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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim May 2023

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 Feb 2020

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 …


Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank Apr 2019

Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay from the collection, Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies, Kevin Frank argues that coming from a creolized society, unlike their father, Seepersad, V.S. and Shiva Naipaul's representations of "race" and ethnicity in their works is cynical, favoring one side in the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean racial antagonism, mainly because of their anxiety about "Black Power."


"The Problem Of Locomotion": Infrastructure And Automobility In Three Postcolonial Urban Nigerian Novels, Danica B. Savonick Jan 2015

"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 Jul 2006

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.