MLA Commons | Postcolonial Literature | Activity https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/postcolonial-literature/ Activity feed for the group, Postcolonial Literature. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:53:59 -0400 https://buddypress.org/?v=10.6.0 en-US 30 hourly 2 f76cd0020abd3be25c86341560e8d5bd Hania A.M. Nashef deposited The City is Closing in: Raja Shehadeh’s Going Home Searches for a Homeland in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1893023/ Sat, 20 Jul 2024 03:01:46 -0400 Growing constrictions and suffocating borders, due to an unrelenting occupation, continue to plague the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Raja Shehadeh’s 2019 book, Going Home, illustrates how this stifling existence has only worsened with time. His work provides a chronology of events and highlights changes w…[Read more]

]]> 0 82604ef1711e938f67fc2f0739795f40 Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Journeys across fragmented lands: Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1840267/ Thu, 06 Apr 2023 04:43:31 -0400 Solidarity between South Africa and Palestine has a long history, and often times, a comparison is drawn between the apartheid system in South Africa and the Israeli occupation and settler-colonial project in Palestine. In 1997, the late South African President, Nelson Mandela, said, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without t…[Read more]

]]> 0 20f26fd7e11033234a720d0d9394c895 Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Suppressed Narrator, Silenced Victim in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1835414/ Sat, 25 Feb 2023 04:01:19 -0500 Although the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their homeland has been recorded at length since the establishment of the state of Israel in 948, the documentation has namely concerned itself with urban centers or villages. Expulsion and removal of marginalized communities, namely the Bedouins’, from their ancestral encampments or homes h…[Read more]

]]> 0 9b0bb7744a72e9161d14ec0aaf60f5df Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Suppressed Nakba Memories in Palestinian female narratives Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water and Radwa Ashour’s The Woman from Tantoura in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1734391/ Fri, 09 Apr 2021 03:53:41 -0400 Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor…[Read more]

]]> 0 c10b41026de3b8c65aa5f81466777aac Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Against a reading of a sacred landscape: Raja Shehadeh rewrites the Palestinian presence in Palestinian Walks in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1718091/ Thu, 26 Nov 2020 03:51:06 -0500 ABSTRACT

In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land’s inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that was continuously invented to confirm r…[Read more]

]]> 0 0ff3af7dbc0036425942a6cd129c8145 Jay Rajiva deposited “Secrecy, Sacrifice, and God on the Island: Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee’s Foe and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1676550/ Tue, 28 Jan 2020 16:25:21 -0500 This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

]]> 0 dd191cb44e3b404bedd5a35111e9ce8a Jay Rajiva deposited ‘The instant of waking from the nightmare’: Emergence Theory and Postcolonial Experience in Season of Migration to the North in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1616184/ Wed, 22 Aug 2018 16:25:37 -0400 This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive pot…[Read more]

]]> 0 395f5d7a543ff1c6d8a4d9d1c0bd6b28 Octavio Gonzalez deposited The Narrative Mood of Jean Rhys' Quartet in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1604275/ Fri, 23 Mar 2018 04:10:24 -0400 Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

]]> 0 5dc49590dfb5a1674caa403656ea5843 Hania Nashef deposited A dialogue beyond the nation-state: Darwish's Mural and Shehadeh's A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1598709/ Sat, 27 Jan 2018 03:52:17 -0500 Even though postcolonial theory has helped in the critique of non-western texts, it has for the most part failed to engage with the Arab region and its literatures in spite of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism. Robert Young argues that postcolonial theory since its inception has been concerned with the politics of invisibility, striving to m…[Read more]

]]> 0 ca54116a9f1d777b7b0dabd667c4f77e Lee Skallerup Bessette deposited How to Make Love to a Negro: But What if I get Tired? Transculturation and its (Partial) Negation In and Through Translation in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1565334/ Sun, 26 Mar 2017 01:07:49 -0400 Dany Laferrière’s first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre was a literary sensation when it was first released in Quebec in the mid-80s. The author/narrator plays with reader’s expectations, presenting both a stereotypical image of the black man (sex-obsessed, white-hating) and one that contradicts and upsets their expectations. Influen…[Read more]

]]> 0 9fff7bd2ba4e00e00113a70aeb8858cb Lee Skallerup Bessette deposited Re-Evaluating Suvin: Brown Girl in the Ring as Effective Magical Dystopia in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1565294/ Sat, 25 Mar 2017 01:13:59 -0400 This paper will begin by looking at the historical theoretical relationship between science fiction and dystopia. It will then proceed to demonstrate how recent theorists have failed to adequately incorporate the practical changes authors have introduced to the genre, which includes the incorporation of aspects of magical realism. Brown Girl in…[Read more]

]]> 0 f170b4f33d429b77565fc4ece6c231bc Lee Skallerup Bessette deposited Dany Laferrière, Japanses Writer? Borderless Texts, Borderless Trauma in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1565282/ Fri, 24 Mar 2017 20:34:44 -0400 Author Dany Laferrière, after a seven year hiatus from writing, produced the book Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) [I am a Japanese Writer]. The title recalls statements he has frequently made in interviews about how much he hates being pigeon-holed by national or racial labels. The book itself is an examination of what (or who) defines s…[Read more]

]]> 0 b61768843a0fcdbcbf824f551cba8c92 Lee Skallerup Bessette deposited Becoming a Gwo Nèg in 1970s Haiti: Dany Laferrière's Coming-of-Age Film Le Goût des Jeunes Filled (On the Verge of Fever) in the group Postcolonial Literature https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1565276/ Fri, 24 Mar 2017 20:16:11 -0400 When all men are either dead, exiled, thugs or zombies in a world ruled through violence and terror by a President-for-Life and his son, how is a young boy expected to come of age and forge his own identity? Le Goût des Jeunes Filles (On the Verge of Fever), a 2004 film about Fanfan, a 15-year-old boy, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on the same…[Read more]

]]> 0 68ebc00abd758294004aaab6db6207ae Lee Skallerup Bessette started the topic Sharing Our Blogs/Online Work in the forum Postcolonial Literature http://mla.hcommons.org/groups/postcolonial-literature/forum/topic/sharing-our-blogsonline-work/ Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:27:41 -0500 Might be a good way to break the ice to introduce each other and share links to our work (if we have them!).
I am interested in French and English postcolonial literatures from the Caribbean and Caribbean […]

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