scholarly journals Junto Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Narrative of Identity and Diaspora

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 202-212
Author(s):  
Samirah Almutairi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Junto Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raises the question of the identity formation for the Caribbean in diaspora. Diasporic Caribbean people struggle with understanding their difference and recognizing the important of assimilating to other people’s lives and cultures when they leave their home country. The struggle of the main character, Oscar Wao, in the novel is established perfectly well through apparent identity crisis that is manifested in his cultural displacements, childhood memories, real-life situations, and unsuccessful relationship with the other sex. It is a problem that Oscar creates his passage towards constructing a national identity, which ends in a tragic death. Caribbean people should privilege a hybrid identify if they want to live outside the West Indies. The present article aims to analyze from a postcolonial perspective Oscar’s futile search for national identity in diaspora and its consequences. This is clarified through a discussion of migration, the results of living in diaspora on the identity formation for the main character, relationships with women, and the concept of a return to the homeland.

scholarly journals Junto Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Narrative of Identity and Diaspora

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samirah Almutairi
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Junto Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raises the question of the identity formation for the Caribbean in diaspora. Diasporic Caribbean people struggle with understanding their difference and recognizing the important of assimilating to other people’s lives and cultures when they leave their home country. The struggle of the main character, Oscar Wao, in the novel is established perfectly well through apparent identity crisis that is manifested in his cultural displacements, childhood memories, real-life situations, and unsuccessful relationship with the other sex. It is a problem that Oscar creates his passage towards constructing a national identity, which ends in a tragic death. Caribbean people should privilege a hybrid identify if they want to live outside the West Indies. The present article aims to analyze from a postcolonial perspective Oscar’s futile search for national identity in diaspora and its consequences. This is clarified through a discussion of migration, the results of living in diaspora on the identity formation for the main character, relationships with women, and the concept of a return to the homeland.

scholarly journals Disrupted Parenthood in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Anastasiia Fediakova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Family Members ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Family ◽  
Caryl Phillips ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Contemporary Britain

Abstract In his debut novel The Final Passage, first published in 1985, Caryl Phillips (dis)connects the English and the Caribbean spaces simultaneously imposing this inbetweenness onto his continuously misplaced characters. This paper explores the novel through the lens of disrupted parenthood, demonstrating that the ties between the family members mirror the inability of the protagonists to belong or to sustain relationships. By applying a postcolonial framework and including both canonical and recent texts produced in the field, this paper analyses how racial labels and assumptions weaken fragile bonds and further displace the characters as it also attempts to fill a gap since aspects of distress and breakdown are often neglected in literary criticism. Finally, given the background of the West Indies, the paper incorporates social and anthropological works dedicated to the region and connects Phillips’s narrative to the stories of migrants in contemporary Britain.

The problem of language identity in Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novel I want! in contemporary sociocultural context

2020 ◽  
Vol 2019 (2 (11)) ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Baydalova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Life Goal ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
National Question ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Ukrainian Society

The novel by Volodymyr Vynnychenko I want! (1915) was, on one hand, his literary answer to the discussion on the national question in Ukrainian society, and, on the other, it was his reaction to the accusations of him being a renegade resulting from his shift towards Russian literature. In 1907-1908, after the publication of his dramas and novels which were impregnated with the idea of “being honest with oneself” (it implied that all thoughts, feelings, and acts were to be in harmony), his works could be more easily published in Russian than in Ukrainian. This situation was taken by his compatriots as a betrayal against his native language and the national cause. In the novel I want! the problem of language identity is directly linked with national identity. In the beginning of the novel the main character, poet Andrey Halepa, despite being ethnic Ukrainian, spoke, thought, and wrote poems in Russian, and consequently his personality was ruined and his actions lacked motivation. It seems that after his unsuccessful suicide attempt and under the influence of a “conscious” Ukrainian, Halepa got in touch with his national identity and developed a life goal (the “revival” of the Ukrainian nation and the building of a free-labour enterprise). However, in the novel, national identity turns out to be incomplete without language identity. Halepa spoke Ukrainian with mistakes, had difficulty choosing suitable words, and discovered with surprise the meaning of some Ukrainian words from his former Russian friends. The open finale emphasises the irony of the discourse around a fast national “revival” without struggle and effort, and which only required someone’s will.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

Caribbean Commission

1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
United Nations ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The United Nations

The third session of the West Indian Conference opened at Guadeloupe, French West Indies on December 1, 1948 and closed on December 14, after considering policy to be followed by the Caribbean Commission for the next two years. The Conference was attended by two delegates from each of the fifteen territories within the jurisdiction of the commission and observers invited by the commission from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United Nations and its specialized agencies.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Douglas Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Imperial Rivalry

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

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