'Post-colonial Dislocation and Amnesia: A Cure from Molefi Kete Asante's An Afrocentric Manifesto' aims at investigating the epistemological problems and theoretical inconsistencies in contemporary post-colonial studies. Capitalizing Molefi Kete Asante's theorizations on agency, location, identity, and history this project applies an Afrocentric approach in its reading of the post-colonial authors and theorists. While current postcolonial theory seems to be at stake with operationalizing many of its terms and concepts, the application of Afrocentric methods can help answering severe allegations raised by a number of critics against this discourse. Issues concerning spatial and temporal location of the term post-colonial, commodity status of post-colonialism, and crises in the post-colonial pedagogy can be addressed from an Afrocentric perspective based on a new historiography. To support the proposed arguments, the paper provides an extensive reading of two post-colonial writers from the Caribbean, and shows how they manipulate their apparent power in perpetuating the misrepresentations of the colonized people initiated by the colonial discourses. With a detailed discussion of the principles of Afrocentricity based on Asante's ground-breaking book An Afrocentric Manifesto, the paper proposes possible ways in which Afrocentric theory could be applied in addressing such misrepresentations and developing a true sense of identity for the oppressed people. / African American Studies

Depuis la découverte de l’Amazonie, la région a été représentée de différentes manières, à travers les récits e voyage. Compte tenu des différentes représentations de l’Amazonie effectuées au fil des siècles, il est important d’évaluer dans quelle mesure les récits produits par des Brésiliens sur cette région incorporent ou rejettent ces perceptions, dans la dialectique entre l’élément extérieur et celui intérieur, qui constitue la principale question culturelle des pays postcoloniaux comme le Brésil. Dans ce panorama, l’analyse se concentre sur la relation existant entre la littérature, la science et l’identité nationale. L’objectif est d’examiner comment ces formes de discours entrent en compétition pour constituer l’ethos national brésilien, durant une période clé d’autodétermination au Brésil. / Since the discovery of the Amazon, the region has been represented in different ways, mainly through travelogues. Concerning the geographical borders of the Brazilian Amazon, they will only be defined in the early twentieth century. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the representations of the Amazon, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, through the point of view of national authors. In this sense, it is important to analyze how Brazilian literature presented the relation between identity and memory, in competition with other forms of discourse.

Os romances A costa dos murmúrios (1988), A noite das mulheres cantoras (2011) e A manta do soldado (1998) constituem uma unidade temática na obra de Lídia Jorge. Neles está contemplada a tríade literatura-história-memória, perspectivada pela ótica das narradoras femininas que articulam suas memórias individuais às memórias dos eventos históricos portugueses ao longo dos mais de quarenta anos de ditatura. O presente trabalho analisará os testemunhos ficcionais das narradoras como condutores dessas narrativas, considerando a representação dos testemunhos dessas personagens tocadas em suas vidas pessoais pela trajetória nacional. Estes três romances evidenciam a preocupação social presente na obra da autora, revelando a consciência (ou não) de pertencimento nacional; o falseamento (e reconstrução) de identidades; o questionamento sobre o discurso oficial historiográfico; o esvaziamento do ser ou a busca pela sua constituição. A violência impetrada tanto pelo estado quanto pelos indivíduos, é denunciada entre as oposições e complementaridades que acontecem entre silêncio e som; eco e murmúrio; interdito e alarde / The novels A costa dos murmúrios, A noite das mulheres cantoras e A manta do soldado constitute a thematic unit in Lídia Jorge\'s work. They introduce the triad literature-history-memory by the perspective of female narrators, who articulate their own memories with the memories of Portuguese historical events throughout more than forty years of dictatorship. This thesis is going to analyse the fictional testimonies made by female narrators as a guide for the narratives, considering the representation of these character\'s testimonies affected on their own lives by the national trajectory. These three novels draw attention to the social criticism in the author\'s work, revealing the consciousness (or not) of belonging to a nation; the masquerade (and reconstruction) of identities; the doubt about the official historical discourses; the hollowness of the being or the search for its constitution. The violence required not only by the State, but also by individuals, is noticed in the oppositions and the correspondence between silence and sound; echo and murmuring; forbidden and clamorous

A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale. Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation.

The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern historical novels, which are labeled &ldquo / historiographic metafictions&rdquo / (Hutcheon 1989: 92), in terms of their allowing for different voices and alternative, plural histories by subverting the historical documents and events that they refer to. The study analyzes texts from feminist and postcolonial literature, Jeanette Winterson&rsquo / s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, and Salman Rushdie&rsquo / s Midnight&rsquo / s Children and Shame as examples in which the transgression of boundaries between fact and fiction is achieved. Basing its arguments on postmodern understanding of history, the thesis puts forward that historiography not only represents past events but it also gives meaning to them, as it is a signifying system, and turns historical events into historical facts. Historiography, while constructing historical facts, singles out certain past events while omitting others, for ideological reasons. This inevitably leads to the fact that marginalized groups are denied an official voice by hegemonic ideologies. Therefore, history is regarded as monologic, representing the dominant discourse. The thesis will analyze four novels by Winterson and Rushdie as double-voiced discourses where the dominant voice of history is refracted through subversion and gives way to other voices that have been suppressed. While analyzing the novels themselves, the thesis will look for the metafictional elements of the texts, stressing self-reflexivity, non-linear narrative, and parodic intention to pinpoint the refraction and the co-existence of plural voices. As a result, historiographic metafiction is proved to be a liberating genre, for feminist and postcolonial writers, that enables other histories to be verbalized.

Os romances A costa dos murmúrios (1988), A noite das mulheres cantoras (2011) e A manta do soldado (1998) constituem uma unidade temática na obra de Lídia Jorge. Neles está contemplada a tríade literatura-história-memória, perspectivada pela ótica das narradoras femininas que articulam suas memórias individuais às memórias dos eventos históricos portugueses ao longo dos mais de quarenta anos de ditatura. O presente trabalho analisará os testemunhos ficcionais das narradoras como condutores dessas narrativas, considerando a representação dos testemunhos dessas personagens tocadas em suas vidas pessoais pela trajetória nacional. Estes três romances evidenciam a preocupação social presente na obra da autora, revelando a consciência (ou não) de pertencimento nacional; o falseamento (e reconstrução) de identidades; o questionamento sobre o discurso oficial historiográfico; o esvaziamento do ser ou a busca pela sua constituição. A violência impetrada tanto pelo estado quanto pelos indivíduos, é denunciada entre as oposições e complementaridades que acontecem entre silêncio e som; eco e murmúrio; interdito e alarde / The novels A costa dos murmúrios, A noite das mulheres cantoras e A manta do soldado constitute a thematic unit in Lídia Jorge\'s work. They introduce the triad literature-history-memory by the perspective of female narrators, who articulate their own memories with the memories of Portuguese historical events throughout more than forty years of dictatorship. This thesis is going to analyse the fictional testimonies made by female narrators as a guide for the narratives, considering the representation of these character\'s testimonies affected on their own lives by the national trajectory. These three novels draw attention to the social criticism in the author\'s work, revealing the consciousness (or not) of belonging to a nation; the masquerade (and reconstruction) of identities; the doubt about the official historical discourses; the hollowness of the being or the search for its constitution. The violence required not only by the State, but also by individuals, is noticed in the oppositions and the correspondence between silence and sound; echo and murmuring; forbidden and clamorous

The thesis aims to present the use of postcolonial literature in pursuance of developing critical literacy in English lessons of upper secondary schools, together with increasing the awareness of the postcolonial world, South Africa specifically. The theoretical part of the thesis concentrates on contemporary knowledge in the field of methodology of teaching literature, reading strategies, and critical literacy, including its development and assessment. Furthermore, the theoretical section establishes the environment for the practical part, which consists of qualitative research in a Czech upper secondary school and employs pretesting, intrinsic research, teacher's and students' assessment, and final achievement test. The research implies that critical literacy is viewed differently with respect to different experts and various fields. Furthermore, the research indicates that the assessment of critical literacy is built mainly on assumptions of the specialists interested in this field and no standardised or unified tests are available. Lastly, the research shows that postcolonial literature seems to be an optimal source for enhancing students' critical literacy since it incorporates similar themes as critical literacy. The thesis has explained that the use of postcolonial literature and relevant...

This thesis argues that events in the postcolonial novel We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo can be viewed as traumatic based on three different aspects; witnessed trauma, transgenerational trauma and cultural trauma. In addition, the thesis provides pedagogical implications and analysis of the novel’s usefulness in the Swedish EFL classroom. What is argued in this essay is that cultural clashes, mourning of home country and lacking of expressive opportunities affect the protagonist’s identity formation. The protagonist’s experiences from and reflections on her home country versus her new one are the focal point of this essay; to prove that belonging to the diaspora is a traumatic, ongoing, event that affects the individual and collective identity process negatively, depicted in the novel. Lastly, the novel’s potential in the EFL classroom is claimed to contribute with insight, understanding and acceptance towards cultural “others” in the Swedish society.

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<p>This study is concerned with subject formation in the fiction of contemporary postcolonial authors Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. In contextualised readings of a total of nine works – Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005); Vera’s Without a Name (1996), Butterfly Burning (1998), and The Stone Virgins (2002); Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993), Turner (1994), and A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – it explores thematic and formal aspects of the subject’s constitution in the texts. Investigating the representation of material and discursive traces that constitute the individual, this study has a double aim. First, it describes the particular historical formations that mould the individual in the different texts. Second, it investigates the tactics used to imaginatively upset these formations in order to present new and more enabling modes of being.</p><p>Gurnah’s fiction depicts the intricate meshwork of social codes, emotions, and narratives that shape subjectivity in a highly unstable and cosmopolitan social reality. His novels repeatedly thematise cultural disorientation, migration, and the efforts of establishing a minimum of social and narrative stability in the form of a home. The chapter reads Gurnah’s fiction against a background of Zanzibari history and diaspora and suggests that various forms of “entanglements” paradoxically provide the means to pull the subject out of states of anxiety and alienation into more viable states of being. Vera’s novels engage a powerful Zimbabwean discourse on history, and the psychic and bodily wounds that result from its violent impact on the subject. Set at moments of special and contested historical importance, her novels address the exclusions and silences of this discourse in order both to assess its effects and the possibilities of imagining alternative versions that would allow other modes of subjectivity. These possibilities are manifested, thematically and textually, through an improvisational form of “movement,” geographical, linguistic, and musical. Dabydeen’s fiction investigates the textual dimensions of identity and its connections to larger cultural archives of tropes and languages. Focusing on the constraining yet constitutive impact of various modes of colonial and racial rhetoric, his literary texts display a manipulation of textual elements from these archives that approaches a re-conception of the subject. To describe this manipulation of English and Caribbean sources, thematised and dramatically staged in his fiction, I am using Dabydeen’s own phrase, “creative amnesia.”</p>