Separate and warring selves : identity crises in Africa in Shiva Naipaul's North of South: an African journey

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This project seeks to analyze the representation of identities in ShivaNaipaul's travel narrative North of South: An African Journey (1978) asencoded in the binaries of primitive / traditional; civilized / modern; settler /native; civic / tribal and neo-colonial / liberated. By analyzing this select seriesof identities, this project aims to explore the fractured nature of identity asconstructed in the post-colony. It will argue that the identities are renderedunstable by the ungrounded nature of the post-colonial space in which theyare located. Naipaul concludes his travel narrative by qualifying the postcolonialsituation as an abortion of Western civilization in the trope ofConrad's Kurtz. Naipaul implies that any identity in Africa is a simulacrum, aphantom double, a copy of something that was not there to begin with. Heattempts to articulate the diverse cultures that he encounters as though hewere apart from them without recognizing that he is essentially andinextricably a part of the various cultural articulations themselves. It is easy tocriticize Naipaul, therefore, as a non-starter. With the advantages of hindsight,however, it is possible for the contemporary reader to recognize theseinstabilities as evidence of the post-modern phenomenon in which reality isnot an absolute. As a modernist writer, Naipaul's efforts to understand theseinstabilities of identity as an articulation of culture are circumvented by aSisyphean struggle wherein he attempts to establish a sense of ontologicalalterity in the narrative yet implicates himself, as well as his invocation ofarchival literature and hence his ultimate position of disillusionment,hopelessness and doom.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University