Vol 2 No 2

Bearing the Burden of Native Experience: A Stylistic Analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

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Debaleena Dutta

Banaras Hindu University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.07

Abstract

Chinua  Achebe has  made  a  creative Africanization  of  the  English  language  in  all  his  literary  works.  In  the  process  of  writing  counter-narratives  to  Euro-centric  misrepresentations  of  Africa, Achebe  has  successfully  harnessed  the  colonizer’s  language  to  make  it  bear  the  burden  of  his  native  experience.  The  present  paper  proposes  to  take  up  the  third  novel  by  Achebe, namely  Arrow  of  God (1964) to  introspect  the  different  kinds  of  narrative  strategies  involved  in  it.  This  includes  a  study  of  the  kind  of  narrator  used,  and  a  survey  of  the  various  ways  in  which  the  language  is  maneuvred—through  the  usage  of  standard  and  pidgin  English, through  linguistic  devices  like  humour, satire  and  irony, through  symbols, proverbs, images, metaphors  and  songs—in  order  to  capture  a  vivid  picture  of  Nigeria  of  the  late  1920s, in  which  the  novel  is  set. In  a  nutshell, this  stylistic  criticism  aims  to  illustrate  in  effect  how  Achebe  creatively  extends  the  frontiers  of  English  language  to  accommodate  the  various  shades  of  Nigerian  reality  within  it.

Keywords:  Chinua  Achebe, Arrow  of  God, Narrative  strategies, Linguistic  devices. Keep Reading

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Editorial, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2010

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Chief Editor

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.01

The reason we wanted to host articles on New Literature is already a question of a bias or a sense of importance indicated by the history of academic interest in the literature in English. It is also an imperialistic event. The conventional English department, itself an imperialist legacy and forbearer of Anglophone imagination, already faces a dilemma of choice created by the literature produced by the settlers and the colonized peoples in the former colonies of England before the British literature. In one of the most ironical events of the last few centuries, the English language has not only been transformed into a number of variants characteristic of culture and geography of the places far from England, it has also been mutated into tools for creative expressions. In this, the rise of the settlers’ English in various parts of the world like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa points to an important historical fact for English literature. The fact that New Literature in the settlers’ new kind of English is an extension or expansion of English literature implies an evolutionary aspect of survival or growth beyond the political and economic process of colonization.

The Bilingual Writer Stripped off his Bilingual Identity in Indian Literary Scene: Manoj Das and the Politics of Packaging

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Amarjeet Nayak, Thapar University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.10

Abstract

The position of a bilingual writer in India, who writes in English and a regional language, is a problematic one as s/he has a foot each in two literary traditions–Indian Writing in English and Regional Language Literatures. Instead of being seen as a bilingual writer, the market forces see to it that the writer is seen as a monolingual writer in the respective literary tradition. This paper tries to show how packaging of the bilingual writer in these two traditions contributes significantly towards the split identity of a bilingual writer as a result of which the bilingual writer is stripped off his bilingual identity. I shall do this through an analysis of the packaging of Manoj Das, a prolific bilingual writer in Indian Writing in English and Oriya literary traditions. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Biafra and the Aesthetics of Closure in the Third Generation Nigerian Novel

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Madhu Krishnan, the University of Nottingham, UK

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.09

 Abstract

This paper examines the role of closure, or the lack thereof, in four contemporary Nigerian novels. Representative of the third wave of Nigerian literature, these narratives each deals with themes of trauma, identity and community affiliation in postcolonial Africa, highlighting the fractured and displaced nation-state as the site of a radical aporia between individual fulfillment and communal harmony. This article postulates that the lack of closure on the level of thematic content and characterization in these novels is an aesthetic condition of third generation Nigerian literature as it strives to narrativize the openness and undecidability of the postcolonial condition and the fundamental instability of history and identity-formation in contemporary Africa. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Ideological Mutations in the Drama of Bode Sowande

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Ameh Dennis Akoh, Osun State University, Nigeria

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.08

 Abstract

The question of a convenient marriage of ideology and aesthetics in Nigerian drama has occupied the minds of critics for a long time – for some dramatists ideology has no place in their works and thus insist rather on social vision; however, while it is, again, long been established that there is no way of escape from ideology in our time, the concern then is on the ideological mutations in a dramatist and his work over time. This paper engages the works of one of Nigeria’s foremost playwrights, Bode Sowande. The paper discusses the different phases of the ideological mutations of the playwright from spiritual and revolutionary nationalism to what the drama is christened for specific purposes.1 The paper argues that the writer’s sensibilities are shaped by the changing fortunes of the society and the current aesthetic and philosophic tangentiality in the African dramatic and theatrical arts of English expression (Uji 44). Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Identity and Belonging in Mudrooroo’s Wild Cat Falling

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Antara Ghatak

South Point School, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.06

Abstract

Wild Cat Falling, the rebellious, anti-colonial story by the black Australian author, Mudrooroo, tells us what ‘belonging’ means in Australia, when one is other than white. Written in an autobiographical mode, Mudrooroo’s first novel, Wild Cat Falling is an avant-garde as it presents an interventionist discourse for the first time in the literary history of Australia directed towards opening up the space for self-determined representation by an Aboriginal. The novel retells the continuing entrapment of the Indigenous minority in an inequitable network of social, economic and cultural relationship that they have inherited from British conquest. This paper explores how the issues of identity and belonging make Wild Cat Falling an important interventionist discourse. Keep Reading

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Where Campfires Used to Gleam— a Collage of Bipolar Dreaming in Davis’ Aboriginal Theatre

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Sibendu Chakraborty

Calcutta University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

 DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.04

Abstract

Jack Davis’ preoccupation with an aboriginal sense of experience as symbolized through uncle Worru’s characterization in The Dreamers, is thought to have been sparked off  by a mysterious man named Jack Henry, whose nostalgia was embittered and angered by what he considered to be the end of the golden age. Davis’ own experience at the Moore River Settlement and his angst at having been forced to overlook the Noongar culture and tradition are snowballed into a representation of wisdom bordered on the edge of eccentricity. Uncle Worru’s strong evocation of a poetic, almost archaic, wish-fulfilling past is thus addressed in terms of his dream-time stories. This paper tries to locate the significance of the dream-time stories in consolidating the theme of protest. The question is: how far successful is uncle Worru in acting out the role of Davis’ spokesman? Uncle Worru’s scheme of looking back at his past endeavors and success needs to be weighed against the younger generation’s instinctive habit of dreaming forward into the future. The sense of false securities embodied through uncle Worru’s dreaming backward in time necessarily comes in clash with the later generation’s habit of dreaming forward. The dilution of the theme of protest thus gets enmeshed in the whirlpool of cultural abnegation. Davis’ “syncretic theatre” distils the elixir of dreams polarized on the chronological separation between past and present.        Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Language Allergy: Seduction and Second Languages in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

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Juan Pablo Rivera
Westfield State College, USA

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.03

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of a bilingual, female, heterosexual subjectivity in Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The paper argues that the theoretical excesses in the narrative revolve around a bilingual difference that problematizes heterosexuality’s efforts to become a hegemonic discourse. Keep Reading

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The ‘Blue Flame’: An ‘Elliptical’ Interaction between Kahlil Gibran and Rabindranath Tagore

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Indrani Datta (Chaudhuri)

Vidyasagar University, India

Volume 2, Number 1, 2010 I Download PDF Version
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n2.02

Abstract:

This paper focuses on certain aporias in the life and works of a Lebanese American writer, Kahlil Gibran, that reveal his idiosyncratic interest in and preoccupation with India, neither his native nor his adopted country. It also charts out the ‘elliptical’ connection that this Lebanese immigrant forged with the Indian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. A “belated” (Behdad 1) reading of these aspects opens up the possibility of critiquing Gibran’s life and writings through the theoretical framework of Nico Israel’s “outlandish”-ness (ix), a state that exists between, as Israel has stated, “exilic emplacement” and “diasporic self-fashioning” (16-17). This kind of “reading behind” (Behdad 4) rewrites “a kind of philosophical décalage” (2) that ruptures existing West-centric discourses by destabilizing and displacing them through “other locations…other trajectories of subjectivity, and…forms of knowledge” (Behdad 1). My critiquing of Gibran’s life and texts, in this manner, show how his sense of identity, generated out of trans-cultural and transnational spaces, not only engenders a counter discursive practice to the West-centric politics of exclusion but also tries to rescue non-Western writers, and their literatures, from the “anamnesiac order” (Behdad 3) of such politics. Keep Reading

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