• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.3-25
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• 2015

This paper reflects on the relationship between postcolonial criticism (PC) and Southeast Asian Studies. The emphasis is on the apparent premature retreat from PC as well as its unfulfilled promises and persistent pitfalls. I argue that it is premature to abandon PC because it remains relevant, even essential, in the context of the much ballyhooed age of "knowledge economy" or "information society." There is a need to take another look at its promises and to work towards fulfilling them, but at the same time be conscious of its persistent problems.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2016

Under the inhumane oppression of imperialism, the Third World's political violence has been often represented as an immediate and explosive one with an instant, concentrated visibility. Yet the ecological and psychological exploitation of the Third-World countries by empires, as Rob Nixon insists, shows the relative invisibility of slow violence. This paper is to reveal this slow violence of the marginalized areas symbolized as the lowland. Although Arne Naess' deep ecology promotes the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. this paper deals with three postcolonial ecological textbooks which criticize the white-centered deep ecology: Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Through postcolonial critical study, this paper finds out that all these three works have some themes in common. First, these postcolonial works assume a shape of family saga which is parallel to the slow violence of ecological and psychological plundering of empires in the postcolonial countries. Second, like the mangroves which have a tenacious hold on life, these postcolonial people rather overcome the heterogenic challenge with the sturdy and tough mind than defeated. Third, the native people's ethics of earth functions as the stronghold for their respectable lifestyle in their indigenous historicity. Finally, as a big fat brother, the Americanized globalization or neoliberalism is warned as the neocolonialism which is often shown as the disguised pattern of greenwashing. Namely, the people's self-enhancement is always prior to the imperialistic development or neoliberalism in the postcolonial ecological texts which sharply contrast the native's life consciousness and the empire's development theory.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.289-306
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• 2010

In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator grows up with the burden of colonial legacies embedded with Englands' imperial disciplinary projects, its language, educational institutions, discourses. Colonial education interpellates the narrator into a colonial subject through its multiple ideological discourses and systems. Teaching the literature of England is the most insidious form of the Empire's disciplinary colonial projects, more powerful than military enforcement: Its mode of operation is creating phantasy and instigating and planting desire for such phantasy. As Homi Bhabha aptly theorizes as colonial mimicry and ambivalence, the narrator as colonial subject grows up split and confused as an ambivalent subject, simultaneously mimicking and desiring for the phantasized England as real, while resisting and criticizing such up-bringing and mimetic desire. This paper explores Kincaid's rhetorical strategy of employing Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud," especially her use of the flower "daffodil." Employing the concept of "daffodil gap" suggested by postcolonial critics, this paper closely examines two episodes involving the flower daffodil in the novel, one in a colonial classroom and the other in a garden in a new world and suggests that Kincaid accomplishes intertextual critique of colonial education and imperial projects.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.28
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• pp.5-16
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• 2012

First published in 1934, George Orwell's Burmese Days, which can be read as an example of both descriptive realism and fictional realism, is considered to be a colonial example of British literature because of its publication date. However, based on the personal experience of the author as an imperial officer in Burma, the novel has an anti-imperialist tone, which can also make it possible to read it through postcolonial eyes. As a result, the novel stands as an example of ambivalence since it has both the colonial and the postcolonial perspective; both the colonizer and the colonized are portrayed with their own flaws, adding to the impact of what can be called "Third Space." This is why the voice of the imperial is heard in an anti-imperialist tone in Burmese Days, through which Orwell presents a critique of colonialism with a from-within approach.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.31-60
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• 2020

This paper investigates changes in relativization in Singapore English broadsheet newspapers from 1993 to 2016. One of the first diachronic studies in Singapore English (SgE), it also explores corresponding data from the diachronic Siena-Bologna (SiBol) news corpus. As SgE is in the endonormative stabilization phase in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, divergence from British English (BrE) is to be expected. In this study, the dataset is a new Singapore English Newspaper (SEN) corpus compiled from local news articles in 1993, 2005 and 2016, and the corpus tool employed is Sketch Engine. The results reveal changes in relativization practices in SEN over the given period, many of which occur in a similar pattern as those identified in SiBol, albeit at varying rates of change. Most significant of these include a sharp decline in the which relativizer in restrictive relative clauses with non-animate antecedents, complemented by a rise in that. The change has been so rapid that although which relative clauses were more common than that clauses in 1993, that has subsequently overtaken which for both the corpora. One shift in SEN that is different from SiBol is the increase in frequency of non-restrictive relative clauses in SgE. The likely motivators for the changes in the two varieties are identified as colloquialization, densification and prescriptivism. The effect each of these factors could have had on the varieties are discussed, as well as the implications that the findings have on our understanding of the evolutionary status of SgE as a postcolonial variety.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.51
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• pp.161-191
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• 2018

In the beginning of the 20th century, post-colonialism has directly raised questions about western-centered universalism. One of its main achievements is that the political liberation of a colonial society does not guarantee the social, economic and cultural liberation of a society. Therefore, the discourse of liberation in the Western society, in particular, Marxism, nationalism, feminism and postmodernism, cannot be directly applied to the non-Western society. As a result, Western and non-Western societies are unfortunately dreaming of different futures and liberation; therefore, a'geopolitical dialogue' is needed between them. However, the theorists' efforts for postcolonial liberation failed to distinguish themselves from the western-centric traditions. It is also true that they have, in conjunction with these traditions, established their own power. As we know, many of the postcolonial criticisms somehow had relations with the West. This study will re-read the postcolonial thought of $Aim{\acute{e}}$ $C{\acute{e}}saire$, the father of the so-called $N{\acute{e}}gritude$, as a 'non-western resistance discourse'. Through this process, we have a chance to reflect on $C{\acute{e}}saire$ and his postcolonial thoughts.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.70
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• pp.66-94
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• 2015

Postcolonialism, as a school of thought, has become enormously influential for understanding the recent phenomena of globalization. While rejecting the universalizing categories of the Enlightenment, postcolonialism has called into question the old idea of culture and identity as a transcendent regime of authenticity and purity. It has also celebrated the diasporic experiences that entail porous and hybrid cultural identities as a potential site of struggle and resistance against the dominant cultural and discursive order. It is argued, however, that postcolonial theory's emancipatory claims relating to the diversified global culture tend to be complicit with transnational capitalism that brings about global issues of material as well as cultural injustice. This article, through a thorough review of the ways the postcolonial theoretical framework has been developed and appropriated by main figures in postcolonial scholarship, seeks for a theoretical and critical strategy to grasp the complex conditions of global inequality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.517-538
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• 2009

This study explores the possibility of finding intersections of commonness and differences between Mahasweta Devi's short stories, "The Hunt" and "Douloti the Bountiful" and Angela Carter's "Flesh and the Mirror" and "Master" in Fireworks. At appearance, Carter as a writer of Great Britains and Devi as a writer of India in postcolonial period do not seem to share any commonness. This study, however, tried to find "common differences," to quote Chandra Mohanty's terminology, as a basis of solidarity possible between these two different feminist writers. Another concept appropriated in this process of comparing Carter and Devi is Gayatri Spivak's 'planetary comparative literature,' which contends the necessity of critical regional studies and the study of Asian Literature in the study of English literature. Devi and Carter, despite their historical, geopolitical and racial differences, share commonness in depicting Asian or colonized women not only as the oppressed others but also as the subjects who show potential for resistance and independence. Carter portrays Japanese women as the colonized and oppressed others of Japanese society, even though Japan did not have any colonial history. Devi finds in the postcolonial Indian women both the oppressed in the interstice of colonial/postcolonial/patriarchal Indian history and the potential for resistance. Despite some limitation in her understanding of Asia, Carter shows her insight to accept Asia as a true origin of her self-knowledge and performativity of her woman's role. Despite their differences, these two writers use Freud's 'unheimlich' from the feminist point of view, in general. Devi's depiction of the heroine's dead body at the end of the story implicates the possibility of resistance through women's 'uncanny' bodies. Carter converts Freudian and negative connotation of woman's body into positive and comfortable 'home' as a starting point of her self knowledge.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2022

Postcolonial critics have criticized Comparative Literature for exclusively studying literatures from the non-Western world through Western lenses. In other words, postcolonial criticism asserts that theorists and practitioners of comparative literature have traced the "assistance" of the classic "comparison and contrast" approach to an imperialist discourse, which sustains the superiority of Western cultures and economies. As a countermeasure to reading through the comparative lens, literary theories have offered a "juxtapositional model of comparison" that connects texts across cultures, places, and times. This paper examines practices of Comparative Literature in Vietnam, revealing how the engagement with decolonizing processes leads to a knowledge production that is paradoxically colonial. The paper also analyses implementations of this model in reading select Vietnamese works and highlights how conventional comparisons, largely based on historical influences and reception, maintain the colonial mapping of World Literature, centralizing Western, and more particularly, English Literature and in the process marginalizing the others. Therefore, the practice of juxtaposing Vietnamese literary works with canonical works of the World Literature will provoke dialogues and raise awareness of hitherto marginalized works to an international readership. In this process, the paper considers the contemporary interest of Comparative Literature practice in trans- national, trans-regional, trans-historical, and trans-cultural perspectives.

• Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.23-44
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to review the trend in comparative education research related to curriculum published in the Korean Journal of Comparative Education, and to critically analyze its characteristics from the postcolonial perspectives. In this study, I analyzed 61 articles published in this journal from 1995 to 2016. The result showed that comparative studies related to curriculum were conducted mainly by benchmarking policies or contents related to curriculum and textbooks of Western countries including North America and Europe as well as Japan which colonized Korea. In addition, although Korea has been changing into multicultural society, studies on Asian countries such as China and Vietnam which are the nationalities of many foreigners living in Korea were rare. Based on the results, this study suggested that the expansion of comparative education research subjects, overcoming of coloniality in comparative education, and ontological reflection of comparative education researchers are necessary.