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Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America
Postcolonial Disability In Mohesen Makhmalbaf’S Kandahar, Sukshma Vedere
Postcolonial Disability In Mohesen Makhmalbaf’S Kandahar, Sukshma Vedere
Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies
Kandahar (2001), an Iranian film directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, details the journey of the protagonist, Nafas, to Kandahar to save her sister from committing suicide on the day of the solar eclipse. The film has gained recent attention by disability studies scholars for the representation of disability in Afghanistan; scholars have discussed the significance of prosthetics and international aid for the disabled in post-war zones of the Third World, but little has been said about disability as a postcolonial embodiment. I argue that Kandahar represents the postcolonial state as a disabled space both literally and metaphorically. It projects the veil …
"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.