scholarly journals Identity as Liminality in Post-Colonial Fiction: Nadine Gordimer.’s The Pickup and Bessie Head.’s A Question of Power

Author(s):  
José Luis Venegas Caro de la Barrera

Abstract: This paper sets out to analyze the interstitial/liminal aspect of postcolonial literature as ciphered in the narratives of Nadine Gordimer and Bessie Head. A Question of Power and The Pickup both voice hybrid subjects in terms of race and gender, and thus represent the new epistemological space that this literature opens up. Focusing on the shifting identities of the female characters in these novels, we will establish a connection between the praxis of post-colonial writing as a continuous refocusing of cultural certainties and the relocation of the familiar in the uncanny.Resumen: Este artículo pretende analizar el aspecto liminal de la literatura postcolonial tal y como se refleja en la narrativa de Nadine Gordimer y Bessie Head. A Question of Power y The Pickup articulan la voz de individuos híbridos en cuanto a raza y género, y, de este modo, representan el nuevo espacio epistemológico que esta literatura abre. Al centrarnos en las identidades variables de los personajes femeninos de estas novelas, trataremos de establecer una conexion entre la praxis de la literatura postcolonial como un continuo reajuste de certezas culturales y la reubicación de lo familiar en lo extraño.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyne Alphonso

This study analyzes regional editorial content as produced by Vogue magazine. Vogue has developed an empire comprised of 22 international editions. Vogue Mexico & Latin America, and Vogue Arabia, are the only two editions that encompass numerous countries, cultures, and voices. Using discourse analysis through a cultural studies lens, this study analyzes six editorial spreads to uncover what cultural messages are being produced, how these images impact national identities, and who is or is not represented in the fashion image. Intersections of fashion with culture, identity, race, and gender, are analyzed through critical discourse analysis to address constructions of power, specifically within a cultural and postcolonial framework. Visual narratives in Vogue Arabia and Vogue Mexico & Latin America reflect values seemingly distinct to their region, but are charged with cultural assumptions and inaccuracies. For postcolonial cultures vying for identities independent of their colonial past, these marketable stereotypes continue to suppress their structural agency.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lana Zannettino

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of three Australian teenage novels – Melina Marchetta’s ‘Looking for Alibrandi’ (1992), Randa Abdel-Fattah’s ‘Does my Head Look Big in This?’ (2005), and Morris Gleitzman’s ‘Girl Underground’ (2004). Drawing from feminist post-structural and post-colonial theories, the paper examines how each author has constructed the racialised-gendered identities of their female protagonists, including the ways in which they struggle to develop an identity in-between minority and dominant cultures. Also considered is how each author inter-weaves race, gender and class to produce subjects that are positioned differently across minority and dominant cultures. The similarities in how the authors have inscribed race and ethnicity on the subjectivities of their female characters, despite the novels being written at different points in time and focusing on different racial and ethnic identities, suggest that what it means to be a raced subject in Australia has more to do with the significance of all-at-once ‘belonging’ and ‘not belonging’ to the dominant culture, of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ and of ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’, than it has with the unique characteristics of biological race and ethnic identification. The paper argues that this kind of fiction carries with it an implicit pedagogy about race relations in Australia, which has the potential to subvert oppressive binary dualisms of race and gender by demonstrating possibilities for the development of hybrid cultural identities and ‘collaborations of humanity’.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyne Alphonso

This study analyzes regional editorial content as produced by Vogue magazine. Vogue has developed an empire comprised of 22 international editions. Vogue Mexico & Latin America, and Vogue Arabia, are the only two editions that encompass numerous countries, cultures, and voices. Using discourse analysis through a cultural studies lens, this study analyzes six editorial spreads to uncover what cultural messages are being produced, how these images impact national identities, and who is or is not represented in the fashion image. Intersections of fashion with culture, identity, race, and gender, are analyzed through critical discourse analysis to address constructions of power, specifically within a cultural and postcolonial framework. Visual narratives in Vogue Arabia and Vogue Mexico & Latin America reflect values seemingly distinct to their region, but are charged with cultural assumptions and inaccuracies. For postcolonial cultures vying for identities independent of their colonial past, these marketable stereotypes continue to suppress their structural agency.


Lire Journal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-133
Author(s):  
Didimus Estanto Turuk

Hegemony is one of the Marxist applicative concepts employed during the European colonial period. The colonization constructed a power domination of the European countries toward the colonized. The constructed hegemony performed by the European colonizers is the center of discussion in this essay. This essay aims to examine the hegemony lies within the two short stories which are “The Lotus Eater” by W. Somerset Maugham and “The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses” by Bessie Head through Post-Colonial perspectives and accompanied by the gender perspectives. The constructed hegemony is the major theory of the analysis to scrutinize the oppressions both racial and gender base, however the further analysis is going to scrutinize the abrogation of the hegemony. On scrutinizing the hegemony, Derridian deconstruction is employed to construct the analysis on the abrogation of the European constructed hegemony.   Keywords: Hegemony, Deconstruction, Post-colonial, Gender, Abrogation


2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-216
Author(s):  
Alice A. Filmer

In an intervention that blurs methodological boundaries traditionally separating the researcher from the researched, history from poetry, and the personal from the political, the author weaves a narrative account of her Euro-American family's early history in California into a larger set of social and historical events taking place during the nineteenth century. She employs the metaphor of ‘legitimacy’ to trace her growing awareness of the physical, psychological, and political parallels at work in the colonization of lands, cultures, and bodies in the ‘New World’. Providing context for the mid-nineteenth century war between the USA and Mexico, she analyzes discursive constructs such as hybridity, impurity, and ‘mongrelization’ as they are evoked in the legend of Malinche – the sixteenth-century, indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortés. Four centuries later, echoes of that ‘intermarriage’ and the transgression of many other kinds of boundaries can be heard in the author's unconventional relationship with her son's Mexican father. She offers a ‘post-critical’ perspective in the conclusion by bringing her own voice into dialogue with those of several post-colonial theorists. This ethnography integrates autoethnography, voices from history, and textual analysis into seldom-heard conversations about the conventional and unconventional workings of power and identity. In so doing, both the fixity and fluidity of concepts such as culture, nation, family, language, social class, race, and gender are revealed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Margaret Steenbakker

This article explores the gendered narrative in the video game Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. Using this game as its main case study, it addresses the question in which ways the game developers have conceptualized gender, race, and gender performance in the video game. It does so from an intersectional point of view. After establishing Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation as a prime example of the trend to include more female characters in games during recent years, I will argue that this game includes a complex rhetoric that not only perpetuates stereotypical notions regarding gender, but also fails to acknowledge issues regarding its main protagonist’s skin color in the historical reality the game wishes to emulate.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
N. Danilo Leon

This dissertation is a study of literary and cinematographic works of the contemporary period that depict the complex experiences that the recent immigration phenomenon in Spain has brought along not only for the new arrivals to Spain (outsiders) but also for the Spaniards themselves. Through an interdisciplinary approach, my study analyzes a wide range of narratives of two of the largest migratory groups in Spain: Latin Americans and sub-Saharan Africans. To do so, I examine the work of a variety of film makers and writers - Isabel de Ocampo's film Evelyn (2012), Helena Taberna's documentary Extranjeras (2003), Fernando León de Aranoa's film Princesas (2005), Montxo Armendariz's film Las cartas de Alou (1990), Imanol Uribe's film Bwana (1996), and Inongo-vi-Makomé's novel Nativas (2008). Other shorter texts have also been included and studied. My entire research project pays close attention to the ways in which race and gender intersect and shape the immigration experience of Latin Americans and sub-Saharan Africans. Whereas there are commonalities among these two groups, especially if we analyze those commonalities through a postcolonial lens, I aim to shed light on the ways in which each migratory group deals with its own post-colonial, racial and gender-related dilemmas. At the same time, Spaniards seem to struggle with the construction of a new Spanish identity which sharply challenges the traditional image of an ethno-culturally homogeneous Spain, an image that the long Franco regime aggressively reinforced. Finally, my analysis pays close attention the role of the western subject in the depiction of the migratory experience, which, in some cases reveals a strong tendency to represent all immigrants as problematic "Others." All the narratives that are part of this ambitious project will reveal pervasive racial discourses and also the ways in which gender roles are deconstructed and reconstructed once the immigrant subject sets foot in a new host society.


Crisis ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Rodi ◽  
Lucas Godoy Garraza ◽  
Christine Walrath ◽  
Robert L. Stephens ◽  
D. Susanne Condron ◽  
...  

Background: In order to better understand the posttraining suicide prevention behavior of gatekeeper trainees, the present article examines the referral and service receipt patterns among gatekeeper-identified youths. Methods: Data for this study were drawn from 26 Garrett Lee Smith grantees funded between October 2005 and October 2009 who submitted data about the number, characteristics, and service access of identified youths. Results: The demographic characteristics of identified youths are not related to referral type or receipt. Furthermore, referral setting does not seem to be predictive of the type of referral. Demographic as well as other (nonrisk) characteristics of the youths are not key variables in determining identification or service receipt. Limitations: These data are not necessarily representative of all youths identified by gatekeepers represented in the dataset. The prevalence of risk among all members of the communities from which these data are drawn is unknown. Furthermore, these data likely disproportionately represent gatekeepers associated with systems that effectively track gatekeepers and youths. Conclusions: Gatekeepers appear to be identifying youth across settings, and those youths are being referred for services without regard for race and gender or the settings in which they are identified. Furthermore, youths that may be at highest risk may be more likely to receive those services.


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