Pub Date : 2023-10-03DOI: 10.1177/00219894231200071
Victoria V Chang
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Pub Date : 2023-01-13DOI: 10.1177/00219894221145213
Nadeen Dakkak
A central theme in Benyamin’s twin novels Jasmine Days (2014) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014) is the role of migrants in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and their attitudes towards the ruling regime’s repression of dissent amongst native citizens. This article argues that Benyamin’s novels advocate recognition of the political impact of migration from Kerala and elsewhere by questioning the supposedly depoliticized economic space to which migrants belong in Bahrain and the other Gulf States, and by asserting Keralan migrants’ long-standing connection to the region and not merely their contributions to its economy as transitory outsiders. Writing in a regional Indian language and for a Malayalam readership about the political and social dilemmas of an Arab city, Benyamin constructs a transnational multilingual space where writing and translation enable dissent and where individuals from different national and linguistic backgrounds have a stake in political change and its repercussions.
{"title":"Malayalam literature as a transnational space of political change: Migration and Bahrain’s 2011 uprising in Benyamin’s <i>Jasmine Days</i> and <i>Al Arabian Novel Factory</i>","authors":"Nadeen Dakkak","doi":"10.1177/00219894221145213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00219894221145213","url":null,"abstract":"A central theme in Benyamin’s twin novels Jasmine Days (2014) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014) is the role of migrants in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and their attitudes towards the ruling regime’s repression of dissent amongst native citizens. This article argues that Benyamin’s novels advocate recognition of the political impact of migration from Kerala and elsewhere by questioning the supposedly depoliticized economic space to which migrants belong in Bahrain and the other Gulf States, and by asserting Keralan migrants’ long-standing connection to the region and not merely their contributions to its economy as transitory outsiders. Writing in a regional Indian language and for a Malayalam readership about the political and social dilemmas of an Arab city, Benyamin constructs a transnational multilingual space where writing and translation enable dissent and where individuals from different national and linguistic backgrounds have a stake in political change and its repercussions.","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135898597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-03-01Epub Date: 2015-01-28DOI: 10.1177/0021989414563149
Jessica M Howell
Colonial nurses were ideal agents of colonial medicine's supposed beneficence: while practising and teaching "hygiene", they also reinforced racial and cultural separation. In some cases, however, the nurses took their role as healers and teachers of local populations much more seriously than was authorized implicitly by their employer. This article analyses the circulation of original life writing materials between one nurse, CC, and the Colonial Nursing Association, in order to chart the considerable anxiety around the concept of nurses' cross-cultural and cross-racial sympathy during the interwar period. I draw upon colonial language studies and women's travel writing analysis in order to demonstrate that many of these concerns centred on issues of language and communication. By speaking local languages, it was feared that colonial nurses' loyalty would shift from their employer towards their indigenous patients. This essay places the concept of "going native" within the contexts of nineteenth-century empire literature, racial anthropology and ethnology, in order to suggest that concerns about nurses "going native" were influenced by discourses of degeneration and acclimatization.
{"title":"Nurse going native: Language and identity in letters from Africa and the British West Indies.","authors":"Jessica M Howell","doi":"10.1177/0021989414563149","DOIUrl":"10.1177/0021989414563149","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Colonial nurses were ideal agents of colonial medicine's supposed beneficence: while practising and teaching \"hygiene\", they also reinforced racial and cultural separation. In some cases, however, the nurses took their role as healers and teachers of local populations much more seriously than was authorized implicitly by their employer. This article analyses the circulation of original life writing materials between one nurse, CC, and the Colonial Nursing Association, in order to chart the considerable anxiety around the concept of nurses' cross-cultural and cross-racial sympathy during the interwar period. I draw upon colonial language studies and women's travel writing analysis in order to demonstrate that many of these concerns centred on issues of language and communication. By speaking local languages, it was feared that colonial nurses' loyalty would shift from their employer towards their indigenous patients. This essay places the concept of \"going native\" within the contexts of nineteenth-century empire literature, racial anthropology and ethnology, in order to suggest that concerns about nurses \"going native\" were influenced by discourses of degeneration and acclimatization.</p>","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989414563149","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34550436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054304
A. Rauwerda
In Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Simon is a white-skinned, blondhaired, blue-eyed child who represents both the Pakeha (white) colonist in a national, postcolonial allegory and, paradoxically, a Maori god. There is, despite the novel’s idealism, an unresolved tension between the representation of Simon as Pakeha (and thus a whipping boy for European colonialism in New Zealand) and as Maui (and thus a figure for the postcolonial revivification of Maori mythology). I argue that any reconciliation between Maori and Pakeha is mitigated by the violence inflicted on Simon because he is white. Hulme exaggerates the paleness of the child; she uses Simon’s injuries to invoke disempowered and disadvantaged colonial whiteness. The violence the child suffers suggests that whiteness must be punished in order that Maoriness can regain pride of place in New Zealand. Maryanne Dever emphasizes Hulme’s use of language as a means of cultural resistance, suggesting that she uses Maori alongside English, and even within English, to undermine colonialist discourse. Dever writes that “language becomes a site of resistance and a way of decentring the narrative. The inclusion of the Maori subverts the conventionally unitary voice of command traditionally associated with the English language.”1 Thus, by “challenging the dominant Eurocentric vision of reality, the text offers an alternative voice, one that enfranchises multiplicity and undermines the authority of imperialism’s homogenising linguistic imperative”.2 However, Simon During implies that Hulme’s resistance may not “enfranchise multiplicity” so much as re-authenticate Maoriness and reestablish it as dominant in New Zealand: “The bone people [. . .] desires a postcolonial identity given to it in Maoriness. The heroine in rebuilding a marae, the hero, in guarding the remnants of the sacred ships of the The White Whipping Boy
在Keri Hulme的《骨人》(The Bone People)中，西蒙是一个白皮肤、金发碧眼的孩子，在国家的后殖民寓言中，他既是白人殖民者，又是毛利人的神。尽管小说充满理想主义色彩，但西蒙作为帕克哈人(因此是欧洲殖民主义在新西兰的替罪羊)和毛伊岛(因此是后殖民主义复兴毛利神话的人物)的形象之间仍存在一种未解决的紧张关系。我认为，毛利人和帕克哈人之间的任何和解，都会因为西蒙是白人而遭受的暴力而受到削弱。休姆夸大了孩子的苍白;她用西蒙的受伤来唤起被剥夺权力和处于不利地位的殖民白人。这个孩子遭受的暴力表明，白人必须受到惩罚，这样白人才能在新西兰重新获得骄傲的地位。Maryanne Dever强调Hulme将语言作为一种文化抵抗的手段，她认为她将毛利语与英语一起使用，甚至在英语中使用，以削弱殖民主义话语。德弗写道:“语言成为一种反抗的场所，一种分散叙事的方式。毛利人的加入颠覆了传统上与英语联系在一起的统一的命令声音。因此，通过“挑战占主导地位的以欧洲为中心的现实观，文本提供了另一种声音，这种声音赋予了多样性，并破坏了帝国主义同质化语言命令的权威”然而，Simon During暗示Hulme的抵抗可能不是“赋予多样性权利”，而是重新认证Maoriness并重新建立它在新西兰的主导地位:“骨头人[…]希望在Maoriness中获得后殖民身份。女主在重建教堂，男主在守卫白色鞭子男孩的圣船的残余物
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Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054309
Sneja Gunew
You ask me what I mean By saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do If you had two tongues in your mouth, And lost the first one, the mother tongue, And could not really know the other, The foreign tongue. You could not use them both together Even if you thought that way. And if you lived in a place where you had to speak a foreign tongue – your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out. I thought I spit it out But overnight while I dream. . . It grows back, a stump of a shoot . . . It pushes the other tongue aside.2
{"title":"“Mouthwork”: Food and Language as the Corporeal Home for the Unhoused Diasporic Body in South Asian Women’s Writing","authors":"Sneja Gunew","doi":"10.1177/0021989405054309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405054309","url":null,"abstract":"You ask me what I mean By saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do If you had two tongues in your mouth, And lost the first one, the mother tongue, And could not really know the other, The foreign tongue. You could not use them both together Even if you thought that way. And if you lived in a place where you had to speak a foreign tongue – your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out. I thought I spit it out But overnight while I dream. . . It grows back, a stump of a shoot . . . It pushes the other tongue aside.2","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405054309","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054305
Hugh Hodges
{"title":"Walk Good: West Indian Oratorical Traditions in Bob Marley’s Uprising","authors":"Hugh Hodges","doi":"10.1177/0021989405054305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405054305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405054305","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054314
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
It is being said that the families of the abducted women no longer want to receive them back. It would be a barbarian husband or a barbarian parent who would say that he would not take back his wife or daughter. I do not think the women concerned had done anything wrong. They had been subjected to violence. To put a blot on them and to say that they are no longer fit to be accepted in society is unjust.1
{"title":"Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes: Partition, Women and Homelessness","authors":"Debali Mookerjea-Leonard","doi":"10.1177/0021989405054314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405054314","url":null,"abstract":"It is being said that the families of the abducted women no longer want to receive them back. It would be a barbarian husband or a barbarian parent who would say that he would not take back his wife or daughter. I do not think the women concerned had done anything wrong. They had been subjected to violence. To put a blot on them and to say that they are no longer fit to be accepted in society is unjust.1","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405054314","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65357098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054310
Lucy Rosenstein
In 1864 Ruskin presented his lecture “Of Queen’s Gardens” at the Town Hall in Manchester. In it he pictured women as passive, self-effacing, pious, graceful, having the natural perfection of flowers. Their “garden”, bounded by walls, was the home, which he described as “the place of peace, the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division”. For Ruskin, Woman was a synonym of home: “[a]nd whenever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head, the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot, but home is wherever she is”.1 About a century later white feminism2 identified home as the major site of women’s oppression, where women had no choice but to suffer in Betty Friedan’s words “the problem that has no name”3 and live a life of domestic slavery. Friedan’s dismantling of perfect domesticity as the female version of the American Dream was taken up by the socialist feminists of the late 1970s who saw the family as “the site of women’s labour in the reproduction of the capitalist system”.4 Feminism’s problematization of patriarchal notions of “home” resulted from its attempt to undo the equation of women with Woman, Ruskin’s “Queen of Gardens”. Feminist critics, like Kate Millett5 and Germaine Greer,6 argued that the male imagination typically forced representations of women into crude stereotypes, most often those of virgins or whores. Julia Kristeva asserted that Woman in all her incarnations – the Virgin, the self-sacrificing Mother, the chaste Wife (as exemplified by the Virgin Mary in Christianity, or Sita and Savitri in Indian mythology) and their dark twin – the evil, lustful, cunning and untrustworthy Whore (mythologized in the Hellenic Pandora, the Christian Eve, the Jewish Lilith, the Indian Durga) was a construct that Not a Home
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Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054303
{"title":"“Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth”: Vikram Chandra interviewed by Maria-Sabina Alexandru","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/0021989405054303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405054303","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2005-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989405054303","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65356748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054312
S. Jayawickrama
In the opening chapter of Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy, Arjie, the young narrator and protagonist, is plucked from play in the children’s game of “bride-bride” and paraded before the adults gathered in his grandparents’ drawing-room dressed as a bride, an old sari wound carefully around his body and his face painted with lipstick, rouge and kohl. When Arjie’s uncle mockingly remarks to his father “Ey Chelva . . . looks like you have a funny one here”2 the ambiguity of the word “funny” disorients Arjie’s sense of meaning and comprehension. When Arjie hears the word uttered it is inflected with ridicule and his parents react with shame and disgust. However, Arjie’s description of adorning himself in the improvised paraphernalia of the bride produces a very different sensation for the narrator of being transfigured into a “more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve” (FB, pp. 4–5). In the “remembered innocence of childhood” (FB, p. 5), a space in which the narrator experiences “the free play of fantasy” (FB, p. 3), the sense of being “an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested” (FB, pp. 4–5) expresses the potency of desire and nostalgia for the past. However, Arjie’s recollection of the allure of childhood is hardly figured on the page before it is succeeded by acknowledgment of a sense of “exile”, of movement away from “the safe harbour of childhood towards the precarious waters of adult life” (FB, p. 5), a process which starts much earlier than his actual departure from the island to Canada. At Home in the Nation?
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