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New Developments in Postcolonial Studies

by Malgorzata Martynuska (Volume editor) Elzbieta Rokosz-Piejko (Volume editor)
©2017 Edited Collection 234 Pages

Summary

This book analyses the applicability of postcolonial theories and contemporary issues, and also revisits previously tackled cultural, social and literary phenomena. The contributions examine contemporary social, economic and cultural processes. The authors look back at older cultural texts, coming from either former colonies or former colonisers. They furthermore refer to the fact that theories of postcolonialism are currently more frequently applied to study countries originally not classified as colonial. They attempt to define and explain the experiences of the native peoples of colonial territories in various historical situations of dependence.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Postcolonial Literature(s)
  • Sharing Space with Others: Re-Thinking the Multicultural Encounter (Anna Branach-Kallas)
  • Education as a Tool for Creating Hybrid Anglo-Welsh Identity in 19th- and 20th-century Welsh Novels (Aldona Bakiera)
  • Postcolonial Ireland in McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy (Oksana Weretiuk)
  • The Image of the Other in The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury – A Supplement to Postcolonial Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Travel Works (Barbara Ludwiczak)
  • Buddhist Ecocriticism in Selected Works of Aldous Huxley’s and Chris Arthur’s Essays (Małgorzata Warchał)
  • Towards a Postcolonial Ecocriticism: A Reading of Mamang Dai’s Legends of Pensam (Anjali Daimari)
  • Liminality as Seen Through the Gardens of Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Days (Patrycja Austin)
  • When Hybrids Collide – Co-Hybridisation in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (Izabela Bierowiec)
  • Cracked Within: Reading the Sri Lankan Civil War in Jean Arasanayagam’s The Dividing Line (Dolikajyoti Sharma)
  • Orality, Textuality and Literary Legacy in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen (Rachael Sumner)
  • Part II: Postcolonial States, Hybrid Identites, Disregarded Territories
  • Stimuli and Challenges of “Mozambican Identity” in Africa. A Brief Analysis of the Processes of the Construction of National and Cultural Identity in Mozambique: A Postcolonial Approach (Fabrício Dias da Rocha)
  • Cooking up Cubanidad: Cultural Hybridity in the Case of Cuban American Cuisine (Małgorzata Martynuska)
  • The Long Road to the South Pole: Post-colonial Antarctica (Johanna Grabow)
  • Part III: Postcolonial (?) Poland
  • Square Pegs into Round Holes: The Contemporary (Mis)Use of Postcolonial Theory in Poland and an Alternative (Gregory Allen)
  • Neocolonialism in Polish Consumer Society (Mira Malczyńska-Biały)
  • Russian Invaders and Their Polish Subjects from the Perspective of Władysław Lech Terlecki (Anna Jamrozek-Sowa)
  • Part IV: Postcolonial Literature in Translation
  • Colonisation of Mind in Translation as Illustrated Through the Polish Rendition of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Łukasz Barciński)
  • Postcolonial Literature in Translation: Polish Translations of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz)
  • List of Contributors
  • Series Index

← 8 | 9 →

Acknowledgments

We are most grateful to our colleague dr Patrycja Austin, without whose ideas, contacts, energy and devotion the authors of the articles included in this volume would never have become involved in the project. We also wish to express our gratitude to Prof. Marek Koziorowski, Vice-Rector of the University of Rzeszów, and to Prof. Zenon Ożóg, Dean of the Faculty of Philology, for their benevolence and significant financial support. ← 9 | 10 →

← 10 | 11 →

Introduction

The present volume titled New Developments in Postcolonial Studies is a collection of eighteen essays, all of which touch upon–from a variety of perspectives–the question of the applicability of postcolonial theories to analyses of contemporary issues, as well as to revisiting previously tackled cultural, social and literary phenomena. Presenting such a selection of texts–varied and interdisciplinary as they are–we would like to contribute to the ongoing discussion upon the postcolonial reality and both current and emerging developments in the field of postcolonial studies. The articles, grouped thematically, either examine from the postcolonial perspective contemporary social, economic and cultural processes and phenomena, or look back at older cultural texts, coming from either former colonies, or former colonisers, taking into account the fact that the theory of postcolonialism is currently being more frequently applied to the study of countries originally not classified as colonial, to explain and emphasize the experiences of the native peoples of those lands in various historical situations of dependence.

The first and the longest section of the volume, titled Postcolonial Literature(s), offers analyses of a variety of literary texts. The opening essay, “Sharing Space with Others: Re-Thinking the Multicultural Encounter” authored by Anna Branach-Kallas, is an attempt to discuss selected theoretical propositions in English and French responding to the dilemma of how to share postcolonial space with the Other. The author adopts postcolonial trauma theory to analyse Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s Révolutions (2003), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (2008). The two essays which follow refer to the postcolonial status of Wales and Ireland, reflected in selected literary works. Aldona Bakiera in “Education as a Tool for Creating Hybrid Anglo-Welsh Identity in 19th- and 20th-century Welsh Novels” provides a postcolonial reading of two novels: Feet in Chains (1936) by Kate Roberts and The Life of Rebeca Jones (2012) by Angharad Price. The author focuses on the process of identity transformation in the characters as a result of their English educational experience and argues that the process is that of displacement of their Welsh identity and the gradual emergence of a hybrid Anglo-Welsh identity. Oksana Weretiuk in “Postcolonial Ireland in McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy” examines the way in which McCarthy’s Bar. A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (1998) might be located within the paradigm of postcolonial studies, suggesting a postcolonial interpretation of McCarthy’s perception ← 11 | 12 → of Ireland, Irishness, and Irish history. The next article, Barbara Ludwiczak’s “The Image of the Other in The Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury–A Supplement to Postcolonial Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Travel Works” is an analysis of the image of the Other featured in twelve letters written during the writer’s eight-month journey around the world in 1875. The author tries to prove that Trollope’s attitude towards colonialism evolved and the letters appear as the writer’s first and only attempt to understand the aboriginal peoples. Małgorzata Warchał’s “Buddhist Ecocriticism in Selected Works of Aldous Huxley’s and Chris Arthur’s Essays” is the first of the articles included in this volume which refer to ecocriticism and its connections with postcolonial studies. The author examines selected works of Aldous Huxley and a contemporary Irish essayist, Chris Arthur, with reference to Buddhist ecocriticism, i.e. a combination of Buddhist and ecological ethics. The other article which applies postcolonial ecocriticism to a literary analysis is Anjali Daimari’s essay titled “Towards a Postcolonial Ecocriticism: A Reading of Mamang Dai’s Legends of Pensam”. The text is an attempt at reading the North-Eastern Indian writer’s 2006 novel taking into consideration the significance of the natural environment of the setting, being an integral part of the backdrop and landscape of the region. Patrycja Austin in her article “Liminality as Seen Through the Gardens of Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Days” follows John Thieme’s belief expressed in his recent publication Postcolonial Literary Geographies. Out of Place that gardens in postcolonial literature are discursively constructed liminal spaces, and she analyses various forms of border crossing in Salman Rushdie’s 2015 novel, focusing on the problems of migration and belonging, colonialism and postcoloniality, the intermingling of cultures, ecological crisis and terrorism. Izabela Bierowiec’s “When Hybrids Collide–Co-Hybridisation in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” is an attempt at identifying the mutual influence of social hybrids as depicted by the Bangladeshi-born British writer in her 2003 novel. The point of the author is that immigrants of different generations residing within a common, yet fairly isolated area within the host society undergo a specific type of assimilation. The remaining two essays of Part I discuss a selection of texts heralding from former colonies. Dolikajyoti Sharma in Cracked Within: Reading the Sri Lankan Civil War in Jean Arasanayagam’s The Dividing Line” looks at the 2002 collection of short stories by the Sri Lankan writer of Dutch-Burgher descent, who uses the themes of displacement and exile to question the postcolonial nation-state of Sri Lanka and the identities imposed on those forced to flee from their homes during the civil war in the 1980s. As the author notices, the stories included in the anthology, set in both ← 12 | 13 → pre- and post-Independence milieus, seem to imply that the relative positions of the Sinhalas, Tamils and Burghers in the 1980s are a perpetuation of the institutional and cultural hierarchies that characterized colonial Sri Lanka. The last article, Rachael Sumner’s “Orality, Textuality and Literary Legacy in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen”, focuses on the Nigerian writer’s 2015 novel, which is characterised by intertextuality, linguistic code switching and the raising of local events to the level of national myth. As the author suggests, such techniques position Obioma’s narrative firmly within Nigerian literary and oral traditions, while also infusing the text with postcolonial political agency.

Part II, titled Postcolonial States, Hybrid Identities, Disregarded Territories, contains three essays examining selected social and cultural phenomena in their broadly understood postcolonial context. Fabrício Dias Da Rocha in “Stimuli and Challenges of ‘Mozambican Identity’ in Africa. A Brief Analysis of the Processes of the Construction of National and Cultural Identity in Mozambique: A Postcolonial Approach” discusses the process of the formation of Mozambican national and cultural identity as influenced by numerous historical and social processes, with special attention drawn to impact of the Portuguese colonization of the country. The author is trying to (de)construct what would be the Mozambican national being through situational observation of “non-black national minorities” experiences in the country’s postcolonial reality. In the next article, “Cooking up Cubanidad: Cultural Hybridity in the Case of Cuban American Cuisine”, Małgorzata Martynuska explores the notion of hybridity which involves the fusion of two relatively distinct forms or identities and a cross-cultural contact which often occurs across national borders. The article deals with cultural hybridity in the case of Cuban American cuisine and analyses the re-creation of food practices after the migratory experience, pointing out how Cuban-style dishes have been reinvented in the American context creating culturally hybrid cuisine, known as Nuevo Cubano, in Florida also called Floribbean Cuisine. The last of the group, Johanna Grabow’s “The Long Road to the South Pole: Post-colonial Antarctica”, provides us with the author’s attempt to integrate Antarctica into the post-colonial discourse. Despite being claimed in its parts by various states, Antarctica presents a challenge to those discussing post-colonialism, as it has no indigenous population, no artificial borders and no displaced peoples, being thus neglected as a “polar wasteland” for a long time. The author examines various engagements, seemingly colonial in their nature, such as Richard E. Byrd’s exploration work, as well as the ubiquitous role of science on the continent, to evaluate them from the postcolonial perspective. ← 13 | 14 →

Part III titled Postcolonial (?) Poland is the result of the attempt to incorporate within our project Polish literature and culture scholars who could contribute to the volume with their opinions concerning the connection–or its lack–between postcolonial studies and post-dependence studies within which Polish literature and culture can/is analysed. The three articles included here concern Polish history, literature and society viewed through the prism of postcolonial theories. Gregory Allen in “Square Pegs into Round Holes: The Contemporary (Mis)Use of Postcolonial Theory in Poland and an Alternative” explores the contemporary use of the postcolonial theory as a framework for Western interactions with Central and Eastern Europe. He argues that while such a framework provides a valid critical perspective, postcolonial theory seems to be stretched beyond its limits and a new approach is needed. Mira Malczyńska-Biały’s article “Neocolonialism in Polish Consumer Society” discusses the development of consumer society in Poland after 1989 as resulting partly from the process of neo-colonisation. The study shows that the modern model of a consumer goes beyond the scope of purchase as well as consumption and is related to the mass globalization of the consumption and generating a “consumer subculture”. Anna Jamrozek-Sowa’s articleRussian Invaders and Their Polish Subjects from the Perspective of Władysław Lech Terlecki”, which closes the section, provides a brief outline of the applicability of postcolonial theories to the analysis of Polish literature either of the time of the partition of Poland, or of the post-World War II years of political dependence on the Soviet Union. The author eventually proceeds to an analysis of selected novels by Władysław Lech Terlecki (1933–1999), namely Dwie głowy ptaka (1970), Wyspa kata (1999) and Czarny romans (1974), in which she concentrates, among others, on the use of the language by the colonisers (the Russians) and on the imposition of their dominant discourse upon the oppressed.

The last two articles of the volume, included in the Part IV, Postcolonial Literature in Translation, focus on some of the problems and challenges which translators of postcolonial literature encounter, and both use translations of Salman Rushdie’s novels as the material for the anlyses. Łukasz Barciński in “Colonisation of Mind in Translation as Illustrated Through the Polish Rendition of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie” examines the extent to which poststructural theory can be useful in defining postcolonial literature and the process of its translation. The author focuses on the similarities between the process of translation and the creation of postcolonial literature, referring both to the linguistic aspects and the psychological state of the author/translator. The final article, closing both the section and the volume as a whole, is Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz’s “Postcolonial Literature in Translation: Polish Translations of ← 14 | 15 → Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, which offers a comparative analysis of two Polish translations of the novel, focusing on such aspects as untranslatability of postcolonial Otherness, hybridity, polyphony and intertextuality. The analysis of the Polish translations included here becomes an excellent starting point for a discussion on translation of Otherness of the text/in the text.

The authors of the articles collected in this volume pose a number of questions, indicate new areas of research, open possible discussions, contributing in that way to the international postcolonial discourse. All we hope for is that any readers interested in what postcolonialism means, or can be understood as today, will find the collection interesting and possibly inspiring.

Details

Pages
234
Year
2017
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631711248
ISBN (PDF)
9783653069808
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631711255
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631675496
DOI
10.3726/978-3-653-06980-8
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (June)
Keywords
Colonisation Migration Ecocriticism Hybridity Dependance Identity
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2017. 234 pp., 3 graph.

Biographical notes

Malgorzata Martynuska (Volume editor) Elzbieta Rokosz-Piejko (Volume editor)

Małgorzata Martynuska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Poland. Her current research focuses on cultural hybridity of Hispanics living in the US. Elżbieta Rokosz-Piejko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Poland. She specialises in American literature and in adaptation studies.

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