Writing the Self: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Autobiographical Novel Second Class Citizen

Life-writing, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, is a general term for the writing of diverse kinds that takes life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer. As autobiographies, as well as autobiographical novels, can be considered as self-referential modes of writing, a notion of the terms in which the subject preconceives himself/herself becomes pervasive for understanding autobiographies as well as autobiographical novels. Susan Stanford Friedman, in her essay “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (1988) opens a critique of a seminal essay by Georges Gusdorf where he states that the cultural precondition for autobiography is a pervasive concept of individualism, a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (Qtd in Friedman 72). Friedman argues that the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self that pervades Gusdorf’s work raises serious problems for critics who recognise that the “self, self-creation, and self-consciousness are profoundly different for women, minorities, and many non-western peoples” (Friedman 73). While taking into account the differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender identity, Friedman refers to Regina Blackburn in her “In Search of the Black Female Self” and says that the “black women autobiographers use the genre to redefine ‘the black female self in black terms from a black perspective’” (Qtd in Freidman 78). Moreover, in the postcolonial context, C.L. Innes in The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007) considers the use of the self-referential mode as a tool by postcolonial writers to represent his/her culture and also to capture and address contemporary concerns. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to explore the use of the self-referential mode by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in her autobiographical novel Second-Class Citizen (1974)

Unsavory Characters

From early works such as “Ralo” (1997) to the more recent “Black Fox Valley” (2012), the acclaimed Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup has demonstrated a consistent interest in the impact of the Chinese language on Tibetan life. This article examines the techniques and implications of Tsering Döndrup's use of Chinese in his Tibetan language texts, focusing on his recent novella “Baba Baoma” (2019), the first-person account of a rural Tibetan boy who attends a Chinese school and ends up stuck between two languages. In a major departure from Tsering Döndrup's previous work on the language problem, this text directly incorporates untranslated Chinese characters, blending them with Tibetan transliterations and Hanyu Pinyin (i.e., the Latin alphabet) to create a deliberately disorienting linguistic collage. This article argues that this latest work pushes Tsering Döndrup's previous experiments to their logical conclusion: a condition of forced bilingualism, in which the author demands of his readers fluency in Chinese in order to access his Tibetan language fiction. This critique of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic crisis puts the author's work into conversation with global postcolonial literatures and the politics of resistance to language hegemony. By demonstrating the Tibetan language's capacity for literary creation, the story effectively resists the hegemony it depicts, even while it suggests that the Tibetan literary text itself is in the process of being fundamentally redefined by its unequal encounter with the Chinese language.

A Journey to the City of Hope: Immigration, Diaspora and Identity in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl

The motif of journey constitutes one of the most important cornerstones of both postcolonial literatures and science fiction narratives, the latter of which owe a significant debt to the essentially colonial origins of the genre, thus inviting postcolonial practices of reimagining and writing back. For that reason, the following article aims at an examination of the peculiar ties between the postcolonial theory and science fiction, in order to discuss how speculative fiction allows for an in-depth analysis of the contemporary diasporic condition and the issues of memory and cultural identity, in the context of a dialogue with contemporary diaspora studies and postcolonial studies.The motif of the journey, then, understood both in literal and metaphoric terms, becomes the point of departure for a discussion concerning the ways in which the experiences of migration and diasporic existence influence the subject’s identity as well as their relationship with the culture and language of the country of their ancestors.To this end, the paper aims at a thorough analysis of the ways in which Larissa Lai, in her novel Salt Fish Girl, engages in a discussion regarding the contemporary condition of diasporic communities, proposing a new perspective on the complicated relationship between diasporas, their past and ancestral heritage as well as their language, and the motif of journey, understood both spatially (as a journey from one place to another) and temporally (as a journey back to the roots or the impossibility of going back). Employing postcolonial theory as well as the theory of science fiction as the methodological framework, the paper argues that for Lai, the journey of one of the incarnations of the protagonist, Nu Wa, to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness constitutes an extended metaphor for the experience of Chinese immigrants in Canada. The motif of journey is inextricably tied here with the practices of remembering and forgetting, crucial for diasporic communities, as well as the constant search for a new, hyphenated identity in the new reality. Moreover, Lai suggests that such a journey constitutes a traumatic experience for the individual, which results in the loss of access to ancestral heritage as well as the language and the necessity of accepting one’s liminal condition, which contributes to the feeling of alienation and rootlessness.

REPRESENTATION OF FEMININITY IN MODERN UKRAINIAN NOVELS

The paper deals with the main tendencies of the artistic reception of women images in modern Ukrainian novels. The principles of modeling femininity in literature have been considered from the positions of the gender studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. It is proved that the peculiarities of this modeling are determined by stylistic and genre tendencies of the Ukrainian literature. The interpretation of feminine images typical for the national literary tradition (mother, family-keeper, demonic woman) has been demonstrated in numerous examples. These images correlate with the fundamental artistic principles of the turning points in history (actualization of the archetypes, attention to the irrational manifestations of human psychics). They display the ‘masculine’ literary tradition (representation of a woman as an external object), but at the same time demonstrate a new accent in the understanding of the gender roles (woman as a mentor of a man). The alternative types of the feminine identity represented by feminist and culturological women’s writing have been explored as well. Special attention has been paid to procreation as the main woman’s ability, which forms different models of feminine mentality – from the essentialist mother-type to the image of a child-free woman. The modeling of a feminine artistic worldview becomes an actual strategy in overcoming the postcolonial trauma. It is explained by the peculiarities of the postcolonial literatures, which fulfill their historical reflections in the local family stories. In this context, feminine conscience gets the status of a memory-keeper and shows the ability to trace the development of national history in its everyday dimensions. Based on the large-scale generalization of the last decades’ artistic practice, the researcher determines the main worldview intentions of modern novels, in particular the tendency to achieve gender parity, the full-fledged dialogue of men and women as the equal subjects of culture creation.

Introduction: Temp/orality in Law and East African Literature

The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.

COUNTERING THE DOMINANT NARRATIVES: ANITA DIAMANT’S THE RED TENT AND JO BAKER‘S LONGBOURN

Majority of the narratives that are handed down to us orally or in written literatures have been written from the perspectives of power, whether they be the patriarchal, religious or authoritarian dominance. Most of these literatures fail to take into account the perspectives and positions of minorities, suppressed or subaltern individuals, groups or communities. In the postmodern and postcolonial literatures sometimes, we see an attempt at making an alternative reading of these discourses and presenting a point of view that was so far unheard of or unrecognized. Dipesh Chakravarty in his essay ‘Minority Histories and Subaltern Pasts’ talks about the impossibility of having a single narratorial voice about incidents and contends multiplicity of voices of recording history or pat. Linda Hutcheon too in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism talks about the possibility of multiplicity of voices and interpretations regarding historical narratives. A section on Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible, puts on record the story of rape of Dinah and resultant bloodshed. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent presents the story from the perspective of Dinah who calls it a consensual act between two lovers belonging to warring factions and unacceptability of this liaison. Similarly, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice narrates the events from the perspective of the Bennets, a middleclass family. A counter narrative by Jo Baker ‘s Longbourn looks at the events though the eyes of a house maid and alters the narrative. This paper makes an attempt to look at these two counter-narratives vis a vis the popular works that we are habitual of studying giving voice to subaltern minority characters in the main narratives.