scholarly journals Oppressive Faces of Whiteness in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 258-277
Author(s):  
Klara Szmańko

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress contributes significantly to the literary debate on the definition of whiteness. The socio-historical construction of whiteness emerging from the novel is amplified by white imagery dovetailing with the claims made about white people directly. For the African American first person narrator, Easy Rawlins, living in post-World War II Los Angeles, whiteness mostly spells terror. The oppressive faces of whiteness consist in the following trajectories: property relations, economic exploitation, labour relations, the legal system, different miens of oppressive white masculinity denigrating blackness, spatial dynamics of post-World War II Los Angeles and the white apparatus of power that the narrator needs to confront throughout the novel. White imagery carried to the extreme magnifies the terrorizing aspect of whiteness in the narrative. Like many authors of colour, Mosley associates whiteness with death. Whiteness inundates Easy Rawlins from all sides, entailing insincerity, dishonesty, interestedness and hypocrisy.

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110447
Author(s):  
Yuliya Kazanova

Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this article examines Oksana Zabuzhko’s latest novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets as postmemorial fiction, which articulates the trauma of Soviet political repressions in the post–World War II period and in the 1970s via the perception of the second and third generation. The affiliative postmemory about World War II in Ukraine from the viewpoint of Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans is emplotted via an original generic combination of contemporary Holocaust fiction and romances of the archive. Postmemory is used in the novel to shape a mythologised alternative historical narrative that reconceptualises the country’s difficult past as a story of heroic resistance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Diler ◽  
Derya Emir

In the post-World War II period, magical realism, as a distinctive mode of fiction, has offered cultural hybridity, transformation and intermingling, and has thus been a significant means of communication for the postcolonial world. It has enabled postcolonial authors to get the chance of observing the world from a different perspective and seeing the truth with a ‘third eye’. The Nigerian-British author Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1991, is one of the postcolonial magical realist novels aiming at viewing the world with a third eye. In The Famished Road, Okri attempts to investigate sociopolitical and historical realities, to understand and solve the paradoxes and secrets of history in the language of magic and dreams. In the novel he connects politics directly with the concept of history; his conception of ‘inviolate’ African consciousness becomes the base for his representation of history. The aim of this study is to scrutinize the ways in which Okri encodes African consciousness versus Western epistemology and reevaluates history. The study tries to analyze how Okri redreams postcolonial potentials for his hometown, Nigeria, by extension for the whole African continent, through magical realism functioning as a third eye in The Famished Road.


2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Eric Stewart

Beginning in the 1880s, transportation innovations allowed the City of Los Angeles to expand past natural barriers and develop the vast land beyond the city's core. The cable car and the electric trolley aided the expression of a Victorian residential ideal and urban aesthetic imported into Los Angeles from “back East” and the Midwest. Streetcar suburbs, the earliest form of urban flight, emerged on what were then the outer fringes of the city, initiating perpetual sprawl. While the city's massive growth in the 1920s as well as extensive post–World War II suburbanization cannot be ignored, such development has obscured the much earlier origins of sprawl in the historiography. This paper argues that Victorian Los Angeles instituted trends aimed at low-density, outward growth, which the streetcar enabled, Progressive planners reinforced, and which bore many of the drawbacks associated with modern urban sprawl.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Maftuna Sanoqulova ◽  

This article consists of the politics which connected with oil in Saudi Arabia after the World war II , the relations of economical cooperations on this matter and the place of oil in the history of world economics


Author(s):  
Reumah Suhail

The paper addresses the different aspects of the politics of immigration, the underlying factors that motivate, force or pressurize people to move from their country of origin to new abodes in foreign nations. In the introduction the paper discusses different theories playing their due role in the immigration process, namely Realism and Constructivism. The paper examines the history of immigration and post-World War II resettlement followed by an analysis of how immigration policies are now centered towards securitization as opposed to humanitarianism after 9/11, within the scenario of globalization. Muslim migrant issues and more stringent immigration policies are also weighed in on, followed by a look at immigration in regions which are not hotspot settlement destinations. Lastly an analysis is presented about the selection of a host country a person opts for when contemplating relocation; a new concept is also discussed and determined whereby an individual can opt for “citizenship by investment” and if such a plan is an accepted means of taking on a new nationality.


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