This thesis examines the premises postulated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin and Homi K. Bhabha within Postcolonial theory. The theorists suggest that these strategies can be applied to the entire literary production emerging from the erstwhile European colonies in Asia and Latin America; hence the aim of this project is to test the validity of their claim. Given the vastnesss of the theory, the scope of this study has been confined to the analysis of hybridity, Nativism, and mimicry. Critical works by Benita Parry, Walter Mignolo, Neil Lazarus, and others, have been taken into consideration. José María Arguedas (1911-1969), Arundhati Roy (1963-) and Geetanjali Shree (1957-), writing in Spanish, English and Hindi, respectively, were chosen to represent Peru and India. The Hindi novel was included to address the lack of adequate research in the field of vernacular literature within Postcolonial studies, as most of the critics have concentrated on texts written in the former colonizers’ languages.
Language and culture have been the cornerstones of this theory hence they form an important part of my analysis. The dissertation foregrounds the relation between Spanish, English and the vernaculars in the text-nations crafted by Arguedas, and Roy. Their narratives indicate that the vernacular melds with the colonizer’s language to form a hybrid tongue, but the manner in which hybridity is constructed depends on the geo-political character of each society. The role of Hindi, its relation to English and Urdu, as well as the invention of its Sanskritized version during the colonial period, is examined in Shree’s narrative and her work is particularly insightful in this regard, as hybridity and Nativism are portrayed very differently in her novel. In this way my thesis demonstrates the difficulty of carrying out a comparative analysis of the entire literary corpus emerging from the erstwhile European colonies based solely on their shared colonial experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/19316 |
| Date | 05 March 2010 |
| Creators | Biswas Sen, Lipi |
| Contributors | Sarabia, Rosa, Kanaganayakam, Chelva |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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