative of Israel’s prominent Arab writer Sayed Kashua. His novel Dancing Arabs (2002) recapitulates the reality of being an Arab in Israel. The impeccable representation of identities in question hinges the repercussions of hegemony and social exclusion on both subjective and national levels. Standing on the critical platforms of Gramsci’s political theory of “hegemony” and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory of “identity”, the text is closely read as an artefact of resistance with emphasis on personal, political and philosophical discourses on the identity of the Arab minority in Israel. The essay traverses through the ethnocentric status of Israel’s social structure which disorders the recognition of Arab identity and identifies the conflict as a potential hindrance to peaceful coexistence in Israel’s near future.

Keywords: Hegemony, Identity, Arab Minority, Israel, Social Exclusion

 

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