Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2014. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die verhouding tussen die verlede en die hede soos uitgebeeld in Jamal Mahjoub se The Carrier (1998) en Amitav Ghosh se In an Antique Land (1992). Hierdie tekste herverbeel die geskiedenis met die doel om 'n ander toekoms te dink. Hulle vertel alternatiewe geskiedenisse en lewer sodoende kritiek op die Westerse historiografie en die uitbeelding van die Ooste en die Suide daarin. Hierdie tesis sal uit Edward Said se Orientalism (1978) put as 'n manier om die dominante Westerse houdings teenoor die Ooste sowel as die Suide, verteenwoordig deur Afrika, te konseptualiseer soos die liminale karakters in Mahjoub en Ghosh se tekste oor die Indiese Oseaan- en Mediterreense wêrelde beweeg. Beide Mahjoub en Ghosh versplinter hulle verhale in 'n historiese en 'n kontemporêre draad, en verweef hierdie fragmente om sodoende kommentaar te lewer op die dinamiese verhouding tussen die verlede en die hede. Hierdie verhouding sal gekonseptualiseer word deur te put uit Walter Benjamin se konsep van 'n konstellasie verbindingspunte in tyd. Die kartering van verbindings word moontlik gemaak deur die skrywer se verkenning van 'n geskiedenis van verbindings tussen diverse mense in hierdie gebiede. Die alternatiewe geskiedenisse wat hier voorgestel word, onthul pre-koloniale Mediterreense en Indiese Oseaan-handelsnetwerke gebou op uitruiling, wat gelei het tot kosmopolitiese samelewings waarin die klem op verbindings eerder as geopolitiese binêre geval het. Gesprekke tussen verskillende kulture, gelowe en denkskole dryf hierdie verbindings in die historiese verhaallyne. Deur hierdie vergange wêreld en 'n meer vyandige twintigste-eeuse wêreld naas mekaar te stel, wil Mahjoub en Ghosh bevraagteken of die herkonseptualisering van die verlede die herverbeelding van die hede en toekoms moontlik maak, in terme van hoe mense in staat is om oor verskilgrense heen met mekaar te verbind. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis interrogates the relationship between the past and the present, as represented in Jamal Mahjoub's The Carrier (1998) and Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992). These texts re-imagine history in order to think a different future. They narrate alternative histories and in the process critique Western historiography and its representation of the East and South. This thesis will draw on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a way of conceptualising dominant Western attitudes towards the East, as well as the South, represented by Africa, as the liminal characters in Mahjoub and Ghosh's texts move across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds. Mahjoub and Ghosh both fracture their narratives into a historical and a contemporary thread, interweaving these fragments in order to comment on the dynamic relationship between the past and the present. This relationship will be conceptualised drawing on Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation connecting points in time. The mapping of connection is enabled by the authors’ exploration of a history of connection between diverse people in these regions. The alternative histories proposed reveal precolonial Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trading networks built on exchange, resulting in cosmopolitan societies emphasising connection rather than geopolitical binaries. Conversations across differences — of culture, religion, and schools of thought — drive these connections in the historical plotlines. By juxtaposing this past world with a more hostile twentieth century world, Mahjoub and Ghosh seek to question whether reconceptualising the past enables the re-imagining of the present and future, in terms of how people are able to connect across boundaries of difference.

Drawing on empirical data from the two Palestinian Arab villages of Abu Ghosh and Umm al Fahem, this dissertation assesses the nature of relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian Arab citizens from a Gramscian perspective. In this respect, a particular emphasis is given to the analysis of impact of local socio-economic and political structures on the relationship between the villagers and Israeli state and dominant classes especially following a hegemonic crisis during post-al Aqsa Intifada. Based on Gramscian methodology and empirical data, it is concluded that hamula structures could act as an agent of hegemony in internalization and reproduction of of consent based Israeli hegemony. Conditions, dynamics and consequences of this agent-structure relationship is also assessed in detail.

Tracked and inscribed across the centuries by traders, pilgrims and imperial competitors, the Indian Ocean is written into literature in English by Joseph Conrad, and later by selected novelists from the region. As this thesis suggests, the Indian Ocean is imagined as a space of littoral interconnections, nomadic cosmopolitanisms, ancient networks of trade and contemporary networks of cooperation and crime. This thesis considers selected fiction written in English from or about the Indian Ocean—from the particular culture around its shores, and about the interconnections among its port cities. It focuses on Conrad, alongside Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Lindsey Collen, whose work in many ways captures the geographical scope of the Indian Ocean: India, East Africa and a mid-point, Mauritius. Conrad’s work is examined as a foundational text for writing of the space, while the later writers, in turn, proleptically suggest a rereading of Conrad’s oeuvre through an oceanic lens. Alongside their diverse interests and emphases, the authors considered in this thesis write the Indian Ocean as a space in and through which to represent and interrogate historical gaps, the ethics and aesthetics of heterogeneity, and alternative geographies. The Indian Ocean allows the authors to write with empire at a distance, to subvert Eurocentric narratives and to explore the space as paradigmatic of widely connected human relations. In turn, they provide a longer imaginative history and an alternative cognitive map to imposed imperial and national boundaries. The fiction in this way brings the Indian Ocean into being, not only its borders and networks, but also its vivid, sensuous, storied world. The authors considered invoke and evoke the Indian Ocean as a representational space—producing imaginative depth that feeds into and shapes wider cultural, including historical, figurations.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1988.

This thesis undertakes a critical study of ethics in the postcolonial novel. Focusing on four authors, namely Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, and Kazuo Ishiguro, I conduct a comparative analysis of the ethical engagement offered in a selection of their novels. I argue that the recognitions and related emotional responses of characters are integral to the unfolding of these novels’ ethical concerns. The ethics thus explored are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic – an impurity which is productively thought together with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “radical evil”. I arrive at this through deploying an approach to ethics in the postcolonial novel that is largely drawn from the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Scott, and Terence Cave. This approach is attentive to both the particular contexts in which the novels’ ethical concerns unfold, as well as the general ethical questions in relation to which these can be understood. Crucial to this is the concept of anagnorisis, that is, the recognition scene. Functioning as both a structural and a thematic element, it serves as a hinge between the general and the specific ethical considerations in a novel. There are three ethical themes that I consider across the thesis: the ethics of remembrance, the human, and religion. The works of these four authors cluster around these concerns to differing degrees and with differing perspectives. What emerges is that while each engagement is focused on the particular details that the novel represents, the range of perspectives can nevertheless be productively read alongside one another as interventions into these general concerns. Following from this I also conclude that as a suitable, if not privileged, form in which to engage questions of the ethical, the postcolonial novel hosts the ethical difficulty that I name as the tragic, and which is characterised by the term radical evil.

This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.

No description available.

In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings, and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.