Neo-Colonialist critique of Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kincaid's A Small Place: A Comparative Postcolonial Study

With a specific focus on two different novels from different continents, the study analyzes the current American neocolonialist hegemonic behavior, which is causing developing countries to remain in a doldrum. The data is based upon the comparative analysis of selected textual paragraphs taken from Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kincaid's A Small Place. Both Mohsin Hamid and Jamaica Kincaid assert that due to the American neo-colonialist regime, indigenous cultures of so many countries of the African and Asian continent have suffered a lot. Theoretical insights for this research have been drawn from Kwame Nkrumah's concept of neo-colonialism. Nkrumah defined neocolonialism as the exploitation of former colonial subjects by European conquerors for political, economic, cultural, ideological, and military gain. The research concludes that although with the inception of the United Nations Organization the colonialism has formally come to an end still the American neo-colonial supremacy is disturbing the people of once colonized countries through various economic, political, and ideological maneuverings.

Reterritorialization in A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid: A Postcolonial Eco-Critical Study

This article intends to understand how the postcolonial ecocritical writers attempt to reterritorialize their land, its history, and its culture by underscoring the hazards of tourism. In the wake of capitalism, tourism has increased environmental racism and environmental injustice encountered by people of marginalized communities. For this study, we have analyzed a creative nonfiction work A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid in the light of postcolonial ecocritical theory presented by Donelle N. Dreese. This literary theory deals with the exploitation of land, its resources, its environment, and its people in the context of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Dreese’s subdivision of the concept of reterritorialization into mythic, psychic, and environmental reterritorialization has been applied on A Small Place. The article explores how Kincaid has reterritorialized her ancestral homeland Antigua by recording the oppressive colonial past of the land that has been ravaged under imperial rule by exploitation of the natural resources (plantations) and subjugation of the human resources (slavery). She has observed that under the influence of capitalism, her homeland is currently facing a new form of colonization in the name of tourism industry that is actually promoting new ways of foreign occupation of the land, enslavement of the local people, and environmental racism. The article concludes by drawing attention toward tourism, which can turn into neo-colonization under the clutches of capitalism and corrupt leadership. We attempt to underscore that there is a dire need of continuous process of planning and management by the local authorities to minimize the problems faced by the natives and to make tourism industry environment friendly.

METÁFORAS CONCEITUAIS EM JAMAICA KINCAID: BREVE ANÁLISE SOBRE A AUTOAFIRMAÇÃO IDENTITÁRIA CARIBENHA

O presente artigo trata-se de uma breve análise de duas metáforas conceituais presentes nas narrativas da escritora caribenha Jamaica Kincaid. Objetiva-se, aqui, a tessitura de uma discussão, à luz da teoria da metáfora conceitual (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980), de questões de autoafirmação identitária caribenha em três textos da autora, a saber: “On seeing England for the first time” (1991), Annie John (1997) e A Small Place (2000). Essas discussões sobre identidade são, em linhas gerais, revisitadas em textos teóricos de três dos principais escritores daquela região, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall e Édouard Glissant, para estabelecer uma contextualização temática destes com as obras anteriormente mencionadas. Por fim, promove-se rápida reflexão sobre como a experiência da colonização e do deslocamento incide nas construções identitárias daqueles povos.

A Systemic Functional Grammar-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

The present paper investigates the grammatical choices made by Jamaica Kincaid in her work Lucy. It analyzes how the selected structure contributes to the realization of particular beliefs such as gender inequality, using the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach (Halliday 1973, 1985, 1994; Halliday and Hasan 1989; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). In particular, the study examines the participants’ roles and the processes types assigned to them with reference to the transitivity system. The data of the present study are collected from the first three chapters of Lucy. The corpus belongs to seven males and eleven female characters who were directly involved in all the actions in the text. A total of 325 sentences were extracted. They were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The results of the study revealed the writer’s subvert of traditional gender stereotypes through displaying women as effectual dynamic actors and assertive sayers. In addition, all female characters were shown as the main participants of the other minor processes, in the sense that they were the behavers and sensers in both behavioral and mental clauses. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, gender inequality, systemic functional grammar, transitivity system.

ROTA DOS ESCRAVOS NAS CARAÍBAS

O presente trabalho intitulado Rota dos escravos nas Caraíbas tem por objetivo perceber que a escravidão é um fenómeno universal e que a sua origem é testemunhada na mais antiga literatura universal. Num segundo momento, dá-se a conhecer o contexto em que se inscreve a rota dos escravos que na sequência dos descobrimentos animou o comércio triangular: Europa, África e América, no tempo da colonização. O contexto histórico da escravatura nas Caraíbas é objeto de análise deste trabalho. Num momento final, tentarei apreender a reação na atualidade de duas “filhas da escravidão” Marlene Nourbese Philip e Jamaica Kincaid: um testemunho na primeira pessoa de duas mulheres de origem africana a viverem no Canadá.

Orientalist Representation of Nepali People, Culture and Landscape: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

Partly drawing on postcolonial rhetorics and partly drawing insights from critical stylistics and critical discourse analysis, this paper basically explores how Antigua-born-American writer Jamaica Kincaid rhetorically constructs Nepal in a disguised form of a travel writer through her travel narrative Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Even though Kincaid is best known as an anti-imperialist, the way she longs for the Garden of Eden and represents Nepali landscape, people, and culture posits that her travel to Nepal is threaded with the rhetoric of Othering, metropolitan culture, and imperial politics. In particular, she looks at the travelled places and people with an imperial eye: nomination, surveillance, negation, debasement, and binary rhetoric.

Postcolonial Reading of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid is one of the most important contemporary Antiguan- American novelists. In all of her works, Kincaid focuses greatly on the influence of the colonial project from which her nation suffered greatly in the past. This paper offers a postcolonial reading of the novel Lucy (1999). The novel details the life of a girl who left her homeland, Antigua, and went to the United States to work as an au pair for a white family. The paper focuses on the author’s as well as the main character Lucy's anger at everything that reminded them of the colonizers, their homeland and family. This anger is seen as a form of hate traced in Lucy's reaction towards the educational system created by the colonizers, her homeland, and any authoritative figure. Lucy suggests that the educational system, which follows the British teachings, in Antigua asserts the domination of the colonizers and the humiliation of her nation. She hates her homeland because she considers it as a production made by the colonizers. Fleeing to the United States is a way to escape her past. Her hate of any kind of domination or control practiced on her is seen in her bad relationship with her mother and employer. Struggling to overcome her anger throughout the novel, Lucy discovers that the aftermaths of her nation colonial past formulates her present and points to her future.

Sobre la condición migrante de la literatura caribeña: geoestéticas de resistencia, entre el turismo y la soberanía

El artículo analiza algunas problemáticas centrales de la literatura caribeña, en particular de expresión francófona y anglófona, relacionadas, por un lado, con la falta de desarrollo y el funcionamiento colonial de sus sistemas literarios, y, por el otro, con el problema social, económico y político de la emigración en las Antillas. Como propongo, es la misma condición migrante de la literatura caribeña, en tanto sistema atravesado por el desplazamiento masivo de sus productores, la que en gran parte determina sus motivaciones e intereses, enfocados a la identidad regional (y a la cultura regionalista) de modo recurrente. El artículo indaga, entre otros lugares-comunes (Glissant) del discurso literario caribeño, su estética geográficamente marcada que es enunciada aun desde un locus migrante (distante) con fines descolonizadores, los cuales se vinculan con la tradición anticolonialista, masculina y de sesgo militante del siglo pasado. Luego de una revisión de este legado a partir de dos aproximaciones críticas (Tinsley, Condé), se lee una serie de textos donde se observa la persistencia de la geoestética antillana, como A Small Place de Jamaica Kincaid, los cuales se apropian creativamente del discurso turístico desde una perspectiva geopolítica de resistencia a las dominaciones aún coloniales.