Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective

For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.

One Text, Many Literary Traditions: The Multidimensionality of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

Death and the King’s Horseman, published in 1975, is undoubtedly Wole Soyinka’s most acclaimed play. When awarding the playwright the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1986, the Committee specifically cited it as a “drama of existence”. Many literary critics have written about the play from multifarious perspectives. However, the dramatic text is still open to multidimensional interpretations that can further illuminate the rich texture of this canonical work. My study contextualises this dramatic masterpiece as yielding to a form of critical inquiry that makes it cohere with definitions of various literary traditions. It can be interrogated as Yoruba/Nigerian national literature, African literature, postcolonial literature, and world literature. It is, therefore, in this effort to use many approaches to see the play as a holistic text that I have chosen to interrogate it as “one text, many literary traditions”.

ROOTLESSNESS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN'S THE DEATH OF THE HEART, AND CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ANGLO-IRISH AND AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Postcolonial literature views the British Empire of the nineteenth century as unique in human history and literary products for it provides writers with different subjects that deal with the idea of how to resurrect the colonized identity even after getting liberation. Postcolonial literature seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other colonized and other colonial powers as British. Such literature and particularly novel, emerged to focus on social, moral, and cultural influences and their interrelation with the impact of English existence upon some countries as Ireland in Europe and Nigeria in Africa. Irish novel shares its genesis with the English novel. When we write of the eighteenth century and use the phrase ' the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novel written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish. This fact is apparent within hands when we talk about the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her novels that show the obvious effect of her Irish identity upon her works during the period of World Wars I and II with a consideration to Ireland as a British colony. The same impact with African culture, postcolonial Nigeria, when its writers saw the changes crept to their traditions. Their literary products concentrated on questioning their nation how to keep and reserve African identity from alternations. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer tried to reflect his culture in a mirror to readers and challenge them with their own strength and weakness in his novel Arrow of God. His novel tackles these weaknesses of the traditional outlook and senses for change. The research paper tackles the concept of rootlessness in postcolonialism through Anglo-Irish novel The Death of the Heart (1938) of Elizabeth Bowen ,which is tackled in the first section , and postcolonial Nigerian novel Arrow of God (1964) written by Chinua Achebe in the second section. The paper ends with conclusions and works cited.

Gabriel García Márquez and the Remaking of the World Canon

Given the central role played by One Hundred Years of Solitude in determining what today is understood as postcolonial literature, it may surprise readers of his memoirs or, for that matter, of his early journalism, to discover that Gabriel García Márquez’s literary role models were almost exclusively European or North American. For the young García Márquez, authors who today constitute the core of the modernist canon, in particular Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, shaped his vision of what narrative should be like. However, in this admiration and appropriation of modernism, García Márquez was not alone. For instance, his younger contemporary Mario Vargas Llosa has also acknowledged the central influence of Faulkner on his works. As Pascale Casanova has noted, both García Márquez and Vargas Llosa belong to the myriad of twentieth-century novelists who found in modernist writers and, in particular, Faulkner, a “temporal accelerator” that made their novels seem contemporaneous to those produced in Europe and North America and therefore understandable by critics and general readers in those countries. However, in a twist that serves as proof of García Márquez’s literary success, his particular reinterpretation of Faulkner’s and other modernists’ writings in turn served as a model for many other writers from the so-called Global South. This article studies the manner in which García Márquez’s “magical realism,” derived from his readings of the modernist canon, became a new “temporal accelerator” that made the experiences of the Global South understandable by readers in the North.

El traductor visible de literatura poscolonial ante la tentación del exotismo

Building upon The Translator’s Invisibility by L. Venuti and related work by Susan Bassnett, Ovidi Carbonell, Anuradha Dingwaney, Samia Mehrez and Mahasweta Sengupta, among others, this paper argues for the visibility of the postcolonial literature translator and draws a carefull line between proper visibility – as we define it – and a counterproductive exotism that may arise as the side-product of a poorly understood visibility. Our discussion focuses on the particular case of postcolonial lusophone African literature. In particular, we analyze the translation strategy adopted by the author of this paper for the translation from portuguese to catalan of A Varanda do Frangipani, a novel by Mia Couto from Mozambique.

Marxism in Zakia Mashhadi's Death of an Insect

Poverty is the root cause of exploitation of the poor at the hands of the rich in the root structure of the society that leads the poor towards the state of self-pity. This study is an interlink between the domains of World Englishes, Freudo-Marxist Literature, Trauma Literature and Postcolonial Literature. The postcolonial context of the subcontinent amidst language appropriation is the major theme that witnesses the phenomenon of exploitation and poverty through the canvas of Freudo-Marxist Literature. The current study attempts to find Marxist themes, predominantly exploitation and poverty, from a short story Death of an Insect by Zakia Mashhadi. The textual qualitative method of analysis proceeds under the operational theoretical lens of Edgar W. Schneider and Karl Marx. The former deals with textual analysis through language appropriation, while the latter deals with thematic analysis through the behaviour of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat, respectively. The study has found that the upper class, for their vested interests, even for the satisfaction of their ego, brutally exploit the poor working class, who have to suffer and bear all inhuman behaviour without any resistance. Thus, this continuous Vicious Circle of exploitation and poverty cause difficulties and hardships for the poor class.