Borrowing identities : a study of identity and ambivalence in four canonical English texts and the literary responses each invokes

[摘要] The notion that the post-colonial text stands in direct opposition to the canonicalEuropean text, and thus acts as a kind of counter-discourse, is generally accepted withinpost-colonial theory. In fact, this concept is so fashionable that Salman Rushdie'sassertion that 'the Empire writes back to the Centre' has been adopted as a maxim withinthe field of post-colonial studies, simultaneously a mission statement and a summativedescription of the entire field. In its role as a 'response' to a dominant European literarytradition, the post-colonial text is often regarded as resorting to a strategy of subversionthrough inversion, in essence, telling the 'other side of the story'. The post-colonial text,then, seeks to address the ways in which the western literary tradition has marginalised,misrepresented and silenced its others by providing a platform for these dissentingvoices.While such a view rightly points to the post-colonial text's concern with alterity andoppression, it also points to the agonistic nature of the genre. That is, within post-colonialtheory, the literature of Empire does not emerge as autonomous and self-determining, butis restricted to the role of counter-discourse, forever placed in direct opposition (or inresponse) to a unified dominant social order. Post-colonial theory's continuedclassification of the literature of Empire as a reaction to a normative, dominant discourseagainst which all others must be weighed and found wanting serves to strengthen thebinary order which polarises centre and periphery.This study is concerned with 'rewritten' post-colonial texts, such as J.M. Coetzee's Foe,Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Marina Warner's Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters andAimé Césaire's A Tempest, and suggests that these revised texts exceed such narrowdefinition. Although often characterised by a concern with 'political' issues, the revisedtext surpasses the romantic notion of 'speaking back' by pointing to a more complex entanglement between post-colonial and canonical, self and other. These texts signal thecollapse of binary order and the emergence of a new literary landscape in which there canbe no dialogue between the clearly demarcated sites of Empire and Centre, but rather aglobal conversation that exceeds geographical location.It would seem as if the dependent texts in question resist offering mere pluralisticsubversions of the logic of their pretexts. The desire to challenge the assumptions of aEurocentric literary tradition is overshadowed by a distinct sense of disquiet or uneasewith the matrix text. This sense of unease is read as a response to an exaggeratediterability within the original text, which in turn stems from the matrix text's inability tonegotiate its own aporia.The aim of this study, then, is not to uncover the ways in which the post-colonial rewritechallenges the assumptions of its literary pretext, but rather to establish how certainelements of instability and subversion already present within the colonial pretext allowsfor such a return.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University