Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011. In both Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider indigenous identity is a central topic. Yet, it is challenged by the advent of colonization or, in the latter case, by the fusion of ancient tradition and modernism. As such, the aim of this paper is to analyse the literary representation of indigeneity in these novels using Stuart Hall's dual definition in order to show how indigenous identity develops at the backdrop of colonization and what this means for the concept of identity in a postcolonial context.
Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature provides an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures. Discussing historical, cultural and contextual background, it contains selected work of some of the major writers from this period.
Written in clear, jargon-free prose, this introductory text charts the variety of novel writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century. An engaging introduction to the English-language novel from 1950-2000 (exclusive of the US). Provides students both with strategies for interpretation and with fresh readings of selected seminal texts. Maps out the most important contexts and concepts for understanding this fiction. Features readings of ten influential English-language novels including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
Striding Both Worlds illuminates European influences in the fiction of Witi Ihimaera, Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost Māori writer, in order to question the common interpretation of Māori writing as displaying a distinctive Māori world-view and literary style. Far from being discrete endogenous units, all cultures and literatures arise out of constant interaction, engagement, and even friction. Thus, Māori culture since the 1970s has been shaped by a long history of interaction with colonial British, Pakeha, and other postcolonial and indigenous cultures. Māori sovereignty and renaissance movements have harnessed the structures of European modernity, nation-building, and, more recently, Western global capitalism, transculturation, and diaspora – contexts which contest New Zealand bicultural identity, encouraging Māori to express their difference and self-sufficiency. Ihimaera’s fiction has been largely viewed as embodying the specific values of Māori renaissance and biculturalism. However, Ihimaera, in his techniques, modes, and themes, is indebted to a wider range of literary influences than national literary critique accounts for. In taking an international literary perspective, this book draws critical attention to little-known or disregarded aspects such as Ihimaera’s love of opera, the extravagance of his baroque lyricism, his exploration of fantasy, and his increasing interest in taking Māori into the global arena. In revealing a broad range of cultural and aesthetic influences and inter-references commonly seen as irrelevant to contemporary Māori literature, Striding Both Worlds argues for a hitherto frequently overlooked and undervalued depth and complexity to Ihimaera’s imaginary. The present study argues that an emphasis on difference tends to lose sight of fiction’s capacity to appreciate originality and individuality in the polyphony of its very form and function. In effect, literary negotiation of Māori sovereign space takes place in its forms rather than in its content: the uniqueness of Māori literature is found in the way it uses the common tools of literary fiction, including language, imagery, the text’s relationship to reality, and the function of characterization. By interpeting aspects of Ihimaera’s oeuvre for what they share with other literatures in English, Striding Both Worlds aims to present an additional, complementary approach to Māori, New Zealand, and postcolonial literary analysis.
In keeping with his commitment to revisit his first five pieces of fiction, Witi Ihimaera has reworked the original text of this much-loved classic. The matriarch is a woman of intelligence, wit, beauty and ruthlessness, and has become a mythical figure through her fight to repossess the land and sustain her people against the ravages wrought by the Pakeha. Priestess of the Ringatu faith, she has been virtually a law unto herself. In his search for the truth behind the legends surrounding the matriarch, his grandmother, Tama Mahana delves deeper and deeper into Maori history and lore to understand the mysterious sources of her power and ambition. Witi Ihimaera's prose is at turns lyrical and spare, sensuous and savage. Weaving fact with fiction, this remarkable odyssey into New Zealand history is a novel of stunning imaginative power. Also available as an eBook Winner of the Wattie Book of the Year, 1986 Runner-up for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, 1987 'Witi Ihimaera's uncompromising masterwork . . . A profound and spellbinding character study' - New Zealand Herald
Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.
This classic has been released in the Popular Penguin format to mark 50 years of publishing in New Zealand. The format reaches further back to 1935, when Allen Lane founded Penguin Books with a clear vision- 'We believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.' Ground-breaking. Original. Heart-rending. Most talked about book in New Zealand, ever. Adapted into a blockbuster movie. Still in print three decades later.
This compendium of 37 essays provides global perspectives of Achebe as an artist with a proper sense of history and an imaginative writer with an inviolable sense of cultural mission and political commitment.
Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.
