Perspectives on Migrant Homelessness in Salman Rushdie’s Novel The Satanic Verses

Author(s):  
Petya Tsoneva ◽  
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The purpose of this article is to explore a territory that is widely contested in colonial and postcolonial studies. Home appears with particular intensity in the literary and critical narratives of empire, while postcolonial writers appropriate it as a site of contestation and rewriting. Although home is a standard topos in postcolonial research, my study focuses on a particular authorial position that reveals enticing new perspectives on the ways in which the domestic is both inscribed and subverted in the rhetoric of migration.

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-629
Author(s):  
Wenge Chen

Abstract This paper conceptualizes dictionary bilingualization as a recontextualizing practice and explores how ideology and power play out in the recontextualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the transformation of meaning. It first proposes viewing the (bilingualized) dictionary as discourse and emphasizes bilingual lexicography as a site of an asymmetrical linguistic and cultural power dynamics. The paper then argues that a synergy of critical discourse analysis and postcolonial studies can reveal the inter-cultural ideological struggle implicit in the bilingualizing lexicographic practice. The body of the study is devoted to the analysis of those shifts taking place in the entries, definition, illustrative examples and pragmatic labels in a bilingualized English-Chinese dictionary, which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly reshape the ideological positioning of the dictionary. The paper discusses the implications for critical lexicographic studies and for research into the interplay between power and resistance between dominating and dominated cultures. It concludes that Periphery English dictionary compilers are able to negotiate the different subjectivities and ideologies inherent in dictionary making and to adopt a subject position favorable to their empowerment in the international English lexicography, although such resistance is far from capable of restructuring the order of lexicography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-353
Author(s):  
Daniel Behar

Abstract This article examines translation activity in modern Syria and its intersections with original works as a middle ground between world literature and postcolonial studies. It argues for a return to the multiplicity residing within a postcolonial national setting as a way of understanding poetic production in interaction with foreign poetries. Syrian translating as practiced in the state-endorsed literary periodical Al-Adab Al-Ajanbiyya (Foreign Literatures) is studied as a site of tension between a political rhetoric maintained by a growingly invasive state and the narrowing field of individual enterprise. How would world literature figure from the perspective of a state-backed, professedly Arab-socialist culture? How would this construction then be contested by agents struggling to carve out spaces for individual expression? What role does translation play in this struggle? The parameters of postcolonial experience and representation are themselves fought over in an unequal playing field between state power and beleaguered authors on the literary margins. Translations originating in politicized agendas then become constitutive of non-ideological engagements with world literature sanctioning deviations from state hegemony and promoting civilian agendas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269
Author(s):  
Justine Baillie

Abstract As novelist, academic, and public intellectual Toni Morrison has made a profound contribution to the transformation of the black intellectual and political aesthetic. In many ways Morrison’s literary and theoretical formulations represent the feminization of black writing traditions through her representations of identity as being fluid and socially constructed. Her novels transform memory into alternative narratives of recovery that illuminate obscured histories of slavery, migration and urbanisation. This project constitutes a rich legacy for a new generation of writers who, working within a global nexus, interrogate the racial economics of trauma, dislocation and exile in ways that dissolve the distinctions between African American, colonial, and postcolonial studies. The introduction to this special issue highlights the transnational scope of Morrison’s work, with a particular focus on her non-fiction.


Author(s):  
Daniela Francesca Virdis

In his treatise Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857), Hyde Clarke wholeheartedly approves of Indian colonial railways and advocates the need for the British to bring about technological progress in the subcontinent. The main research purpose of this article is to provide stylistic evidence of how Clarke relays and constructs his Anglocentric and imperial viewpoint on Indian railways. The article firstly introduces the figure of Clarke and his railway pamphlet, and discusses the keywords colonialism and colonization as defined in two authoritative nineteenthcentury dictionaries of the English language and in colonial and postcolonial studies. Secondly, moving from this field and from the field of postcolonial stylistics, the stylistic methodology defined by Ron Carter as “practical stylistics” is applied to thirteen sequences from the treatise including the keyword colonization. Finally, the definitions of colonialism and colonization are compared with Clarke’s notion of colonization as emerging from the text. This linguistic analysis hence identifies and explores the stylistic strategies utilised by the author – mainly stylistic choices at word- and phrase-level, syntactic structures and the pragmatic functions of these devices – and reveals the ways in which he conveys his colonial mental attitude to the Indian reality.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Arnold

Re-situating Andean colonial history from the perspective of the local historians of ayllu Qaqachaka, in highland Bolivia, this book draws on regional oral history combined with local and public written archives. Rejecting the binary models in vogue in colonial and postcolonial studies (indigenous/non-indigenous, Andean/Western, conquered/conquering), it explores the complex intercalation of legal pluralism and local history in the negotiations around Spanish demands, resulting in the so-called "Andean pact." The Qaqachaka's point of reference is the preceding Inka occupation, so in fulfilling Spanish demands they seek cultural continuity with this recent past. Spanish colonial administration, applies its roots in Roman-Germanic and Islamic law to many practices in the newly-conquered territories. Two major cycles of ayllu tales trace local responses to these colonial demands, in the practices for establishing settlements, and the feeding and dressing of the Catholic saints inside the new church, with their forebears in the Inka mummies.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-136
Author(s):  
Saddik Gohar

Discussing the banning of Salman Rushdie’sSatanic Versesin some Islamic countries, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge argue:For the Islamic postcolonial world, the moral is clear and succinct: to write in the language of the colonizer is to write from within death itself. Postcolonial writers who write in the language of the Empire are marked off as traitors to the cause of a reconstructive post-colonialism. Postcolonial writers compose under the shadow of death (Williams & Chrisman 1993:277).Apparently, the consequences triggered by the publication of Rushdie’s novel, in the preceding century, raised many significant questions about the relationship between East and West, colonized and colonizer. Nevertheless, the hostility toward the book in some Middle Eastern and Islamic countries is not related to the issue of language, identified by Mishra and Hodge as “the language of the empire.” The use of colonial languages rarely represents a threat to Islamic culture because unlike the literature of ex-colonies in Asia, Africa, South America, the West Indies and the Caribbean, dominantly written in the language of the western colonizers, literature in a large part of the Arab-Islamic world is composed in indigenous languages. It is important to point out therefore that the issue of language, raised above, is irrelevant because the campaign againstSatanic Versesis rooted in the radical constructs of religious hegemony integral to contemporary political Islamic doctrines.


Author(s):  
Tymofii HAVRYLIV

The article is devoted to the study of the content aspects and structural features of the book of travel sketches "The Enchantment of Morocco" by Ukrainian filmmaker and traveler Sofiia Yablonska-Uden. On the example of the work, the discursive mechanisms of travel literature are analyzed in the context of a broad range of issues relevant to the time of writing sketches; innovative, semimedia character of travel sketches is shown, content blocks and the interrelations between them are distinguished and highlighted. Hermeneutic scientific approaches are used in this article; it is based on the philosophy of identity and cultural studies, colonial and postcolonial studies. Main results of the research: 1) travel literature occupies an important, and often a key place in the discourse on identity; 2) identity is conceived as a key multilevel marker; 3) the intention of the trip contains an identical challenge that affects the preparation, organization, flow of travel, the way of documenting impressions and the content of documented impressions; 4) the book is characterized by the tension between colonialism and enslavement, in the field of which the self-positioning of the narrator occurs; 5) traveling fulfills the function of restoring lost communications – with oneself, with culture, with history, with natural, urban and anthropomorphic environment. Sofiia Yablonska-Uden's "The Enchantment of Morocco" sketches formulate an identical challenge and try to answer him. This answer is complex, based on antinomy pairs: statehood – statelessness, Europeanism – non-European, modernity – nonmodernity, femininity – manhood, domination – subordination, maturity – childhood. These antinomy pairs are in interference, inclusion, and / or tangency relationships. The study of travel literature, an identical issue, is relevant for the formation of a modern vision of Ukrainian society itself, belonging to a European civilization project and engaging in a global context. Keywords nonfiction travel literature, modernism, extraterritorialization, exotic discourse, orientalism.


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