Home

Post-Colonial Literature I

Session 7 - Sunday 1:00-2:30pm
Henry Hall 207
Presiding Officer: 
Ana Maria Rodriguez-Vivaldi
  1. "The Empire Writes Back" and the Politics of Comic Representation: Reading Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans within a Framework of Colonial Discourse. Kumar Sankar Bhattacharya, Drew University

    This paper analyzes the use of Manichean binaries of self-other, civilized-native, us-them with a focus to Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans. Although the novel’s protagonist, Gopal attempts to “write back” by subverting the ‘normative’ West, he fails in the end due to his positionality.

  2. Affective Disorders: Emotion, Modernity and Narrative. Bede Scott, Nanyang Technological University

    This paper explores the crisis initiated by colonial modernity in Naguib Mahfouz's 1947 novel Midaq Alley. It focuses on three different responses to this crisis: anger, the (over)production of rumour, and the narrative's use of various melodramatic tropes to create a sense of social stability.

  3. Usable Pasts and Imperial Futures: Re-Visioning Hawai‘i’s Literatures and Literary Histories, 1945-1959. Michael Oishi, University of Washington, Seattle

    This paper examines the ways postwar U.S. writers instrumentalized Hawai‘i’s literatures to justify American imperialism. Using the popular anthology A Hawaiian Reader, I argue that postwar U.S. narratives about Hawai‘i served to maintain American imperialism in a rapidly decolonizing world.

  4. Proven through Profiling: Multiculturalism and the Traps of Self-Identification. Barbara Seidman, Linfield College

    Austin Clarke's 2009 novel More explores the problematic quest for self-identification confronting postcolonial migrants subjected to the reductive racialization that compromises their ethnic specificity despite Canadian multicultural ideals.

Session Type: 
Standing Session
Session Status: 
Closed