The Subaltern Would Speak: Palimpsestic Identities in Nuruddin Farah’s ‘Blood in the Sun’ Trilogy

Nuruddin Farah’s ‘Blood in the Sun’ trilogy is a socio-political voyage into the Somali life and consciousness. It is a serious attempt to explore the changes that befell the Somali society and converted into a poor, failure and famine struck state in the present though it was a powerful and rich state in the past. The trilogy is a documentation of the history of Somalia from a philosophical standpoint; it delves into clan and ethnic traditions and, at the same time, expounds the adverse consequences of colonisation that have been invoked by the first wave of the ‘Rush to Africa’ in the nineteenth century. The article is an endeavour to underline the complex status of subalternity of the Somalis whose palimpsestic historical and political situation forced a palimpsestic identity. Farah’s ‘Blood in the Sun’ trilogy enfolds three novels; i.e. Maps (1986), Gifts (1993), and Secrets (1998) which are reflective of the current failure social and political situation which negatively influences the identity of the natives. The article hopes to be the kernel of further studies handling the complex postcolonial identity of the Somalis from a historical-political perspective.

The Narrative of Hybrid Identity in the Third Space: A Postcolonial Critique of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The study aims at analyzing the construction and the working of hybrid identity in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The review of the literature discusses how postcolonial identity research has undergone a paradigm shift in recent times. Among the modern postcolonial critics like Bhabha (1994) and Spivak (2013), 'colonizer' and 'colonized' are dynamically dependent on each other for their subjective constructions. The identities of the 'colonizer' and the 'colonized' are not autonomous; rather, they have mutually exclusive identities—a structuralist stance taken by the earliest postcolonial theorists. Instead, such identities of 'colonizer' and 'colonized' are transcultural and fluid in nature and can negotiate themselves 'in the third space of enunciation' for 'new' forms of 'social collectives' (Bhabha, 1994). This aspect of hybrid identities provides the framework for our research. So, the study, through the textual analysis of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, has applied Bhabha's (1994) concept of 'hybridity' to unearth different aspects of Changez's identity in the wake of changing geopolitical and global scenario after the 9/11 event. The study ends on a note that there is a further need to develop the concept of hybrid identity so that it might enlighten us more about the role of 'cultural materials' in constructing such identities.

Magic Realism as Rewriting Postcolonial Identity: A Study of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Magic realism as a literary narrative mode has been used by different critics and writers in their fictional works. The majority of the magic realist narrative is set in a postcolonial context and written from the perspective of the politically oppressed group. Magic realism, by giving the marginalized and the oppressed a voice, allows them to tell their own story, to reinterpret the established version of history written from the dominant perspective and to create their own version of history. This innovative narrative mode in its opposition of the notion of absolute history emphasizes the possibility of simultaneous existence of many truths at the same time. In this paper, the researcher, in efforts to unfold conditions culturally marginalized, explores the relevance of alternative sense of reality to reinterpret the official version of colonial history in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children from the perspective of magic realism. As a methodological approach to respond to the fiction text, magic realism endows reinterpretation and reconsideration of the official colonial history in reaffirmation of identity of the culturally marginalized people with diverse voices.

From Lotte Reiniger to Nguyễn Trinh Thi: Examining the Evolution of Non-Western Representation in Artists’ Film and Video

Experimental filmmakers are often celebrated for their radical engagement with both form and content. This article highlights how artists’ film and video have evolved in the past century when it comes to the representation of non-Western communities and their cultures. Employing close textual analysis, it compares Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Len Lye’s Tusalava (1929) and Free Radicals (1958), and Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Letters from Panduranga (2015), through a postcolonial lens. Foregrounding how Nguyễn is engaged in the nuances of postcolonial identity in a manner that is not replicated by Reiniger and Lye, it concludes that depictions of non-Western cultures in artists’ film and video have developed in the past century from spaces of exoticization to sites of inclusion and respect.

Not Enough Sami? The Affects of Postcolonial Identity

The article explores how people identify with their ‘Saminess’. To understand this better, discourses of affects and emotions around the topic are analysed, particularly shame and inadequacy. They show how people ‘measure’ Saminess in relation to ‘proper’ Sami. I investigate here if this is a fault of a discursive dichotomy between modernity and tradition – the depiction of a traditional indigenous group forming in opposition to a coloniser’s modern identity. Key words: Sami, indigeneity, modernity, tradition, identity.

Postcolonial Spatiality

This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence, and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment, infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases.

Restitution of African colonial artefacts: A reassessment of France’s post-colonial identity

This article aims to investigate the way the French government has utilized the restitution of African colonial artefacts to reshape its postcolonial identity. The decision to return African artefacts to their country of origin is studied from a national perspective, shedding light on the postcolonial evolution of the French society, and from an international perspective, placing this decision within the structure of international relations. This article demonstrates that the restitution of African colonial artefacts is part of a political strategy aimed at addressing the national and international criticisms directed towards the French government without having to implement the structural reforms necessary to truly resolve them.