Tag: Literature/Literary Studies
“Only When the Whole World Becomes One Family”: The Ideal Vision of a Eurasian
My paper benefits from Lisa Lowe’s idea of heterogeneity and multiplicity, Foucault’s notion of power, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. My ultimate aim is to challenge the binary axis of power by examining how Sui Sin Far, a pioneer of Asian American writer, enunciates to resist the mechanism of power which attempted to dominate and …
Beyond “Sex and the Family”: Revisionist Historiography in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
Until the early nineties and due to various reasons, the experiences of (Korean) comfort women were edited out of Korean and Japanese historical narratives, highlighting how power dynamics and different agendas lead to the sanitization and censoring of historical records. In her novel Comfort Woman (1997), Nora Okja Keller positions Akiko, a survivor of Japanese …
Identity Quest: When East Meets West in Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis: A Post-Colonial Reading
The cultural representation of the Western Other in modern Arabic fiction is a formidable body of texts that stretches over a span of almost one hundred years – from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present. Emerging out of the experience of colonization, most of these fictional narratives have asserted themselves by foregrounding …
When One Novel Talks with Another: The Dialogue Between Camus’ The Stranger and Kamel Daoud’s the Meursault Investigation
One of the 20th century’s major works of fiction is Camus’ The Stranger, a novel where a French Algerian kills an Arab and is executed for it. Is his condemnation based more on his disinterest in the recent passing of his mother? For many years, Meursault, the protagonist of this novel, beguiled readers with his …
Pushing European Boundaries Towards East and West: Gulliver in Japan and America
Worldwide, in the East as well as in the West, one character has become a part of everybodys childhood, regardless of ethnicity, national or cultural belongings, age and status. The fame of Lemuel Gulliver has survived from early eighteenth century until today, outlasting many other fictitious protagonists in world literature, making Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels …
Marriage Al ‘Mosaico’ in Divorzio All’Islamica a Viale Marconi: Muslim-Arab Migrants’ Code Switching at Play in Amara Lakhous’ Novel
The present article focuses on a popular novel set in Rome, Divorzio all’ islamica a Viale Marconi (2010), in which the Italian-Algerian author Amara Lakhous discusses the struggles of immigrants in an ‘arabicized Italian’ narrative style. The study offers insights on the patterns and meanings of code-switching as used by postcolonial Muslim-Arab migrants living in …
Teaching Whiteness in American Literature
Teaching Whiteness in American Literature discusses challenges to raising the consciousness of university students of American literature about the impact of whiteness/white supremacy on the development of American characters as they have been portrayed in American literature from J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur’s late 17th century Letter’s from an American Farmer to David Mamet’s …
What Happens When We “Cage” Our Fellow Humans?
Literature is a powerful medium for examining justice, judgment, and society’s treatment of humankind. “Does justice have a dark side?” Many pieces of literature show the dark side of man’s justice, such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which presents a young woman being punished as an outcast while her guilty male partner remains free. Other …
The Disharmonized Space in Postcolonial Memoirs: The Case for Said and Achebe
This research paper will attempt to understand how space is integral in the formation of the colonial/postcolonial subject through the memoir of Edward Said’s Out of Place, and Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country and give justice to their spatial reality. The paper will respond to the primary texts through a focused theoretical understanding of …
Confronting Liminal Spaces: Iconography, Gender, Justice, and the Case of Perumal Murugan’s “One Part Woman”
In this paper, I examine the thematics of justice in the controversy surrounding Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s novel One Part Woman. The work was attacked by right-wing organizations, for its portrayal of an obsolete ritual associated with the Tiruchengode Kailasanathar temple, which supposedly cast women worshipers in bad light. Subsequently, Murugan was forced into self-exile …
Anti-Coloniality in Ali Ahmad Bakatheer’s Mismar Juha and Imberatoriyya Fil Mazad
Ali Ahmad Bakatheer (1910-1969) wrote a number of plays which dealt with some of the nation’s pressing issues. One of these issues is colonialism. He believed that the theatre can be used to address these issues, enlighten the masses to the dire consequences of colonialism, and awaken within them the call for liberation and anti-colonialism. …
Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Text of Non-Violence and Civil Disobedience
Recognized as a great anti-slavery narrative, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 19th century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often seen as more of a historical document today. Yet the way several of Stowe’s characters such as Mrs. Bird, Ophelia, and Uncle Tom himself confront the issues of slavery (or fail to) prophetically mirrors the positions of non-violence …