Literature: Different Perspectives and Approaches in Postcolonial Studies
Göksel ÖZTÜRK (Volume editor)
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Postcolonial Reading of a Colonial Text: Transcultural Encounters in Robinson Crusoe
- Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino: A Fanonian Reading
- A Transmodern Reading of Black Feminist Activism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other
- Postcolonial Translation from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: The Case of the Turkish Translations of Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Silenced Past: The Postcolonial Gothic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- The Past-Present Dichotomy of the Immigrants in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poems
- The Irish Potato Famine and Colonial Biopolitics: Tom Murphy’s Famine
- Who is the British Citizen?: Being The Immigrant in This Is England
- Volunteerism in the Age of Postcolonialism Postcolonial Perspectives of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO)
- Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden: Repainting The Lion
- Invisible Bullets of the British Raj: Subversion and Containment in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim
- Achebe and Emecheta: Representations of Masculinity and Femininity
- Bio of Authors
Introduction
Postcolonial studies which is known to be the period that reflects the aftermath of the colonial period, and about the conditions of the once colonized. However, it should not be considered in a narrow sense, as it goes beyond the traditional hegemonic relationships between the East and the West, the white and the black, and the dichotomy of tradition and modernity. It represents the combination of interdisciplinary research areas such as historical, theoretical, national, and geographical ones. It also deals with the past, present, and future as the issues of colonialism, imperialism, the struggle of the colonized, and the lasting relationship between the colonizer and the colonized are always global concerns of the world. As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin1 also express in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, “Postcolonialism (or often post-colonialism) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘postcolonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization” (168). Regarding these discussions, Synergy: Different Perspectives and Approaches in Postcolonial Studies aims at examining and exploring alternative perspectives to postcolonial studies. Accordingly, in the book the use of postcolonialism in translation studies in literature, the Gothic, the colonial perspective, the issue of immigration, rewriting, and literary criticism are addressed as the subjects of postcolonial studies. In the first chapter Assoc. Prof. Dr. A. Nejat Töngür explores Robinson Crusoe’s colonist attitude towards not only Friday but also the people from different countries including his friends, his benefactors, and his slaves in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The second chapter has Assoc. Prof. Dr. Alev Karaduman’s article in which she presents the postcolonial issues in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino by referring to the postcolonial elements in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask. In Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kuğu Tekin and Dr. Zeynep Rana Turgutt’s chapter they explore the contemporary black feminist activism in the twenty-first British society by analysing Bernardine Evaristo’s novel, Girl, Woman, Other. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sinem Sancaktaroğlu Bozkurt in the fourth chapter, dwells on the relationship between translation studies and postcolonial studies analyzing Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels through Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural translation, Salman Rushdie’s translated men, Maria Tymoczko’s hybrid translation strategies within the framework of Paul Bandia’s Tripartite Translation Process. In the fifth chapter, Dr. Yıldıray Çevik presents the link between the postcolonial and the Gothic, and analyses Toni Morrison’s Beloved through the postcolonial and gothic elements. The sixth chapter has Dr. Pınar Taşdelen’s article in which she examines Carol Ann Duffy’s poems, “Originally”, “Deportation”, and “Foreign” in terms of the past and the present dichotomy. In the seventh chapter, Dr. İmren Yelmiş explores the biopolitical representation of the British colonial administration in the Great Famine in Tom Murphy’s postcolonial play, Famine. Dr. Emine Seda Çağlayan Mazanoğlu’s concern in the eighth chapter is the presentation of the struggle between the English people and the Commonwealth immigrants in England, which is provoked by the politics of the period in This is England (dir.Shane Meadows). In the ninth chapter, Dr. Zafer Parlak analyses postcolonial perspectives of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). The tenth chapter has Dr. Azime Ekşen Yarar’s article in which she analyses the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden in terms of postcolonial theories of rewriting. In the eleventh chapter, Dr. Yakut Akbay examines the imperial power in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim through new historicism. In the twelfth chapter, Dr. Duygu Serdaroğlu focuses on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price, and analyses the (re)formulated representation of femininity and masculinity.
The authors of the chapters are responsible for the ideas and discussions in the works they present.
1 Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., Tiffin H. (2007). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. (2nd ed.). Routledge.
A. Nejat Töngür1
ORCID: 0000-0002-1204-4399
Postcolonial Reading of a Colonial Text: Transcultural Encounters In Robinson Crusoe2
Daniel Defoe’s acclaimed work, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was first published in 1719 to be followed by the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in the same year and the third book to the sequel, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1720. To truly understand Robinson Crusoe, rereading the text with a postcolonial hermeneutic is essential because Robinson Crusoe is a sample of colonialist fiction which suggested “the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire [while i]ts distinctive stereotyped language was geared to mediating the White man’s relationship with colonised peoples” (Boehmer, 1995, p. 3). Pui-Lan defined postcolonial hermeneutics as ‘‘a reading strategy and discursive practice that seeks to unmask colonial epistemological frameworks, unravel Eurocentric logics and interrogate stereotypical cultural representations’’ (as cited in Leshota, 2014, p. 143). Similarly, Dewi (2018) argued that postcolonial hermeneutics, which is “appropriate to challenge the dominant discourse”, can be employed “as reading tools to rediscover the lost experiences and perspectives of the colonized subjects” (pp. 61, 54). Postcolonial reading of a colonialist text also requires questioning the validity of “the values once taken for granted by a powerful Anglocentric discourse” (Brydon & Tiffin, 1993, p. 11) and “the discourses which supported colonization” (Boehmer, 1995, p. 3). When a postcolonial “reading strategy” to reread the texts produced during the colonialism view is adapted (McLeod, 2000, p. 33; Ashcroft et al., 1989, pp. 189, 193; Ashcroft et al., 1995, p. 16;), these texts are discovered to be portraying the indigenous people in other lands pejoratively as barbaric, heathen, savage, evil, primitive and inferior as colonialists exalt their culture, language, religion, institutions and life style as the norm (Brydon & Tiffin, 1993; Aladaylah, 2012; Neimneh, 2013; Leshota, 2014). Robinson Crusoe, too, has been considered as a “paradigmatic account of early English imperialism and its colonial motifs have, not surprisingly, received considerable attention from postcolonial commentators” (Thieme, 2001, p. 55), and, therefore it is appropriate to restudy the text in the 21st century.
Defoe was a prolific writer who wrote in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a relatively peaceful period in the history of the United Kingdom after William of Orange secured stability in the country. However, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe starts in the 17th century when the country was in turmoil because of the Civil War. When a postcolonial hermeneutic is adapted as a reading tool for Defoe’s work, brief historical information about the competition between Spain, Portugal and Britain, colonialism, slave trade, plantation and settlement is essential. The 17th century was also the time when the British people’s migration to the other countries and continents began after the first voyage to the New Continent and with the strengthening economic and commercial bonds with the Indian Sub-Continent in the early 17th century. Besides, the 17th century was the beginning of the gradual transformation of Britain into the British Empire over 200 years and the start of the ‘Britannic exodus’ which would result in 20 million people leaving the British Isles (Ferguson, 2003). Lured by the prospects of having gold and silver, dissatisfied with the results of the Reformation and aspiring for free land and profitable plantations to produce sugar, rice and tobacco in the Americas, people from the British Isles started to flow to other parts of the world (Ferguson, 2003, pp. 53–68).
Throughout the novel, it is possible to trace how Defoe reflected the dominance of the Portuguese and Spanish trade ships and sailors in the Atlantic Ocean with their colonies and plantations in South America. When Christopher Columbus set sail to the Americas in 1492, his expedition was sponsored by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The then Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo de Borja y Doms, was a Spanish man who did not hesitate to issue the well-known bull Intercaetera on 4 May 1493 to favour the Spanish king in his competition for the new lands and wealth. With this decree, the Pope authorized Spain and Portugal to colonize, convert, and enslave the new continent and its people, and he asserted the right of Spain and Portugal to enslave Africans. With this Bull, the Pope divided the world along a circle passing 100 leagues (555,6 km) West of the Cape Verde Islands and through the two poles, giving the entire New World to Spain and Africa and India to Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 expanded the Portuguese share to a circle passing 370 leagues (2055,72 km) West of the Cape Verde Islands to include today’s Brazil.
Details
- Pages
- 206
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631897829
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631897836
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631853801
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20597
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (May)
- Keywords
- bilingualism cognitive stylistics contrastive rhetoric intercultural rhetoric Morphophonology syntactic priming
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. 206 pp., 1 table.
Biographical notes
Alev KARADUMAN (Volume editor)
Göksel ÖZTÜRK (Volume editor)
The Editors Alev Karaduman graduated in 1990 from Hacettepe University, Faculty of Letters, Department of English Language and Literature. She received her MA in 1996 and PhD in 2003 from the same University on the 18th- and 19th-century English novel. She has been a visiting research fellow at Syracuse University (USA) and at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany). Moreover, for her postdoctoral studies on post-colonial English literature, she has carried out research at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She has also been an ERASMUS visiting lecturer at Technische Universität Dortmund (Germany). She has not only published in learned national and international journals but also presented papers at national and international conferences. Currently, she is working as a Vice Dean at the Faculty of Letters and teaching as an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University. Göksel Öztürk is an Asst. Prof. Dr. at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bursa Technical University. He completed his BA in English Language and Literature at Selçuk University. He completed his MA in English Language and Literature at Namık Kemal University. He completed his Ph.D. in Translation and Cultural Studies at Gazi University in 2020. His main interests are translation of comics and children‘s periodicals, literary translation, manipulation in translation, multimodal translation, and cultural studies. He is also interested in HyFlex and Flipped learning models instructional design.
