This thesis examines representations of nation, race and gender in three postcolonial texts: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; Meena Alexander's autobiographical memoirs Fault Lines; and Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi's collection of short stories entitled Imaginary Maps. All three texts reconfigure conventional accounts of nationhood by positing fictions based on what I am calling the poetics of displacement. The diasporic perspective provides Salman Rushdie's novel with the ability to suggest hybrid identities arising from the experience of cultural migration. In Meena Alexander's autobiography, displacement is figured in terms of both a diasporic and feminist vision that allows for the deconstruction of masculinist narratives of identity and nation. Mahasweta Devi's short stories, by contrast, represent displacement in terms of the violences and dislocations suffered by the Indian subaltern as a result of ecological degradation and cultural uprootment. In looking at these differential articulations of displacement, this thesis thus attempts to illustrate that what is often seen as an unified body of postcolonial literature emerges from a heterogeneous set of textual practices which are the products of varying social, cultural, political and economic contexts. In this way, this thesis rethinks the categories of nation, race and gender in order to consider the bases upon which people make claims to identity along with the boundaries of inclusion or exclusion often invoked by such claims.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.23739 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Tagore, Proma |
| Contributors | Cope, Karin (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001489115, proquestno: MM12092, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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