Hegemony Unbound: Tradition Gone Awry as the Female Body Mimics a Site of Colonization and Decolonization in Alice Walker’s “Possessing the Secret of Joy”

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Dr. Samuel Obed Doku
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Genital Mutilation ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
A Site ◽  
American Authors

Alice Walker’s novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy shares some similarities with many texts written by black Americans, but it is uniquely different because its settings include an African village where the story begins. The novel is rich in intertextuality as it engages other great American authors like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, feminist bell hooks; and Austrian psychoanalytical theorist, Carl Jung. Beside its psychoanalytical framework and story-telling pattern with multiple narrators, Possessing the Secret of Joy is also grounded in Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) theories, as well as in Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory.1 These theories exemplify themselves in the way the protagonist in the novel is convinced to succumb to genital mutilation and how a journey into herself to remember long-repressed memories, eventually results in her ability to liberate women of her village. Possessing the Secret of Joy is a modernist novel in which hegemony, patriarchy, and feminism converge to expose an obnoxious practice in an African village in expectations of dismantling the antiquated tradition that informs the novel.  

scholarly journals Home as a Site of Resistance: A Study on Agunpakhi by Hasan Azizul Huq

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-280
Author(s):  
Md. Shamim Mondol
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Partition Of India ◽  
A Site

This paper is an attempt to investigate Hasan Azizul Huq’s much awaited novel Agunpakhi to explore the potencies and potentials of home as an empowering site of resistance. The novel commonly studied as a counter narrative on the Partition of India has multilayered implications embedded in it. One such dimension is the exploration of home place by contesting the common ideas to redefine its scopes. Home is normally studied as a sequestered space of deprivation and gendered marginalization. The inhabitants inhibited there by the social apparatuses are simply seized mentally. The consequent ideas built around home as a site showcase it impotence, and imposing character with no productive aspects. But the lived experiences of the inhabitants and their resultant practices if studied out of the box exhibit the excellences of home as a nurturing ground for raising resistances against the oppressors. To concentrate on these empowering aspects of the space, I will draw on bell hooks for her insights on home as a site of resistance. The research will advance the argument that home is a place of care and nurturance in the face of harsh realities facilitating the emergence of voices and subjectivity leading to emancipation from exigencies of marginalization.  

Ireland and Europe after 1973

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Hand
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Real People ◽  
Economic Union ◽  
A Site

This chapter argues that the novel form is best suited to giving expression to the multifaceted Irish reality. Ireland, in the modern moment, is a place of incongruity and contradiction: it is at once a site of colonization and post-colonization, as well as simultaneously positioning itself as an integral part of a modern, globalized, economic union. The novel’s being bound to the immediate moment, while also aspiring toward the transcendence of immutable art, perfectly reflects an Irish mood caught between the violent actuality of war and a desire for mundane ordinariness. Indeed, it can be argued that the novel form offers a very human, and humane, lens through which to expose the hidden histories and anxieties of real people. Certainly the Irish novel has consistently done this from the seventeenth century onward, as it has charted the story of Ireland’s complex emergence into modernity.

An attempt to relieve oppression through the difficult paths of translation between Catalan and Spanish: The case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Galera
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Authors

In the uneasy context of the Francoist regime, some authors tried to alleviate the difficult cultural situation through creation and translation. This is the case of Avel·lí Artís-Gener, commonly known as Tísner, a Catalan writer who was exiled to Mexico for more than twenty years. Translation from Spanish into Catalan played a major role in Tísner’s efforts to keep Catalan culture alive, and this article presents the major translation initiatives in this language combination throughout the twentieth century in order to provide enough context to give Artís-Gener’s endeavours their real weight. In Mexico, he wrote his most famous novel, Paraules d’Opoton el Vell (‘Words of Opoton the elder’), which describes the imagined ‘discovery’ of Europe by the Aztecs and creates a bond between the fate of the Nahuatl and the Catalan people under the yoke of Spanish imperialism. In 1992 Artís-Gener decided that the novel had to be retranslated into Spanish and undertook that task himself. In addition, Tísner translated major Latin American authors from Spanish into Catalan, an experience that gave him the chance to regain control of the language imposed by the Francoist regime and use it as a form of relief from the political oppression.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Form

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.

scholarly journals DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS IN BELL HOOKS’ BONE BLACK

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Mzukisi J. Lento
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Du Bois

This article investigates the shifts in the concept of double consciousness as depicted in bell hooks’ Bone black (1996). According to Du Bois, the idea of ‘double consciousness’ refers to being both black and American. In Du Boisian understanding, double consciousness refers to a condition of being black and American in which ‘One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’ (Du Bois 1989, 5). bell hooks agrees with this view but she also revises the concept in order to take on board the fact that black women have other experiences in addition to double consciousness in America (Hooks 1996).

scholarly journals “I would have to be mad to leave this bed.” A Female Heterotopia of Self-confinement in Sue Townsend’s The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

2021 ◽  
pp. 217-237
Author(s):  
Nieves De Mingo Izquierdo
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Tool ◽  
A Site

What happens when a woman, housewife and mother, decides to take to her room and stay in bed for a whole year? This scarcely plausible proposition opens the last published work by the late British author Sue Townsend. This paper aims to explain the main coordinates of the narrative by using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia; an effective, theoretical tool when applied to the analysis of a contained, physical space which is eventually turned into a site of contestation by means of the protagonist’s self-imposed confinement. This implies further questioning on the degree of agency she displays within her environment and, in addition, raises doubts about whether the novel responds to a feminist stance on the part of the author or to a literary depiction of her unavoidable withdrawal from the outside world due to her personal circumstances.

scholarly journals Oppression and Female Body: A Feminist Critique of the Novel 'Half the Sky'

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (I) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ayesha Khaliq ◽  
Mamona Yasmin Khan ◽  
Rabia Hayat
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
The Body ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Second Sex ◽  
Interpretive Paradigm ◽  
A Site ◽  
Body Theory

The female body is more than often used as a site to perpetuate violence and oppress women in patriarchal societies. The current study aims to explore how patriarchal oppression targets the female body and how it enforces women to become subalterns having no voice in the selected fictional work, Half the Sky by Kristoff and WuDunn. For this purpose, Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Bryan Turner's The Body theory (1984) are used as theoretical frameworks to explore the selected novel. The research is descriptive qualitative, and placed within the interpretive paradigm. The data for the present study is in the form of textual paragraphs, which is taken from the selected novel and is collected through the purposive sampling technique. The study argues on women's oppression and violence. The findings of the study revealed that the dominancy of male counterpart in every field of life is the basic reason for women oppression which leads to the women being subalterns.

Site Unseen

Site Reading ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Road ◽  
Sociological Thought ◽  
The Moment ◽  
A Site

This chapter argues that to perform a site reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is to appreciate how the text functions as a novel of purpose that aims to vivify the planet as what Latour would call a “matter of concern.” Still, The Road reads less as a critique of contemporary social problems than as a “thought-experiment,” a sort of literary climate model, forecasting a chillingly plausible correlation between a ruined site and a grisly social order. By imagining this correlation through narrative form, McCarthy offers his own striking contribution to environmental and sociological thought, a contribution that starts to become apparent the moment we ask how his setting functions as an actant, both in the novel itself and beyond.

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

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