More on Post-Colonial Writing

Just in time for the midterm, I'd like to return to this entry.  If you are going to respond to essay prompt #2, you may want to know a little more about post-colonial writers.  We've read Things Fall Apart, a pioneering example of post-colonial writing, but you may want to know what else is out there.

Let's start with some definitions of post-colonialism.  As Deepika Bahri states in her page on post-colonialism, the definition of this term is not always hard and fast.  This is good to keep in mind.

 http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html 

Even in 1998, Paul Brians had some concerns with the term:

http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~brians/anglophone/postcolonial.html

Some students at Brown University attempt to define and respond to this term:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/stolorow1.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/washburn1.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/yancovitz4.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/hander5.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sarowiwa/hander6.html
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/achebe/hander7.html






For more information about the authors and books above, see the following links. I will be posting from top to bottom, starting with Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian writer now living in the UK.

http://emeagwali.com/nigeria/biography/buchi-emecheta-voice-09jul96.html

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Emech.html

http://readallday.org/may12.html

Let's move on to Ben Okri and The Famished Road.
http://emeagwali.com/nigeria/biography/ben-okri-19jul92.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/25/ben-okri-poem-twitter

http://armenianodar.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/the-famished-road-by-ben-okri/

Wole Soyinka's The Man Died is an example of life writing.

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/soyinka/

http://nigeriaworld.com/feature/publication/molara-wood/072604.html

We'll conclude with Ama Ata Aidoo, a writer from Ghana.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/aidoo_life.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/aidoo_work.shtml

In addition, here is a list of some post-colonial (and colonial) writers:

http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Groups/postcolonial.htm#authors

As you can see from the list, not all are African, and the list is not all inclusive.

Here is a link to Indra Publishing's list of post-colonial novels.  The publishing company is based in Australia.

http://indrabooks.com/category/theme/post-colonial-literature/






For information about the authors above, see the links below.  Let's start with Salman Rushdie. 
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rushdie.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/salmanrushdie.bookerprize

http://www.kaysbookshelf.com/2008/12/midnights-children-salman-rushdie/

What is Orientalism?

Orientalism is an important concept to keep in mind as we start EN 202 because the West's political & cultural power makes it easy to see non-Western literature as exotic and less important than Western literature.  Since this semester we are reading Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters from the Ottoman Empire *and* excerpts from Evliya Celebi's The Book of Travels, this concept is especially important since Edward Said's book focuses on this part of the world more than it focuses on Africa.  So I thought I would put up some links about it while I have a little more time. 

Nowadays when we talk about Orientalism in literary studies we are referring to Edward Said's definition of this term: Orientalism as a method of defining the Middle East (and the rest of Asia) as an object of study by Westerners.  However, as Danielle Sered notes in a web page on Orientalism, this term was used long before Said.  Then its meaning was a lot less controversial.

 http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html

Prof. Allen Carey-Webb's page at the University of Western Michigan provides more detailed information about the concept of Orientalism, the reception of Said's ideas, and Said himself.

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/orientalism.htm

Interestingly, his students have also written about some of the works that we'll be reading.  Here is Michael Omo's page on Heart of Darkness: 

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/heartofdarkness.html

Theresa Johnson wrote about Things Fall Apart:

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/thingsfallapart.html

OK, I'm starting to go off track, but here is Vicki L. Whisler's page on Oroonoko:

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/oroonoko.html

Said does mention Heart of Darkness and other works by Conrad, but his emphasis is on the Middle East as it has been scrutinized and defined by Westerners.  Nevertheless, because Said has helped us realize how politicized literature and literary studies are and his book is a key text in post-colonial studies, he has affected how we read Heart of Darkness et al.  We cannot read it as naively as we might have before Said published Orientalism (1978). 

Of course, neither should we read Orientalism naively.  FYI, here are some reviews by critics of Said:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/enough-said-3743

The print on this article is small, but this site is more accessible than Salon is nowadays:

http://www.ictal.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1328

 

How do you interpret the way that the authors of these web sites use the term Orientalist or Oriental?

http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/

http://www.orientalistart.net/index.html

http://www.arabartgallery.com/orient1.htm

Here is a painting by Kamil Aslanger, a contemporary Turkish artist who calls himself an Orientalist artist.  I tried to go to his website, but it is entirely in Turkish!  It looks and sounds beautiful, though.

Field Trip for Fall 2008

Link

Just to let you know that you're invited to join my world literature class on our field trip to see an exhibit of Indian paintings at the Smithsonian.  (The picture above is an example of the type of work we will see.)  The field trip will be on Saturday, November 1.  For more information, check the link above.  Hope to see you there.  

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2008) -- part 5 (folktales)

As much as I love this picture, I need to put up some text. 

We began this unit with the French writer Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin," an eighteenth-century adaptation of a folktale about a beautiful princess who has to flee her incestuous father and win the heart of a young prince...despite her necessary disguise.  Her fairy godmother, however, helps her do both.  Perrault was a "Modern."  In other words, he believed that people could improve on what the  Greeks and Romans had done.  "Ancients," on the other hand, believed that we could not.  Perrault, by the way, wrote the original Mother Goose tales.  This story is an interesting blend of magic and the mundane, clothing the heroine in radiant dresses and ending with the "moral" that "clear water and brown bread are sufficient nourishment for all young woman provided that they have beautiful clothes" and the "observation"  that "there is not a damsel under the skies who does not imagine herself beautiful and somehow carrying off the honors in the famous beauty contest between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena" (37). 

The Brothers Grimm, folklorists from 19th century Germany,  collected and edited another version of this story.  It was called "All Kinds of Fur."  It does not have the classical references or the "moral" that Perrault added to his story.  Indeed, the Brothers Grimm's version (that again they collected and edited) spends less time at the father's fabulous palace and at the mother's deathbed and more time on the princess' escape and her efforts to attract the young prince's attention.  (However, as our anthology's editors noted, most of the people whom the brothers interviewed were NOT peasants, and the brothers later edited the stories so that they would be more appropriate for children.  Ah, the 19th century...the age of Bowdler who censored Shakespeare so that his plays could be read aloud in Victorian homes...the age of nationalism.)

I want to give you a link to the Brothers Grimm's "Godfather Death":

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm044.html

Would you read this story about the poor man who chooses Death (rather than God or the Devil) to be his thirteenth child's godfather and about the young doctor, Death's godchild, who tries to trick his godfather, to your neice or nephew?  What do you find interesting about this story?  What do you think that the German peasants who originally listened to this story found interesting about it?

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2008) -- part 3 (novel & short story)

  Above is a scene from the 1986 TV version of The Story of a Stone or The Dream of the Red Chamber.  The character above is Bao-yu's beloved (and cousin), Lin-yu.

The Story of a Stone is an extremely popular novel from eighteenth-century China.  Initially, its author was not known, and the manuscript was not published until 1791.  Our anthology contains only a small part of the original novel; the full English translation is in five volumes.  I currently have volumes 1 and 5. 

The Story of a Stone follows the life of a wealthy young man, Jia Bao-yu, from the beginning of his life as his grandmother's pet to his romance with the delicate Lin-yu to his marriage (to another cousin, Bao-chai, a woman who is thought to be more suited to him because of her temperament--and a gold trinket that she was born with) to his entry into monastic life after the birth of his son.  Bao-yu, Lin-yu, and the rest of their family live in a estate in the country; however, the family is going into a decline, perhaps epitomized by Bao-yu's reluctance to study and his preference for the company of women.  (Lin-yu, on the other hand, is more scholarly although she is also a delicate young lady of sensibility.  We will see her and Bao-yu burying flower petals rather than letting them float downstream into polluted waters.)  At one point, Bao-yu's father, Jia Zheng, a more conventional man, challenges his son to come up with names for various features in a garden built for Bao-yu's older sister, an Imperial Concubine.  The Story of a Stone also contains elements of magic realism in its opening frame story and Bao-yu's dreams.  After Lin-yu's death, for example, he tries to bring her back from the afterlife, but he fails.

Eileen Chang's "Stale Mate," on the other hand, is a twentieth-century short story set at about the time of Raise the Red Lantern.  Whereas Su Tong's novella and Zhang Yimou's film date from the 1990s, Eileen Chang's story was written during the 1950s after she had immigrated to the US.  This story is also set in a more Westernized although not urban setting (whereas Raise the Red Lantern is set in rural Northern China--although we see mostly Chen's compound).  In "Stale Mate," Luo, a high school teacher, pursues Miss Fan, a student, even though he is married to a woman who lives at his family's farm.  Luo divorces his wife despite his family's protests, but the divorce does not come through quickly enough for him to marry Miss Fan--or so he thinks.   Out of pique, Miss Fan pursues a marriage that her family is arranging for her (she is after all in her mid-twenties ), and Luo marries Miss Wang.  Miss Fan's marriage falls through, and a few years later she meets Luo again.  Luo then divorces his second wife to marry Miss Fan.  However, as it turns out, he is convinced to  ask his two ex-wives to live with him and his current wife...and so, despite his desires to be modern, he is more or less in the same situation as Master Chen in his compound!  Interestingly, he and the former Miss Fan have less money than his ex-wives do.

Below are an undated picture of the author Eileen Chang and a picture of a current stage show that is intended to evoke 1930s Shanghai: