INTRODUCTION
V. S. Naipaul is considered to be one of the most prominent expatriate novelists having first hand colonial experience in English literature. His novels deal with the colonial as well as postcolonial societies with an explicit account of the common complexities inherent among the marginalized societies. Naipaul’s works is commonly regarded as an implicit biography of his departure from the narrow background of the Caribbean island to the open cosmopolitan culture of the world at large. He carries three conflicting, at a time, interacting components in his personality of being a Trinidadian colonial, an English metropolitan, and a person of Indian ancestry.
The worldwide culture, economic and political changes resulted in the
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In their deliberate effort to preserve their customs, rites, traditions, religion, languages, caste beliefs and their family patterns, they got themselves transformed so as to familiarize themselves to the colonial setting of creolized society of Trinidad. It was impossible for the East-Indian expatiate in Trinidad to maintain their homogenous cultural identity.
In his early fictions V. S. Naipaul captures twice-torn and displaced immigrants oscillating between home culture and alien culture on the one hand and obviously fascinated by the sophisticated culture of the Westerners on the other hand. The novel exposes the essential ambivalence of East-Indian emigrants at Trinidad seeking belongingness and affiliation there in the West. To present the apparent cultural confusion has been the obsession of diasporic writing, but Naipaul’s account of these dispossessed is based on his first hand experiences and thus seems quite authentic. Jasbir Jain
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Biswas depicts house as the predominant metaphor signifying the universal diasporic disorder. The hero of the novel Mohun Biswas represents the psychology of every East-Indian colonial at Trinidad. He endeavors to create something significant and substantial out of “unimportant, uncreative and cynical Trinidad” (124). The life of Biswas is a complex tale of an expatriate Indian’s ambivalence presenting the typical expatriate sensibility. Mr. Biswas whose life-long ambition is the ownership of a house, finds himself caught in an inescapable trap. The symbol of house embodies Naipaul’s personal diasporic predicament.
Biswas’s dying accommodated at the age of forty-six is shown as the big question in the novel. His individual quest for selfhood identity and coherence in his life terminates with the owning of a house of his own. Though the multiple defects and drawbacks of the house lessen his charm, he is excited because he has now found some meaning in his existence in the world. He exclaims: “How terrible it would have been … to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and
The House on Mango Street is the tale about a young girl named Esperanza who is maturing throughout the text. In it Esperanza documents the events and people who make up Mango Street. It is through this community that Esperanza’s ideas and concepts of the relationships between men and women are shaped. She provides detailed accounts about the oppression of women at not only the hands of men who make up Mango Street but also how the community contributes to this oppression. As the young girls and women of Mango Street try to navigate the world they must deal with a patriarchal society that seeks to keep them confined. By growing up in this environment where women are confined Esperanza seeks desperately to depart from Mango Street for fear
...spoke a Spanish Creole. This made a clear distinction between the two and made it easy for the government to identify the difference. The reader sees how such themes of Birth and Death show so prominently throughout the characters that one must focus on how birth and deaths affect the concept of the individual relating to their own Negritude. It is culture, not skin tones but rather the beliefs and values that each country be it Haiti or Dominican Republic relate to. Danticat’s novel helps us understand the strengths and limits that Rene Depestre states in The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation “there is a progressive ‘negritude’ that expounds the need to rise above all the alienations of man . . . and there is “an irrational reactionary and mystic version of ‘negritude’ which serves . . . as a cultural base for neo-colonialist penetration into our countries” (244).
Esperanza, the main character of The House on Mango Street, a novella written by Sandra Cisneros in 1984, has always felt like she didn’t belong. Esperanza sought a different life than the ones that people around her were living. She wanted to be in control of her life, and not be taken away by men as so many others around her had. Esperanza wanted to move away from Mango Street and find the house, and life she had always looked for. Through the use of repetition, Sandra Cisneros conveys a sense of not belonging, that can make a person strong enough to aspire to a better life.
The Caribbean has been an unexplained region throughout the test of time because there are many different depictions of what actually is happening. The ranging cultures in the Caribbean bring about many different points of view. A perfect example is how Cliff, Mintz, and Benitez-Rojo describe their version of the Caribbean. They discuss affairs in the Caribbean from the days of slave trading to present day issues. In analyzing their anecdotes and books, one can find not only similarities between them, but discrepancies as well. All three authors express their thoughts vividly, unleashing ideas about the Caribbean. Among the most important themes of these ideas were that of the plantation, identity, and social hierarchy.
Imperialism in the Caribbean region produced institutions and movements that deeply affected and continue to affect the Caribbean region. Interpersonal conflicts related to gender, sex and sexuality in a character represent the colonization and its ongoing effects in the Caribbean region. Throughout the semester we have read many novels that have emphasized Caribbean women’s subjectivities and how they have been obliterated through race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Elizabeth Nunez’s novel, Bruised Hibiscus, is a Caribbean novel filled with the complexities of colonization and patterns of power in the lives of individual men and women. Colonization is definitely represented as part of the problem in this novel; however, Nunez’s readers realize the domination of men over women in European colonialism as well as the differences between passion and power, black and white, and male and female. Bruised Hibiscus is a dark exploration of power and sexuality due to the finding of a murdered woman’s body that causes consciousness of both women. The empowerment created through interpersonal conflicts often results in the life one lives based on the power exhibited through gender, sex and sexuality.
When it comes to post-colonial literature, most initially think about the colonization of other countries and how it has affected the natives. Though it is the most well known form of post-colonial literature, it is not the most wide-spread. By slightly altering the framing in which one looks at it, the idea that feminist literature by women from a patriarchal society is post-colonial literature begins to make sense.
This research study focuses at negotiating the shifting identities of immigrants and their traumas in postcolonial literature with reference to Lahiri’s fiction. The suffering of every immigrant in achieving a shelter and identity in a foreign land often leads to loss of identity. The qualms, agitation and nervousness of immigrants often increase the issues of identity, and immigrants often feel alienated in the midst of exotic land, they even start to think about achieving new identities. Stuart Hall (1987) a famous cultural theorist discusses the issues of cultural identity and migration as he says “Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to”. Change in the place and ambience totally change the circumstances in the lives of immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction, they often try to cling to their own cultural identity and costumes. But the cultural effect is often so strong that it deeply affects the identity of immigrants and they ultimately try to change their identities. Immigrants make an absurd attempt to get mingled in the culture of foreign country. Hall discusses “Cultural identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).
Nevertheless, inequality continues to be a major problem within cities and between rural and urban areas. Encompassing this situation is Katherine Boo’s novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which attempts to shine some light on the conditions of Mumbai’s informal settlements. Following the life of two rural migrant families residing in the Annawadi settlement, Boo highlights the everyday challenges individuals must fact to survive. As such, one of the major topics of the novel is inequality as a consequences of a lack of investment in basic needs, a matter of poor planning based on interest differences as well as corruption. Therefore, it can be argued that through her novel, Boo was able to successfully depict the how inequality has impacted the lives of those residing in informal settlements, with the fact that housing and land rights alone is an issue not being properly dealt
The way in which Benítez-Rojo and Mintz tackle the question of Caribbean identity in their articles, is a removed, objective ideal, in contrast to Michelle Cliff’s portrayal of Jamaican identity. Cliff’s portrayal touches the heart and soul of Caribbean identity. While Mintz and Benítez-Rojo are investigating trends in the Caribbean as a whole, from an outside perspective, Cliff offers the personal, tactile imagery of what it is to live in the Caribbean, utilizing the objective account of history as a background. Furthermore, Cliff deals with Jamaica, one island in the Caribbean, while Mintz and Benítez-Rojo are dealing with the Caribbean on a grand scaled overview. The fact is neither article can be taken as complete truth. In fact, although Cliff uses history in her novel, I believe the account of history from someone who has completely accessed the interior of a place, is always going to be biased. Likewise, Mintz and Benítez-Rojo in making their hypotheses, are lacking an insider’s view. It is the difference between a Caribbean person and Caribbeanist, respectively. Therefore, while on a logical level, an analytical level, Benítez-Rojo and Mintz’s, conclusions as to Caribbean identity could rightly be accepted, these two authors do not possess the experience and intensity to make me as a reader, convinced of their conclusions.
This essay will be about a comparative study of the representation of colonialism as a positive or negative force. The texts that are being used are my core text ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad and ‘Collected Poems’ by Rudyard Kipling. The partner text will be ‘Swami and Friends’ by R. K. Narayan.
Lately Indian novelist has shifted from rural to metro India, which is the living soul of the country. The problems of urbanization and the problems faced by the people of metro India find a powerful expression in Indian English fiction.
In this paper feminist aspect of post colonization will be studied in “Season of Migration to the North” novel by Tayeb Salih. Postcolonial feminism can be defined as seeks to compute for the way that racism and the long-lasting economic, cultural, and political influences of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world, according to Oxford dictionary. As it mentioned earlier about the application of Feminism theory in literature, the provided definition of postcolonial feminism also is not applicable in literature analysis. Therefore, Oxford defines another applic...
The inhabited islands clustered in the Caribbean Sea are an interesting study in cultural and social identity. Colonized by european powers from the Fifteenth Century, the Caribbean islands have become mixtures of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India, as well as from the original inhabitants of the islands. As a result, describing and defining the Caribbean is a much more difficult task than it appears on the surface. The norms and ideas of identity and history that exist on one island are vastly different than those that exist on a near neighbor, despite similarities in geography and history.
Postcolonial authors use their literature and poetry to solidify, through criticism and celebration, an emerging national identity, which they have taken on the responsibility of representing. Surely, the reevaluation of national identity is an eventual and essential result of a country gaining independence from a colonial power, or a country emerging from a fledgling settler colony. However, to claim to be representative of that entire identity is a huge undertaking for an author trying to convey a postcolonial message. Each nation, province, island, state, neighborhood and individual is its own unique amalgamation of history, culture, language and tradition. Only by understanding and embracing the idea of cultural hybridity when attempting to explore the concept of national identity can any one individual, or nation, truly hope to understand or communicate the lasting effects of the colonial process.
There are people bustling, merchants selling, Anglo-Indians watching, and birds flying overhead. How many perspectives are there in this one snippet of life? They are uncountable, and that is the reality. Modernist writers strive to emulate this type of reality into their own work as well. In such novels, there is a tendency to lack a chronological or even logical narrative and there are also frequent breaks in narratives where the perspectives jump from one to another without warning. Because there are many points of view and not all of them are explained, therefore, modernist novels often tend to have narrative perspectives that suddenly shift or cause confusion. This is because modernism has always been an experimental form of literature that lacks a traditional narrative or a set, rigid structure. Therefore, E. M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, uses such techniques to portray the true nature of reality. The conflict between Adela, a young British girl, and Aziz, an Indian doctor, at the Marabar Caves is one that implements multiple modernist ideals and is placed in British-India. In this novel, Forster shows the relations and tension between the British and the Indians through a series of events that were all caused by the confusing effects of modernism. E.M. Forster implements such literary techniques to express the importance or insignificance of a situation and to emphasize an impression of realism and enigma in Chandrapore, India, in which Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, takes place.