The thesis analyses novels l'Étranger and Meursault, contre-enquête, which represent an example of literary dialogue reflecting problems associated with postcolonial society. The comparison of texts shows changes made by Kamel Daoud and the shifting values taking place in this transformation. Emphasis is placed on the characters, and especially on the onomastic system, to illustrate the main difference in the message of selected novels. The introduction focuses on contradictory public perception of writers and their native country, Algeria. The main part compares semantic differences of these two books. To strengthen the comparison, the word frequency analysis has been used and it showed important disproportions between both texts. The conclusion discusses the crucial role of language, which in both cases is divided into two contradictory categories that are the source of certain tension. The result of this work is an interpretation of Daoud's work, in which the possibilities of new interpretations of Camus's work also appear, partly thanks to the comparison with texts written by important postcolonial theoreticians. The issue of searching for identity, presented in the literature since time immemorial, derives from the contact of two different cultures and occupies a significant place in Daoud's...

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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores selected Indian narratives that emerge in South Africa and East Africa between 1960 and 2010, focusing on representations of migrations from the late 19th century, with the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism, to the early 21st century entry of immigrants into the metropolises of Europe, the US and Canada as part of the post-1960s upsurge in global migrations. The (post-)colonial and imperial sites that these narratives straddle re-echo Vijay Mishra‘s reading of Indian diasporic narratives as two autonomous archives designated by the terms, "old" and "new" diasporas. The study underscores the role of memory both in quests for legitimation and in making sense of Indian marginality in diasporic sites across the continent and in the global north, drawing together South Asia, Africa and the global north as continuous fields of analysis. Categorising the narratives from the two locations in their order of emergence, I explore how Ansuyah R. Singh‘s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) and Bahadur Tejani‘s Day After Tomorrow (1971), as the first novels in English to be published by a South African and an East African writer of Indian descent, respectively, grapple with questions of citizenship and legitimation. I categorise subsequent narratives from South Africa into those that emerge during apartheid, namely, Ahmed Essop‘s The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), Agnes Sam‘s Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) and K. Goonam‘s Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr Goonam (1991); and in the post-apartheid period, including here Imraan Coovadia‘s The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim‘s The Lotus People (2002) and Ronnie Govender‘s Song of the Atman (2006). I explore how narratives under the former category represent tensions between apartheid state – that aimed to reveal and entrench internal divisions within its borders as part of its technology of rule – and the resultant anti-apartheid nationalism that coheres around a unifying ―black‖ identity, drawing attention to how the texts complicate both apartheid and anti-apartheid strategies by simultaneously suggesting and bridging differences or divisions. Post-apartheid narratives, in contrast to the homogenisation of "blackness", celebrate ethnic self-assertion, foregrounding cultural authentication in response to the post-apartheid "rainbow-nation" project. Similarly, I explore subsequent East African narratives under two categories. In the first category I include Peter Nazareth‘s In a Brown Mantle (1972) and M.G. Vassanji‘s The Gunny Sack (1989) as two novels that imagine Asians‘ colonial experience and their entry into the post-independence dispensation, focusing on how this transition complicates notions of home and national belonging. In the second category, I explore Jameela Siddiqi‘s The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown‘s No Place Like Home (1996) and Shailja Patel‘s Migritude (2010) as post-1990 narratives that grapple with political backlashes that engender migrations and relocations of Asian subjects from East Africa to imperial metropolises. As part of the recognition of the totalising and oppressive capacities of culture, the three authors, writing from both within and without Indianness, invite the diaspora to take stock of its role in the fermentation of political backlashes against its presence in East Africa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus op geselekteerde narratiewe deur skrywers van Indiër-oorsprong wat tussen 1960 en 2010 in Suid-Afrika en Oos-Afrika ontstaan om uitbeeldings van migrerings en verskuiwings vanaf die einde van die 19e eeu, ná die vestiging van handelskapitalisme, immigrasie in die vroeë 21e eeu na die groot stede van Europa, die VS en Kanada, te ondersoek, met die oog op navorsing na die toename in globale migrasies. Die (post-)koloniale en imperial liggings wat in hierdie narratiewe oorvleuel, beam Vijay Mishra se lesing van diasporiese Indiese narratiewe as twee outonome argiewe wat deur die terme "ou" en "nuwe" diasporas aangedui word. Hierdie proefskrif bestudeer die manier waarop herinneringe benut word, nie alleen in die soeke na legitimisering en burgerskap nie, maar ook om tot 'n beter begrip te kom van die omstandighede wat Asiërs na die imperiale wêreldstede loods. Ek kategoriseer die twee narratiewe volgens die twee lokale en in die volgorde waarin hulle verskyn het en bestudeer Ansuyah R Singh se Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) en Bahadur Tejani se Day After Tomorrow (1971) as die eerste roman wat deur 'n Suid-Afrikaanse en 'n Oos-Afrikaanse skrywe van Indiese herkoms in Engels gepubliseer is, en die wyse waarop hulle onderskeidelik die kwessies van burgerskap en legitimisasie benader. In daaropvolgende verhale van Suid-Afrika, onderskei ek tussen narratiewe at hul onstaan in die apartheidsjare gehad het, naamlik The Hajji and Other Stories deur Ahmed Essop, Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) deur Agnes Sam en Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam deur K. Goonam; uit die post-apartheid era kom The Wedding (2001) deur Imraan Covadia en The Lotus People (2002) deur Aziz Hassim, asook Song of the Atman (2006) deur Ronnie Govender. Ek kyk hoe die verhale in die eerste kategorie spanning beskryf tussen die apartheidstaat — en die gevolglike anti-apartheidnasionalisme in 'n eenheidskeppende "swart" identiteit — om die aandag te vestig op die wyse waarop die tekste sowel apartheid- as anti-apartheid strategieë kompliseer deur tegelykertyd versoeningsmoontlikhede en verdeelheid uit te beeld. Post-apartheid verhale, daarenteen, loof eerder etniese selfbemagtiging met die klem op kulturele outentisiteit in reaksie op die post-apartheid bevordering van 'n "reënboognasie", as om 'n homogene "swartheid" voor te staan. Op dieselfde manier bestudeer ek die daaropvolgende Oos-Afrikaanse verhale onder twee kategorieë. In die eerste kategorie sluit ek In an Brown Mantle (1972) deur Peter Nazareth en The Gunny Sack (1989) deur M.G. Vassanjiin, as twee romans wat Asiërs se koloniale geskiedenis en hul toetrede tot die post-onafhanklikheid bedeling uitbeeld (verbeeld) (imagine), met die klem op die wyse waarop hierdie oorgang begrippe van samehorigheid kompliseer. In die tweede kategorie kyk ek na The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995) deur Jameela Siddiqi, No Place Like Home (1996) deur Yasmin Alibhai en Migritude (2010) deur Shaila Patel as voorbeelde van post-1990 verhale wat probleme met die politieke teenreaksies en verskuiwings van Asiër-onderdane vanuit Oos-Afrika na wêreldstede aanspreek. As deel van die erkenning van die totaliserende en onderdrukkende kapasiteit van kultuur, vra die drie skrywers – as Indiërs en as wêreldburgers – die diaspora om sy rol in die opstook van politieke teenreaksie teen sy teenwoordigheid in Oos-Afrika onder oënskou te neem.

L'esclavage constitue le chronotope de "Tituba" de M. Condé et de "Beloved" de T. Morrison. Il est un héritage paradigmatique dans les autres œuvres de ces auteures, ainsi que chez Alice Walker et Gisèle Pineau, déterminant les rapports raciaux contemporains. La fragmentation du corps esclave convoque le motif de la couture, entre tissage conteur, re-membrement du corps social, et reconfiguration d'une tâche traditionnellement féminine. La mise en exergue du pouvoir performatif des mots des maîtres rappelle l’historicité et la dimension politique de l'invention du racisme dans le régime plantocratique. L'exemple de la beauté féminine et de sa racialisation illustre l'intrication complexe de la construction du genre et de la race. Mais le récit du passé esclavagiste, s'il peut éclairer et expliquer le présent, n'est fait qu'au prix d'un combat douloureux contre divers processus de refoulements, individuels et collectifs. Si "Beloved" et "La couleur Pourpre" rappellent le rôle essentiel de la réminiscence, "Paradis", "Morne Câpresse" et "Heremakhonon" mettent en scène des hypertrophies mémorielles problématiques ou drolatiques. La critique de la prétention historienne à l'objectivité y participe d'une remise en cause globale de la scientificité et de l'héritage des Lumières. Les ambivalences de la postmémoire s'opposent à la sacralisation contemporaine de la littérature mémorielle ou testimoniale, et la hantise postcoloniale se donne à voir sous un jour nouveau, ironique. L'analyse des maternités dialectiques dans "Beloved", "Tituba" ou "Rosie Carpe" permet de réfléchir le lien entre narration de la nation, racialisation de la maternité et contrôle du corps des femmes. Une lecture des œuvres du corpus à l'aune du concept d'intersectionnalité permet d'envisager une déconstruction globale de la féminité libérée de l'injonction à la sexualité reproductive. Au croisement du pouvoir de donner la vie et de son refus, le personnage de la sage-femme est récurrent. Souvent accusée de sorcellerie, elle nourrit une mythologie féminine qui peut retourner le stigmate magique. Fruit de rivalités dans les champs médicaux et religieux, la figure de la sorcière chez Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé ou Marie NDiaye est une invention interculturelle dont la force performative et parodique ébranle les catégories littéraires. Issus du traumatisme de l'esclavage, les romans étudiés esquissent les contours d'utopies concrètes. Leur dimension totalitaire et séparatiste cependant se révèle dans le visage grimaçant de l'espérance eschatologie contemporaine : la secte. Si la projection dans le futur semble ainsi dérisoire, le retour en un espace premier, refuge utérin et remontée dans le temps, s'abîme dans l'impossibilité du retour en Afrique. La Négritude césairienne est ainsi mise à distance, tandis que les espoirs de la Créolité semblent battus en brèche par une littérature récusant l'utopie post-raciale. Les migrations contemporaines et les douleurs de la condition exilique sont narrées sans idéalisation de la mobilité, tandis que les stratégies narratives des auteures diffèrent, tout en se retrouvant dans un désir de révéler en même temps que de dépasser la ligne de couleur. / Slavery is the chronotope of "Tituba" by M. Condé and "Beloved" by T. Morrison. Slavery is a paradigmatic heritage in other novels by these authors, as well as in Alice Walker's and Gisèle Pineau's art ; it determines the contemporary racial relationships. The splitting up of the slave's body calls to mind the pattern of sewing, narrative weaving, re-membering of the social body, and reinventing a traditionally feminine work. The highlighting of performative power of the master's words reminds us the historicity and the politic aspect of the invention of racism in the plantation system. The example of women's beauty and its racialization illustrates the complicated co-construction of gender and race. The writing of past history of slavery points out and explains the present time, but it requires a painful fight against various processes of individual and collective repression. "Beloved" and "The Color Purple" remind us of the importance of rememory, while "Paradise", "Morne Câpresse" and "Heremakhonon" tell about memory in excess. The criticism of historian claim for objectivity belongs to a global questioning of science on the one hand, and of the heritage of Enlightenment on the other. The ambivalences of postmemory confront the contemporary sacralization of memorial and testimonial literature. Postcolonial haunting is seen in a nex light, quite ironic. The analysis of dialectic motherhood in "Beloved", "Tituba" or "Rosie Carpe" allows us to conceptualise the link between national storytelling, racialization of motherhood and political control of women's bodies. Reading and analysing the novels with the concept of intersectionality shows a global deconstruction of womanhood, freed from the stress of reproductive sexuality. At the crossroad of women's power to give birth and death, the midwife is a recurring character. The midwife is often accused of being a witch, and she belongs to a feminine mythology that can turn the stigma around. The witch is born from rivalry in both religious and medical fields. In Toni Morrison's, Maryse Condé's or Marie Ndiaye's novels, the witch is an intercultural invention ; her parodic and performative strength undermines literary categories. Born from the trauma of slavery, the novels outline the pattern of concrete utopias. The totalitarian and separatist aspect of these utopias appears in the grinning face of the contemporary eschatological hope: the sect. Therefore any hope of a better future seems to be ridiculous ; when the return to a primary space, turning back in time, is dying in the impossible way back to Africa. The "Négritude" of Aimé Césaire is dismissed, and so are the hopes of "Créolité", by a literature that rejects post-racial utopia. There is not any idealization of movement in these novels, which tell contemporary migrations and pains of exile condition. Although the narrative strategies are different, they all intend to expose and overcome the color line.

Cette thèse propose une lecture croisée des épopées traditionnelles et postcoloniales dans un cadre transculturel. Une analyse comparée de Moby Dick de Herman Melville, Omeros de Derek Walcott et la trilogie de l’Ibis d’Amitav Ghosh nous permet de cerner spécificités de l’épopée moderne postcoloniale. Celle-ci s’inscrit dans la lignée des épopées traditionnelles d’Homère, Virgile, Arioste, Camões et Milton, tout en rivalisant avec elles. Les épopées traditionnelles et modernes ont recours à des conventions qui esthétisent l’expérience collective comme les comparaisons épiques, la généalogie présentée sous forme de prophétie et la mise en abyme ekphrastique. L’épopée traditionnelle met en avant la vision d’une société unifiée grâce à des conjonctions harmonieuses entre le trope et la diégèse, des continuités généalogiques entre l’ancêtre et le descendant ainsi que des associations autoréflexives ekphrastiques entre l’histoire impériale et le texte qui la glorifie. Dans cette perspective, la spécificité de l’épopée postcoloniale semble résider dans l’articulation ambivalente de la condition postcoloniale. Ainsi, chez Melville, Walcott et Ghosh, le style héroï-comique contrebalance les comparaisons épiques opérant des transfigurations héroïques. De même, de nouvelles affiliations hybrides forgées par les personnages coexistent avec des généalogies discontinues, sans en combler toutes les lacunes créées par le déracinement et la violence coloniale. Cette vision équivoque trouve son expression la plus franche dans les séquences ekphrastiques où les textes sont confrontés au choix impossible entre commémoration de l’expérience et regard critique vis-à-vis d’elle. / This thesis offers collocational readings of traditional and postcolonial epics in transcultural frameworks. It investigates the specificities of modern postcolonial epic through a comparative analysis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. It explores how these works emulate, but also rival, the traditional epics of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Camões, and Milton. Both traditional and postcolonial epic rely on generic conventions in order to aestheticize collective experience, setting it against the natural world (via epic similes), against history and imperial destiny (via genealogy and prophecy), and against the epic work itself (via ekphrasis). However, traditional epic emphasizes a unified worldview, characterized by harmonious conjunctions between trope and diegesis, genealogical continuities between ancestor and descendant, and self-reflexive ekphrastic associations between imperial history and the epic text commissioned to glorify it. From this perspective, the specificity of postcolonial epic can be formulated in terms of its ambivalent articulation of the postcolonial condition. In the works of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh, tropes of heroic transfiguration are held in check by the mock-heroic, while empowering self-adopted hybrid affiliations co-exist, but cannot entirely compensate for, discontinuous genealogies marked by displacement, deracination, and colonial violence. This ambivalence finds its most powerful expression in the ekphrastic sequences where the postcolonial texts are most directly confronted with the impossible choice between commemorating experience and being critical of such commemoration.

Cette thèse traite de l’évolution des modes de représentations et de l’image du Polynésien dans les littératures française, anglaise et américaine depuis 1842, la date du Protectorat de Tahiti, jusqu’en 1911, la période qui précède la Première Guerre mondiale. Il s’agit d’une lecture postcoloniale analysant l’influence des facteurs temporels et culturels des voyageurs occidentaux sur l’image de l’Autre et sur sa transformation du bon sauvage ou du cannibale païen en métis tiraillé entre les traditions et la modernité. Cette analyse a pour ambition de tracer la métamorphose qui marque le discours occidental sur la Polynésie et qui atteint son paroxysme à partir de la fin du XIXe. Il est question de tracer les origines de cette métamorphose, son impact sur la littérature et de déterminer si cette évolution dans le discours colonial représente une prise de conscience de l’Autre ou bien s’il s’agit des symptômes avant-coureurs d’un état de décadence qui frapperait la littérature coloniale. / This thesis deals with the evolution of the modes of representation and the image of the Polynesian in the French, English, and American literatures since 1842, the date of the French Protectorate over Tahiti, until 1911, the period which precedes the First World War. It is about a postcolonial reading of the influence of temporal and cultural factors of Western travelers on the image of the Other, on its transformation from a Noble Savage or a Cannibal into a person who lives in a cultural hybridity, and who is in a conflict between tradition and modernity. This analysis aims to outline the metamorphosis that affects the Western discourse on Polynesia and which reaches its peak starting from the late nineteenth century. It endeavors to study the origins of this metamorphosis, its impact on the literature and to determine if the evolution of the colonial discourse represents a growing awareness of the Other or if it is only a kind of warning symptoms of a literary decadence.

The farm in South Africa is an ideologically laden but also ambivalent concept, associated with pastoral ideals and the hierarchy of the colonial past; but also with fear and insecurity. The representation of the farm in the South African farm novel has been subjected to larger processes of development, dissolution and replacement in accordance with changing socio-historical contexts. Accordingly, the farm novel's contribution to the conceptualization of space, place and identity within the South African and postcolonial literary context, needs to be traced and related to the pastoral tradition as well as its mutations and deviations. This dissertation investigates how Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as anti-pastoral farm novels, in different ways and degrees, rewrite and transcend the pastoral farm novel tradition by rejecting and subverting the inherent ideological assumptions and pastoral values exemplified by this genre. Specific focus is given to the role of space and place in the identity formation of the female protagonists and the conceptualization thereof in a postcolonial society. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005

The farm in South Africa is an ideologically laden but also ambivalent concept, associated with pastoral ideals and the hierarchy of the colonial past; but also with fear and insecurity. The representation of the farm in the South African farm novel has been subjected to larger processes of development, dissolution and replacement in accordance with changing socio-historical contexts. Accordingly, the farm novel's contribution to the conceptualization of space, place and identity within the South African and postcolonial literary context, needs to be traced and related to the pastoral tradition as well as its mutations and deviations. This dissertation investigates how Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) as anti-pastoral farm novels, in different ways and degrees, rewrite and transcend the pastoral farm novel tradition by rejecting and subverting the inherent ideological assumptions and pastoral values exemplified by this genre. Specific focus is given to the role of space and place in the identity formation of the female protagonists and the conceptualization thereof in a postcolonial society. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005

<p>This dissertation draws on a broad range of postcolonial literature in order to explore literary representations of environmentalism in the global South. Although this project draws heavily on the particular environmental histories of different nations and geographic regions, I am also interested in areas of overlap. In this study I do two interrlated and simultaneous things that I hope will refine postcolonial ecocriticism. The first involves a broadening of the definition of 'environment,' informed by the environmental justice movment, in ways that make it more applicable and accountable to people's lived lives. This expanded definition of the environment includes those spaces where people live and work. Such a redefinition, I argue, is a crucial counter-measure to ecocriticism's Anglo-American focus, where traditional American environmental values of conservation, preservation, and the cult of the wilderness prevail. The second intervention involves using ecocriticism alongside this expanded notion of the environment to unearth the everyday environmentalisms at work in postcolonial literature that may go unnoticed through traditional ecocritical approaches. I argue that this everyday approach successfully avoids some of the common hurdles in postcolonial ecocriticism. These hurdles include debates over the origins of environmental thought, questions about the link between affluence and environmental consciousness, and the contentious space of animals in postcolonial thought and literature. By beginning with an examination of the ways in which people interact with their own local environments, I am able to explore environmental thought and action on the ground and can begin theorizing there. What is revealed through these analyses is that this expanded definition of environmentalism and this new ecocritical approach open the door to viewing environmentality as a common and foundational feature of postcolonial literature. My chapters explore various facets of these everyday environmentalisms, including ecofeminist perspectives, anthropocentric versus biocentric representations of the environment, urban space, and finally the idea of going back to the land. The issues that I explore throughout these chapters include legacies of colonialism, globalization, racism and speceism, ecolocial/ecocritical imperialism, and postcoloniality.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Globalization and English-language predominance situate English teachers as increasingly influential mediators of both language and culture. In the iconic multicultural hub of Ontario, Canada, teachers work within a causal nexus of social theories of language, the information and communication technologies revolution, and unprecedented global interdependency. Changes in English curriculum reflect these trends, from references to “global citizenship,” to stress on “intercultural communication,” “cultural sensitivity,” and Information and Communication Technology (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2007). Delegated gatekeepers of both linguistic and critical literacies, and facing new questions about the purposes and priorities of their discipline, Ontario English teachers must negotiate the divide between an inherited curriculum and the impacts of sociocultural transformation on changing literacy needs. To contribute to a professional dialogue about teaching English in a multicultural society and global age, this thesis presents findings from interviews with fifteen Ontario secondary English teachers. The focal question, “How is English changing?” introduces a range of pressing issues, such as: displacing the canon, practicing intercultural communication, balancing a democratic discourse, or “common culture,” with respect for diverse values, and managing opposing views and resistance to English curriculum change. The data reveal how English teachers across levels of experience occupy contrasting positions on the curriculum change debate. In part, this can be explained in terms of epistemological orientations. The participants represent three categories: Adaptation, Applied Research / Collaborative Inquiry, and Activism, each by turn more geared toward reconceptualizing English for social diversity and global consciousness. Beyond these classifications, the teachers reflect dissonant perceptions, sometimes personal ambivalence, on the changing role of text choice, and written and oral dialogue in the English classroom. From passionate defenses of Shakespeare, to radical measures to revamp book lists for cultural relevance, to remarkable illustrations of curriculum linked with global consciousness and civic action, the responses of the English teachers delineate zones of difficulty, change, and possibility. They help, too, to catch sight of a new horizon: the English classroom as a space for “cultural conversation” (Applebee, 1994) where canon- and teacher-centred dialogue give way to intertextual (Bakhtin, 1981; Kristeva, 1980) and intercultural (R. Young, 1996) transactions.