Autofiction, Post-conflict Narratives, and New Memory Cultures

A reaction against the death of the author provided one context in which autofiction started to develop in the 1970s. The rebuttal of the death of the author has been prominent among postcolonial writers, who, because their voices were historically marginalized until the recent past, are unlikely to accept the tacit silencing that theories of the death of the author might imply. Through a discussion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s depiction of Nigeria’s Biafran War of 1967–1970 in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Justin Cartwright’s reflection on the massacre of Zulus by Boers in 1838 in Up Against the Night (2015), this chapter shows how they use techniques associated with autofiction to contribute to new forms of memory culture in post-conflict societies.

The afterlives of Yi Gwangsu: Narrating the trauma of colonial collaboration

This article seeks to examine the repeated appearance of Yi Gwangsu (1892–1950) in South Korean postcolonial fiction as a sign of collective trauma. Yi was a pioneering novelist who was a nationalist hero to his readers, but later became a collaborator who supported Japan's war effort. This article focuses on depictions of Yi in the works of three postcolonial writers – Choe Inhun, Seonu Hwi, and Bok Geoil – whose works bore witness to how traumatic his collaboration was. Their works displayed many of the defining characteristics of trauma such as delayed experience and transmission to others. They were also marked by narrative rupture as represented by Yi's mutually incompatible identities as both a nationalist and a collaborator. Rather than repeating the traumatic event, these stories employed various strategies to create new narratives that attempted to heal the trauma.

Celebrating Indigenous Culture and Identity in Ice Candy Man: A Postcolonial Critique

To justify colonialism and perpetuate colonial rule the colonizers appropriated their political, cultural, academic, literary, and linguistic supremacy which left a tinge of mimicry and hybridity among natives. The colonizers, being in the center, employed colonial discourse, Eurocentric historic construct, western education system, English language, missionary, and creative literature to portray the periphery, the colonized, as uncivilized, accultured, incompetent, uncouth, and diabolical evils. To rebut this, the postcolonial writers rejected colonialist ideology and cultural supremacy by asserting native culture, identity, language, and societal values. They actually disassociated themselves from cultural imperialism and celebrated their indigenous culture. The undertaken study analyses the portrayal of celebration of the indigenous culture and identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man (1988-89) from the vantage point of postcolonial theory. It has been found that Sidhwa celebrates indigenous culture, identity, tradition, language, and localization in the novel. To this effect, she employs code-mixing to add indigenous semantics, delineates characters from the locality, asserts her Pakistaniness, and objectifies Pakistani leadership and narrative in the novel and thus she continues to live as a postcolonial writer.

Autofiction, Colonial Massacres and the Politics of Memory

: I argue that the emerging genre of autofiction provides a number of useful techniques and methods by which postcolonial writers engage with the politics of memory in their depiction of a number of largely forgotten brutalities committed by the European imperial powers during the colonial era. More specifically, two of the elements of autofictional practice that have been of particular interest to postcolonial writers are its capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory on the one hand; while also radically destabilizing notions of absolute truth and authenticity on the other. Drawing on research into the relationship between writing and forms of public commemoration, the article analyses Fred D’Aguiar’s portrayal of the killing of African slaves thrown overboard the slave ship Zong in 1781 in Feeding the Ghosts (1997); Kamila Shamsie’s depiction of the massacre of demonstrators protesting against colonial rule in India in Peshawar in 1930 in A God in Every Stone (2014); and Jackie Kay’s homage to the sinking of the SS Mendi, a ship carrying southern African non-combatant personnel to assist in the British effort in World War One in “Lament for the Mendi Men” (2011). It will suggest that even though these texts are not strictly works of autofiction, the techniques afforded by that genre are useful to those writers seeking to draw attention towards a number of neglected historical events. Colonial massacres, enslavement of people and naval disasters during the imperial period have received far less historical or cultural memorialization than other more widely recognized historical events such as VE Day or the Somme. By establishing these events as being culturally and morally important to remember, the article will argue, autofiction provides a number of tools for engaging with the politics of public memory and commemorative events in the present

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

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.

“Tell it slant”: Postcoloniality and the fiction of biographical authenticity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father

In Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Sarah Brouillette expands on Graham Huggan’s exploration of the current entanglement between “the language of resistance” inherent to postcolonialism and “the language of commerce” intrinsic to postcoloniality (Huggan, 2001: 264). Connecting the successful marketing of postcolonial writing with the regime of postcoloniality, Brouillette argues that such a regime requires or projects a “biographical connection” (2007: 4) between text and author so that even postcolonial fiction can be thought of as offering a supposedly authentic or unmediated access to the cultural other. This article discusses Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father (2004), in which the British Asian author narrativizes his ambivalent relationship with his father and retraces the latter’s trajectory from India to the UK of the 1960s and 1970s. My aim is to show how this memoir is very much concerned with the relationship between postcolonialism and postcoloniality even as it foregrounds issues of genre, authorship, and (af)filiation. Highlighting the ambiguities and impossibilities inherent in any referential pact (see Lejeune, 1975), My Ear at His Heart not only complicates the demand for “biographical authenticity” that is seen by Brouillette to condition the niche marketing of postcolonial literatures, the memoir also alludes to the reception of Kureishi’s own work, which was framed by “autobiographical” readings of his early novels. Through an analysis of the ways in which My Ear at His Heart re-places issues of postcoloniality and genre at the heart of the father–son relationship, I wish to suggest that Kureishi still has “something to tell us” about the commodification of “minority” cultures, provided that postcolonial scholarship starts taking issues of form seriously.

Introduction

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized world. The introduction traces the critical reception of modernism over roughly the last forty years, highlighting Edward Said’s and Fredric Jameson’s highly influential critiques of it. In response, some scholars challenged the claim that modernism was necessarily complicit with colonialism and imperialism—as Begam and Moses did in Modernism and Colonialism (2007)—while others, following Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), reconceived the field, temporally and spatially expanding its boundaries beyond Europe and the 1890–1950 period. The canoncial realignments that the New Modernism Studies inspired have generally taken place under four broad rubrics: Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernisms, Global Modernism and Planetary Modernisms. This Introduction examines all these critical approaches, as well as David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s response to them in their influential essay “Metamodernism” (2014).

Framing Empire

This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities. Since decolonization, postcolonial writers and filmmakers have re-appropriated and adapted texts of the Victorian era as a way to 'write back' to the imperial centre. At the same time, the rise of international co-productions and multinational media corporations have called into question the effectiveness of postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts as a resistance strategy. With case studies of films like Gunga Din, Dracula 2000, The Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair and Slumdog Millionaire, this book argues that many postcolonial filmmakers have extended resistance beyond revisionary adaptation, opting to interrogate Hollywood's genre conventions and production methods to address how globalization has affected and continues to influence their homelands.

Négritude

The literary and cultural movement known as négritude was started in Paris in 1932 by Black students from French-speaking colonies in West Africa, the Caribbean and South America. The word ‘négritude’, which literally means ‘negro-ness’, expresses the value and depth of Black culture and history, as opposed to European, particularly French, culture. Its aesthetics drew from other Black-centric movements of the period, including the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. The most prominent authors associated with négritude were Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal, Léon Damas (1912–1978) from French Guiana, Aimé Césaire from Martinique (1913–2008) and Birago Diop (1906–1989) from Senegal, who wrote literature and political treatises that influenced their contemporaries as well as many postcolonial writers. Some of the movement’s founding members, including Césaire and Senghor, held political office in their newly independent states in the post-World War II period.

Reclaiming the Past: Restoration of Personal and Communal History in Petals of Blood

The implications of the colonialist discourse, which suggested that the colonized is a person “whose historical, physical, and metaphysical geography begins with European memory” (Thiong’o, 2009), urged postcolonial writers to correct these views by addressing the issues from their own perspectives. The themes of history and communal/national past thus play a prominent role in postcolonial literature as they are inevitably interwoven with the concept of communal identity. In Petals of Blood (1977), the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explores the implications of social change as brought about by the political and economic development during the post-independence period. This paper seeks to examine the crucial relation between personal and communal/national history and relate it to the writer’s views of principal legacies of colonialism. As Thiong’o states: “My interest in the past is because of the present and there is no way to discuss the future or present separate from the past” (Thiong’o, 1975). Clearly, the grasping of the past and one’s identification with it seems fundamental in discussing national development. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s narratives are always situated in the realm of political and historical context, blending fiction with fact, this paper also aims to elaborate on the implications of his vision.