scholarly journals Representation of The Other in Ghanaian Literary Texts: A Reading of Some Selected Works

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-77
Author(s):  
NII OKAIN TEIKO
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Theory

Ghanaian literary texts have been greatly influenced by post-colonial theory which tends to depict and (expose) the inaccuracy of the duality embedded in western imperialism manifested in the concepts of the self and the other. With post-colonial theory as background and specifically the theoretical formulations from Said’s Orientalism (1978), Bhabha’s The location of Culture (1994), and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2001), this paper examines how Ghanaian written literature re-inscribes the concept of the Other with intent of justifying the existence of the advantageous self which apparently denigrates the other. Using textual analysis of some representative texts, I argue that Ghanaian literary artists portray the concepts of the self and the other with different connotations and permutations which reflect the ideals of the society within the geo-political space of world Literatures.   

scholarly journals The Othering in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Matava Vichiensing
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Normal People ◽  
Colonial Theory

In this article, I will investigate the concept of ‘othering’ originally as part of a post-colonial theory. This concept is interested in many academic areas, including a literary study. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is about human clones raised for organs. The clones are excluded and discriminated to be ‘the other’ from the normal people. The manifestations of othering in Never Let Me Go can be presented in the forms of linguistic features, indoctrination, objectification, and assimilation. Although the othering phenomenon can be found in the reality, it can be appeared in literary texts as well. The findings show that the study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go helps us to understand and aware of how the negative consequences of the othering process affect undesirable treatments in the society as a whole.

scholarly journals IMPACT OF IDENTITY-ORIENTED LITERATURE EDUCATION ON ADOLESCENTS' INSIGHT INTO THE SELF AND THE OTHER

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Grandits ◽  
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
School Students ◽  
Pedagogical Intervention ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
Quasi Experimental ◽  
Literature Education ◽  
Insight Into

A mixed-methods quasi-experimental study evaluated the effects of a pedagogical intervention in literature education on Austrian upper secondary high school students’ insight into the self and the other. The intervention is based on the newly developed NDR-model, the letters in the abbreviation representing the basic practices of narration, dialogue and response underlying the model. Two cycles of NDR interventions on the identity issues of “happiness” and “relations” were implemented. An IPA study was conducted to explore how the implementation of the NDR-model of literature education affected participants’ learning outcomes (self-understanding and understanding of the other). Qualitative analysis of interview and artefact data suggested that NDR students experienced insight into the self and the other because they were stimulated to engage with literary texts in the context of their personal identities.

scholarly journals Edward Said: Post-colonial Discourse and Its Impact on Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Naifa Al Mtairi
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
Colonial Theory

This paper highlights Edward Said’s ideology for discerning literary texts that followed the colonial period as a post-colonial discourse. Though some scholars disapprove that notion, Said holds the view that literature is a product of contested social and economic relationships. The West attempts to represent the East and consequently dominates it, not only for knowledge but for political power as well. He assures the worldliness of texts and their interferences with disciplines, cultures and history. Thus, the post-colonial critic should consider the post-colonial literature that might take the form of traditional European literature or the role of the migrant writer in portraying the experience of their countries. The pot-colonial theory with its focus on the misrepresentation of the colonized by the colonizer and the former’s attitude of resistance, draws new lines for literature and suggests a way of reading which resists imperialist ideologies.

The ant as metaphor: Orientalism, imperialism and myrmecology [W. T. Stearn Student Essay]

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-361
Author(s):  
Carissa Chew
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Ant Colony ◽  
The Other ◽  
White People ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Inferior Status ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
The One ◽  
Civilized Society

Myrmecological texts that circulated in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century can be interpreted, from the perspective of the post-colonial theory of Orientalism, as belonging to a wider body of colonial-era European literature that has historically portrayed New World peoples and animals as the “Other”. In implicit ways, colonial-era literature on ant behaviour reproduces the Orientalist dichotomy of civilization and savagery. At different times, the ant colony has been portrayed, somewhat paradoxically, as both a civilized society in miniature and a foreign savage order. On the one hand, some British myrmecological texts rendered the ant as a symbol of Britishness and civilization: the elevated image of the ant reflected the imperialist trope that non-white people were inferior, savage Others. On the other hand, the ant colony was portrayed elsewhere in British myrmecological literature – and in other European texts that were translated into English and circulated in Britain – as a dangerous, merciless and aggressive Otherness itself. Accordingly, in these texts, the ant and the “native” are depicted as accomplices who share an antagonism toward the colonial project. Both these positive and negative representations of the ant reflect and reproduce Orientalist tropes, which have historically been used to emphasize the perceived inferior status of non-white colonial subjects.

Answering the charge?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-328
Author(s):  
Norunn Askeland
Keyword(s):  
Boarding Schools ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Metaphor Analysis ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Abstract From 1850 to 1980 the Norwegian state pursued a policy of Norwegianization of the Sami, where schools played an important part in the attempt to turn Sami children into Norwegian citizens. Pupils lived in boarding schools where all teaching was in Norwegian and it was forbidden to speak Sami, both in and out of the classroom. This article examines metaphors in three types of material: Norwegian textbooks; Sami literature in these textbooks; and Sami testimony literature. The aim is to find out how the Norwegian state used its power to stigmatize Sami identity through metaphors in textbooks, and how Sami writers show their resistance to Norwegianization through metaphors in Sami literary texts and Sami testimony literature. The analysis also examines whether metaphors are signalled or not, in order to see if they are open to negotiation or taken as self-evident, and if signalling can be related to genre. One central finding is that the Norwegian texts contain more condescending and less signalled metaphors than the Sami ones. Another is that signalling might be related to genre: there are more signalled metaphors in the reflective narratives of witness testimonies than in the other genres that are examined. The theoretical foundations of the analyses are discourse-based metaphor analysis in a post-colonial perspective.

scholarly journals The Hidden Gaze of the Other in Michael Haneke’s Hidden

Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 228-240
Author(s):  
Tomasz Dobrogoszcz
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Racial Issue ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
Present Life ◽  
Civilized Society

In his 2005 French production Hidden (Caché), Michael Haneke continues disturbing his audience with poignant and stirring images. When Georges and Anne Laurent keep finding on their doorstep videotapes showing the exterior of their house filmed with a hidden camera, they do not realize that trying to trace the identity of the photographer will lead Georges back to his deeply concealed childhood atrocity and gravely affect their present life. With Hidden, Haneke presents a provocative case of Freudian return of the repressed and probes the uncertain grounding and pretentiousness of French national self-importance. The article attempts an analysis of Hidden from two interconnected perspectives, provided by the use of the Lacanian category of the gaze in relation to film studies and by the application of certain categories derived from post-colonial theory (voiced here by Homi Bhabha). The discussion ventures to demonstrate that the camera-eye "hidden" in its impossible position can be interpreted as a gaze imagined by Georges in the field of the Other. The voyeuristic act of filming also suggests the question of colonial surveillance, which relates to the racial issue underlying the conflict repressed by Georges. Haneke investigates the way in which the symbolic power bestowed on the authority of the French state facilitates discrimination. Georges, a model representative of the civil/civilized society, is shown as rent by primal fears of imaginary savage "terror," desperately trying to fortify his dominion against Algerian aggressors who are otherwise a necessary part of the structure.

scholarly journals Postcolonial Merger/Dissolution of Identities in In-Between Spaces: A Diaspora Study of Ondaatje�s The English Patient

2018 ◽  
Vol III (IV) ◽  
pp. 647-661
Author(s):  
Qasim Shafiq ◽  
Asim Aqeel ◽  
Qamar Sumaira
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Hybrid Space

The epistemological shift from colonialism to postcolonialism refashioned the colonial conceptualization of gender, race, geopolitical locale and sexual orientation to focus on those processes theorized by Homi K. Bhabha as 'in-between spaces'. With the delimitation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), this research explores how these 'in-between spaces' led colonialism and its subjects to the postcolonial / post-World War II milieu. The colonizers were not psychologically resilient enough to survive the hybrid 'in-between space' that dismantled the binary of the self and the other. The post-colonial subject, like the colonial subject, is a collage, not stable or autonomous, because it exists in a hybrid space of the enunciation of two cultures which cannot sustain its independent identity: in The English Patient, the diaspora located at the cultural boundaries of the Europeans and their home countries merges and dissolves into the in-between spaces acquainted with their anxiety and passion of nationhood and the nationlessness.

Textures of the Ordinary

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Families ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Social

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

Queer subjectivities within political scenes: Traumatic relations, exposed vulnerabilities

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Soula Marinoudi
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Scene

This article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document