Pub Date : 2018-12-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0007
Deepika Bahri
In considering Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), the author observes that time is a central preoccupation in the novel. But how does postcolonialism situate itself in relation to a temporality whose structure, logic, and rhythm have been defined by the West and the experience of colonization? Roy responds to this problem by examining the figure of the Kathakali man, a native storyteller who uses dance, movement, and costume to relate stories derived from the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Like the stories of the Kathakali man, Roy’s own narrative is disjunctive and recursive, generating a temporal scheme that is at once static and dynamic. Such a handling of time enables Roy to construct what the author calls a “postcolonial modernism,” which employs the formal devices of modernism to arrive at a more genuinely postcolonial engagement with the past and its historical traumas.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0012
Nicholas Allen
Focusing on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, this chapter explores the limitations of Irish postcolonial criticism. Acknowledging the invigorating influence of Said on Irish critics, it nevertheless argues that an overemphasis on Ireland’s colonial and “postcolonial” status has restricted attention to the nation and its political history. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger permits a global reframing of Irish culture that emphasizes transnational flows of money, people, culture, and literature. While Heaney’s poetry may seem archaic (rather than avant-garde), this chapter finds it creatively engages with transimperial affiliations. Rather than reading Heaney as a provincial northern Irish poet rooted in the native soil, the chapter emphasizes the poet’s embrace of mobility, fluidity, and non-Irish sites. Underscoring Heaney’s indebtedness to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett—whose works represented the circulations of seafaring cultural exchange—the chapter discovers in Heaney’s meditations on oceanic networks a corrective to the narrow critical focus on decolonization and nationhood.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-20DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0008
Andrzej Gąsiorek
Arguing against critics who situate Jean Rhys in either the modernist or postcolonial camps, this chapter suggests that these movements complement and reinforce one another. In “Again the Antilles” (1927), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys consistently employs ellipsis, narrative fragmentation, and multiple narrators to unmask the ideological underpinnings of plantocratic ideology. Of special interest to Rhys are modernity’s discontinuities, which extend to the rigid binaries of the Caribbean: white and black, master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Unable to fit easily into any of these categories, Rhys’s heroines become “marooned in ruinous subject positions.” Although her work is sometimes read as a form of revisionism that exculpates the colonial class, Rhys not only enables the colonized to speak—most memorably through the character of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea—but also exposes the ways in which official discourse ratifies the logic and legacy of colonialism.
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