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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim
Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim
Theses and Dissertations
Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …
Postcolonial Urban Vernacular Narratives In Contemporary Britain, Kathryn N. Moss
Postcolonial Urban Vernacular Narratives In Contemporary Britain, Kathryn N. Moss
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores the ways in which three postcolonial writers in Britain (Samuel Selvon, James Kelman, and Suhayl Saadi) have used the vernacular as a medium for third person narrative fiction. In doing so, they have emphasized the legitimacy, beauty, and utility of languages sometimes considered debased and ugly even by their own speakers. I argue that this shift from the margins to the center of dialect or minority language in fiction is a radical—and relatively recent—one, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. By utilizing the vernacular as a medium for third person narratives, these authors are bringing non-prestige vernacular voices …
Rogues In The Postcolony: The New Picaresque And The Making Of Modern India, Stacey Balkan
Rogues In The Postcolony: The New Picaresque And The Making Of Modern India, Stacey Balkan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Rogues in the Postcolony looks at Indian picaresque novels that respond to and productively complicate dominant historical narratives by adapting formal conventions of the picaresque novel and by foregrounding the experiences of historically obscured figures, or “rogues.” The project is structured in such a way as to read colonial and postcolonial India through the lens of marginalized persons such as poppy farmers and, more recently, the citizens of Bhopal who continue to struggle with the toxic legacy of the Union Carbide fertilizer factory in their city. I argue that the unreliable narration and non-teleological structure of the picaresque form parody …
"The Problem Of Locomotion": Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica B. Savonick
"The Problem Of Locomotion": Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica B. Savonick
Graduate Student Publications and Research
This essay analyzes automobility in three postcolonial urban Nigerian novels: the fantasy of self-propulsion that subtends a colonial modernity materialized through the erection of urban infrastructure. Tracing the disjuncture between automobility and infrastructure—the “problem of locomotion” (Achebe)—reveals the inextricability of mobility, modernity, urbanism, and colonial violence even into Nigeria’s formally postcolonial period. By exploring how characters both invest in and move beyond inherited colonial narratives, these novels challenge top-down images of Lagos, instead depicting it as a city “otherwise fashioned” (Abani) from their characters’ perspectives on what it feels like to dwell and sell on the streets.
Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank
Abroad At Home: Xenomania And Voluntary Exile In The Middle Passage, Salt, And Tide Running, Kevin Frank
Publications and Research
This essay re-examines the causes and consequences of Caribbean alienation, with implications for understanding alienation in other postcolonial societies. The author argues that while externalization does follow colonial incursions or international travel by the colonized, exile and alienation also result from emotional or psychological migrations within the mind, a consequence of neocolonial mechanisms tied to globalization.