Aware of questions of identity politics in twentieth-century Assam, the students responded to the text in a manner where their assumptions regarding these questions were re-examined to eventually show up the nuances of the textual world as well. Starting with the objective of understanding postcoloniality through the text, the classroom threw up many ideas as we read three important issues of race, gender and language. I taught the text during a period when events in the socio-political milieu of Assam appeared entwined with those of the text’s setting viz. Can the subaltern speak? In: Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen (Ed.), The post-colonial studies reader, Abingdon: Routledge.This chapter discusses the experience of teaching Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950) to postgraduate students at Dibrugarh University in Assam. A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing.
“Postcolonial” literature in a neocolonial world: Modern Arabic culture and the end of modernity. The empire renarrated: Season of migration to the north and the reinvention of the present. The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Chapel Hill, NY: University of North Carolina Press. Jean Rhys's historical imagination: Reading and writing the Creole. The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.įoucault, Michel. Third world women's literatures: A dictionary and guide to materials in English. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.īhabha, Homi K. London: Routledge.Īshcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen. The empire writes back: Theory and practice in postcolonial literatures. London: Verso.Īshcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, & Tiffin, Helen.
In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. Rethinking postcolonialism: Colonialist discourse in modern literatures and the legacy of classical writers. However, aligned with these gender and racial tensions is the way the novels’ treatment of gender specific consciousnesses, in terms of racial identity, become evident as female characters are made to suffer a double sense of oppression within post-colonial narratives, a condition which I term here “double colonialism,” a condition which this essay further argues still lingers today.Īcheraiou, Amar. These tensions are analyzed through postcolonial theories of hybridity and notions of Other to consider the impacts of these tensions and whether these still exist. In particular, the authors’ use of the framework of colonialism produce what, when read from postcolonial perspectives, necessarily creates tensions in the novels between characters that represent the colonists and those of the indigenous characters. The themes of gender and racial identity and their treatment in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea fundamentally inform both novels in uneasy ways that this essay argues hold enormous contemporary importance. Gender, racial identity, double colonialism, post colonialism, hybridity.