Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

Kanthapura as “India in Microcosm” in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

2024-01-09T08:05:25-05:00

Against the backdrop of the Indian freedom struggle, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura touches on the psycho-spiritual idea of India in a rural setting through motifs and expressions such as “Gandhi,” “Congress,” “Mother,” “Vande Mataram,” and “a thousand pillared temple.” The Kanthapurians are psychologically conditioned to collectively participate in the freedom struggle through a nationalist discourse. However, their peculiar understanding of and attitude to the national movement are unique and do not represent the essence of the multifaceted Indian independence movement. The novel has a limited scope, and it, rather than representing India during the British Raj, mainly constructs an imaginary caste-ridden village. To interpret Kanthapura as “India in microcosm” is to overlook the fictional local/regional nuances in the text and to dilute the complexity of Indianness in favor of exaggerating the “nationalness” of Kanthapura. Kanthapura is a fictional village that appears to embody Ambedkar’s understanding of the Indian village rather than Gandhi’s.

“Against Forgetting”

2023-11-08T12:47:54-05:00

This paper investigates the witnessing and memory-making functions of the poetry of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Against the backdrop of prevailing institutionalized constraints on journalism and mass media reportage by a postcolonial nation-state in a conflict-ridden territory, this paper shows how Shahid’s poetry fills the lacuna and serves not only as an archive of collective memories of his people, or witness to their sufferings, but also engages the critical as well as emotional faculties of a wider audience to elicit empathies and garner committed solidarities. It throws light on the complexity of witnessing with respect to the poet’s positionality as he bore witness to the occurrences of his homeland while being physically distant from it and yet offering a substitution to news, especially in the present times when journalism, in Kashmir, has failed in its obligation to represent the experiences of the ordinary people. The study primarily focuses on Shahid’s 1997 collection, The Country Without a Post Office, for its investigation of the witnessing functions of his poetry.

A Narrative House of Mirrors

2024-01-29T15:17:37-05:00

The paper reads The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as texts of displacement: texts that are about displaced people, but that also showcase narrative displacement, a refusal on the part of the narrative to congeal into a fixed, unitary set of meanings. It traces the ways in which these novels stage, in and through their linguistic and narrative choices, the constitutive incompleteness of the process of displacement, willed or not, and its unavailability as a coherent or fixed referent. There is constant disarticulation and slippage between words and their accepted meanings, between places and their supposed distinctiveness, and between relationships and their expected outcomes. I examine these narrative aporias to posit these novels as texts that make for a radically unsettling reading experience, at the same time as they are texts about the radical unsettlement undergone by migrants and refugees as they leave a home in search of a new one. I offer, further, that it is through an elaboration of the city— or cities— in these novels that they are able to create a highly productive effect of the uncanny. Both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West deploy a range of cities from all over the globe to set up a conversation between them as in a narrative house of mirrors, asking the reader to acknowledge the placing of borders between places, between people and between their stories, as an imperfect and ineffectual attempt to deny the great deal that links them together.

Hybridity in Arabic Science Fiction

2023-03-28T12:49:40-04:00

This essay tackles the nuances of establishing Arabic science fiction (ASF) within postcolonial literature. It argues that even though postcolonial critics writing about ASF have established the genre’s postcoloniality, they have, nevertheless, noticed that it neither entirely ascribes to postcolonial tropes nor fulfills established postcolonial functions. This essay argues that a deeper understanding of Homi Bhabha’s nuanced exploration of hybridity beyond the often oversimplified explanations answers this dilemma. As Michael Syrotinski explains, Bhabha’s hybridity compromises two interconnected modes: diversity and difference. This essay explains that these two modes are present in ASF’s Arabic term, al-khayal al-‘ilmi, and in the genre’s characteristics. The essay also illustrates the presence of both modes in Talib Imran’s ASF short story, “Ashbah.” Understanding hybridity in ASF not only enhances our understanding of the genre’s postcoloniality but also deepens our appreciation for the diversity of postcolonial literature and its resistance to standardized forms of expressions.

“The Face of the Buffalo”: Interspecies Relationality in Nawal El Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile

2024-01-19T15:37:51-05:00

In several interviews, the Egyptian American writer and feminist Nawal El Saadawi has emphasized her commitment to women’s rights and gender justice in Africa and the Arab world. However, there is hardly any reference regarding her engagement with animals. Yet her writing is replete with animal subjectivity. Therefore, this paper examines animal representations in El Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile by unearthing what we conceptualize as her “complex animal imaginary,” a concept encompassing the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic currents in her novel. Although her narrative language constitutes and conveys such vocabularies, this hardly undermines El Saadawi’s recognition of interspecies relationality and how central the nonhuman is to the flourishing of humans. As such, we highlight her register of animality that presents humans in zoomorphic imagery, stressing that this strategy not only makes legible human suffering but also flattens animal subjectivity, thereby reducing the buffalo, named Aziza, in this case, to a figure of abjection. However, we argue that this representational strategy neither erases animal vitality nor reinscribes speciesism. But instead, it uncovers animal suffering in society. By focusing on interspecies relationality in God Dies, we amplify El Saadawi’s contribution to ongoing conversations on animal studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and posthumanism.

Boundary Poetics

2024-02-26T13:09:34-05:00

This essay approaches Adania Shibli’s 2016 novella Minor Detail through what I term boundary poetics, a way of reading state-sanctioned boundary formations like excessive checkpoints, erection of concrete walls, and new maps erasing original settlements from its key, as a useful methodological approach for reckoning with how the history of violence and occupation are manipulated and controlled by the state. How then does Shibli’s novella reckon with movement in contemporary Palestine dictated by one’s willingness or ability to cross borders, checkpoints, military training zones, and museums and archives?

“Does My Voice Count?”

2024-04-12T11:33:46-04:00

The imbrication of depth psychology, textual genealogy, and Postcolonial Studies has not received much attention when healing trauma caused by slavery, colonization, and neocolonialism in the Caribbean. However, the white Trinidadian British author Monique Roffey, who was in Jungian analysis for many years, explores the efficacy of reconfigured myth in recuperating indigenous memory in her novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020). Foregrounding Adrian del Valle’s Cuban version of the oral Taíno (Aycayia) myth from Tradiciones y Leyendas de Cienfuegos (1919), Roffey’s novel re-imagines the representation of patriarchal gender relations by empowering the mermaid through self-determined, conscious sexuality and turning the male gaze through relatedness. At the same time, however, the novel problematizes woman-on-woman envy, jealousy, and implication in androcentric power structures to show the limits of self-realization due to systemic racism. Thus, the novel calls for a reconsideration of psychological growth across gender and color lines in a trans-Caribbean context and beyond.

The Danger of a Single Chronotope

2024-03-16T14:56:42-04:00

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy popularized the ship as a salient chronotope for examining the Black diasporic transnational alliances across the Middle Passage because ships sailing across the Atlantic metonymically represented Pan-Africanism and transcultural relations in the writings of intellectual activists like W. E. B. Du Bois. Jettisoning the clichéd chronotope of the ship and portraying the alternative chronotope of the airport as a space that restricts mobility for Black diasporic subjects, this article argues that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah represents the unique chronotope of the hair salon as a spatiotemporal organizer of the narrative depicting the diverse lived experiences of the new Black diaspora. Close reading to demonstrate how Adichie’s experimental aesthetics augments extant theoretical models of the Black diaspora (e.g., Brent Edwards’s Décalage), the article concludes by proffering that Ifemelu’s blog posts challenge the claims of The Black Atlantic, which are supported by a framework that Michelle Wright describes as the “Middle Passage Epistemology.”

Editor's Note

2025-02-11T11:12:51-05:00

Editor's note to volume 12, issue 2 (Fall 2024) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.

Notes on Contributors

2025-02-11T12:06:54-05:00

Contributor biographies for volume 12, issue 2 (Fall 2024) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.

Postcolonial Comics and Graphic Novels

2024-10-22T08:56:37-04:00

Mark McKinney, Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics. Leuven UP, 2021. Paperback. $74.

Esra Mirze Santesso, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing. Ohio State UP, 2023. Paperback. $34.95.