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Postcolonial Text
Number of Followers: 10

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1705-9100 - ISSN (Online) 1705-9100
Published by Open Humanities Press

[5 journals]

Healing Cosmopolitanism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones
- Authors: Florian Schybilski
  Abstract: Edwidge Danticat’s 1998 novel The Farming of Bones is an articulation of ‘healing cosmopolitanism’. Amidst the 1937 genocide against French-speaking Haitians in the Dominican borderland, I focus on medical practitioners who attempt to save as many Haitians as they can by transporting them across the border to safety and share an ethos that binds them to each other as well as to their patients. Using Cheah’s and Robbins’s shorthand for cosmopolitanism, they are thinking, feeling and, most importantly, acting beyond the nation. As itinerants between nations, they create their own cosmopolitan affiliations as a decolonial counter-articulation vis-à-vis nation as ‘purity’. As author, Danticat actively participates in this project of healing cosmopolitanism through the act of writing that bears witness and helps treat the wounds on both sides by European-style nationalism. The Farming of Bones thus deals with the shadows of Hispaniola’s past in order to put the ‘post’ in postcolonial.
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
“There Are Other Kinds of Exile”: Exploring the Stance of Detachment
in Damon Galgut’s 'The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs'
- Authors: Marek Pawlicki
  Abstract: The article is a critical analysis of Damon Galgut’s second novel 'The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs' in the context of the historical and political conditions of apartheid in the late 1980s. It is argued that the alienation and detachment of the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Patrick Winter, need not be perceived solely in terms of an affliction: his detachment can also be seen as a conscious stance which enables him to distance himself both from the racist values held by his grandparents and from the volatile and vacuous liberal humanism represented by his mother. Rather than interpret Patrick’s alienation solely as proof of his sexual and political marginalization, this article puts equal emphasis on the empowering dimension of his detachment, interpreting it as Galgut’s attempt to formulate a viable political stance in the times of the South African interregnum.
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
Land, Language, Body: Representations of Feminine Autonomy in Krishna
Sobti’s Mitro Marjani
- Authors: Radhika Prasad
  Abstract: This paper reads Krishna Sobti’s novella Mitro Marjani (To Hell with You, Mitro, 1966) in the context of the Partition of India, with attention to its use of a hybrid Hindi and its representation of the female bodies. I argue that Sobti’s experimental use of Hindi allows her to replace patriarchal, nation-centric forms of relationality with ones that are based in feminine sexual and financial autonomy. Her representation of a non-reproductive and sexually desiring feminine subjectivity, further, problematizes language debates that relied on tropes of virtuous femininity to emphasize the supremacy of Hindi, and the national imaginary that was embedded within this discourse of supremacy.
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
Global Migration and Betrayal of Immigrants: Lessons Learned from Samuel
Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners
- Authors: Sujata Chattopadhyay
  Abstract: Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners showcases the struggles of Windrush migrants in their new home host country, Britain, exposing a larger issue appearing in the underbelly of global migration where the societal mechanisms exploit cheap labor from poor countries for global capitalist gain while denying basic human dignity, and at the same time racism underpinning patriotic nationalism. Global migration has become a site of political contentions in recent times with many global and local events that brought the blatant racism against migrants to the center stage. The contagious COVID-19 was such a global phenomenon, which took everyone by surprise. However, the scandal involving non-European migrants is what was most striking as it manifested how the contagious disease, in the Western part of the world, became co-mingled with its pre-existing racial prejudice that views non-white bodies as contagious, which in turn prompted the closure of national borders in the Western hemisphere for such individuals. Another example of impropriety involving migration is the Windrush scandal—a localized event in Britain that occurred a year before COVID-19 but was an ongoing issue there in this period. The Windrush scandal is about the betrayal of a generation of Caribbean migrants from the Commonwealth countries, who were born as British subjects, to Britain with a promise of citizenship but instead were mistreated and betrayed, which got wider global scrutiny and publicity after the COVID-19 scandal. The local British racist immigration policies instantaneously gained notoriety and became part of the global dialogue about the complicated relationship between immigration and racism. In such an environment, Caribbean-born Windrush writers like Samuel Selvon, who wrote on this issue much earlier, need to be acknowledged as a visionary who raised his voice against the systemic racism faced by his people as a global issue well ahead of his time. This essay uses his novel, The Lonely Londoners, to investigate the struggles of Windrush migrants serving as examples of migrants in general, who are used as political pawns for negotiations, forcing them to relocate from their home country only to be betrayed later due to the dereliction of duty by the establishment and failure of fellow citizens in honoring the promises made to them.
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
Jason Jones' interview
- Authors: Dexter Peters
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
Review of The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti
by Erin L. Durban
- Authors: Cæcilie Paarup Madsen
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
Review of Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature:
Unsettling the Anthropocene Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell
- Authors: Alys Daroy
  Abstract: (I'm not sure if I need an abstract for the review, please let me know if so.)
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000
The Apple Appetite, Les Pommes de Terre)
- Authors: Hui Chien Ngoi
  Abstract: Both poems in this submission use my transnational experiences to illustrate the enduring impact of British colonialism on Malaysia. First, the poem “The Apple Appetite” uses the imagery of apples, which symbolise wisdom in Western culture, to explore the colonial supremacy attached to certain types of English pronunciation. Depicting the issue of pronunciation through the act of ingestion, I gesture towards the interiorisation of, and increasing desire for, values moulded by British colonialism. Second, the poem “Les Pommes de Terre” continues to draw on the imagery of apples to convey the lasting influence of colonialism. The French term “les pommes de terre”, which refers to potatoes, literally translates to “apples of the soil” (“les pommes” means “apples”). With that, by contrasting the soil-covered potatoes in Malaysia with the potatoes as smooth as apples in the UK, I illustrate how my time in the UK has influenced my perception, which at times conflicts with Malaysian culture.
  PubDate: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:26:14 +000

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