6. Reorienting the Colonial Body: Space and the Imposition of Literacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 219-250
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Body

Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-95
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Body ◽  
Small Things ◽  
Social Orders

Understandings of trauma in the colonial context fall largely into two strands. A therapeutic strand endorses the potential for “healing” from colonial trauma in the present, postcolonial era but fails to grasp how much this era reprises the toxins of colonialism itself. This view implicitly encourages the once-colonized to align themselves with the purported “health” of postcolonial modernity. An anti-therapeutic strand grants the need for a critique of the postcolonial but generalizes the historically specific toxins of that era to any and all social orders—hence making it difficult to imagine social change. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things provide more historically astute and dialectical accounts than the theoretical models offer. These examples of postcolonial historical fiction are modernist in form; they explore distinct yet homologous types of domination (slavery and the slave trade on one hand, exploitation colonialism in India on the other) through a similar set of representational techniques. These techniques are crucial to the novels’ political astuteness. The books’ temporally disordered forms at once record the fragmentations and devastations visited on the colonial body and provide intimations of an alternative, erotic futurity in which those bodies will have been made whole.

A Comparative Study of Pecola and Gyanoda: Sex, Violence and Beauty in the Bluest Eye and Arakshaniya

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-26
Author(s):  
Sajal Sarkar ◽  
Moshref Jahan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Body

Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938) in Arakshaniya (1916) has pictured Gyanoda, a socially abandoned and oppressed Bengali Hindu girl of 12/13 expected to be married off. Unable to endure the sexual violence and cruelties thrown upon her, Pecola in The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison (b. 1931) looses her sanity. The colonial- society-constructed idea of beauty, the hurling insults of her schoolmates and neighbors, the perverted assurance of achieving beauty from the pedophile Soaphead Church and above all the sexual violence that she receives from her father leaves her in a dark world. Apart from her friends, she receives sympathy only from socially unaccepted ‘ruined’ women. Unlike Pecola, Gyanoda was restored to the world of love and affection primarily by her mother, younger aunt and then by Atul, her assumed love. Gyanoda, though rejected and humiliated by the family and the society, was not a total rejection as Pecola was. She managed to live on though not in a respected manner. This paper looks into Pecola’s psychic procedural patterns to show how she becomes an object of perversion and violence, which along with the established idea of beauty takes her to the verge of insanity. A comparative study has been done between Pecola and Gyanoda, two characters from two entirely different ethnicities and cultures. However, surprisingly both the characters encounter social hostility for their common characteristic “ugliness.” The very presumption of beauty, violence, and sex lead these young girls to the different worlds of their own. Black and female identities occupy very real political spaces of diaspora, dispossession and resistance. What is complicated is the simultaneity of suffering and power, marginalization and threat, submission and narcissism, which accre to Black and women’s bodies and their representation in racist cultures.--from “Feminism and the Colonial Body” by Kadiatu Kanneth.

Imperialism, Race, and Therapeutics: The Legacy of Medicalizing the “Colonial Body”

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Barton
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
Gynecology And Obstetrics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Body ◽  
The 19Th Century

The BiDil controversy in America coincides with a renewed interest in the linkages between race and therapeutics, whether in the medical history of the United States itself, or in the colonial world. During the colonial era in South Asia, many anthropological and medical researchers conducted research which compared the European and “colonial” body, contrasting everything from blood composition to brain weight between the races of the Indian Empire. This, as Mark Harrison has shown, was fundamentally a phenomenon of the 19th century, arguing that “[i]t was only after 1800 that racial identities came to be fixed and that India was viewed with terror, as a reservoir of filth and disease.” Racist attitudes in British Indian colonial medicine are not hard to discover. They underpinned, for instance, campaigns to improve the appallingly high maternal and infant mortality rates in which the blame was placed squarely upon the women and the indigenous midwives who delivered them rather than the poverty in which they lived. As such, Peers Dimmock, a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Calcutta Medical School, opened his address to the First Indian Medical Congress in 1894 with a diatribe against “the unclean and repulsive traditionary [sic] methods of the native midwives.”

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