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2. Essay (70% of module mark, 1500 words)

Due: Monday, 26th May, 2025, 17:00

N.B. This information is subject to change pending the moderation process.

Choose one of the questions provided, and submit the following in a single Word file (not PDF):

a) A completed cover sheet on which you have confirmed that your work does not include plagiarism or collusion (more details are included in the Module Handbook);

b) Your essay in which your argument must closely reference ONE literary text we’ve studied on this module. You must also include references to at least TWO theoretical texts we’ve covered this term (you are welcome to add your own additional theoretical resources).

Please remember:

You must include the question you are answering at the top of your essay, just after the completed coversheet.
Any quotations that you use should be fully referenced and you should present your work in accordance with the guidance in the XJTLU Harvard Style Guide, provided in class and on LMO.
Make sure you proof-read carefully before submission in order to eliminate all basic spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors.
You must focus on a different literary text than the text you covered in Assignment 1 (the same theory is allowed).
You may not use quotations from primary texts covered in seminars.
You may not use any novels, stories, or poems not on the syllabus of this class (the same theory is allowed). Students who do so without the Module Leader’s permission will get a failing mark.

c) A full bibliography with references to all reading cited in or read for the essay project. It includes the specific publication details of all the texts you have used, and this includes your primary text(s). Again, you should compile/present this information according to Harvard Style. Work which does not include this basic requirement will lose marks.

The focus of this assignment is close textual analysis. It is intended to develop your literary close-reading skills. You will be expected to engage with the postcolonial topics raised by your chosen extract, through a close consideration of the language in which they are expressed. You must then anchor your discussion in direct quotation from, and analysis of, the language of the two chosen literary texts. Your job is to connect the theory to the literary texts. Please make sure you clearly identify your selected extract at the beginning of your assignment, including page numbers and the opening and closing phrases, and that you include a reference list of any texts you consult, including the primary text (and it may be that the primary text is the only text in your bibliography). Your reference list should not be included in your final word-count.

N.B. More information on the specifics of essay writing will be provided in the PPT in Week 12.

Essay Questions

1.Indigenous Context

“A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.” (Coulthard, Red skin white masks, p. 6-7)

Think about the legacies of settler-colonialism in Sherman Alexie’s Flight and Zits’ life in foster care. What do his family situations have to do with settler colonialism

2.Feminist Theory

“Within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced. The question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of which there is ‘evidence’. It is, rather, that, both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even deeply in shadow.” (Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak ’, p. 82-83.)

Consider Spivak’s quote in conjunction with an analysis of the character of Tantie from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. What is Tantie’s position in her family, neighborhood, and British society What does colonization have to do with it

3.Language

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 52)

Consider Fanon’s quote in conjunction with two poems, Armand Garnet Ruffo’s “Poem for Duncan Campbell Scott” and Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Indian Place-Names”. Why does language matter in the Canadian colonial and indigenous contexts

4.De-civilizing
“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” (Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 35).

Think about Cesaire’s quote in relation to one character in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. How is the character affected by their surroundings

5.Race, Class, Gender

‘Fundamentally, race, class, and gender are intersecting categories of experience that affect all aspects of human life; they simultaneously structure the experiences of all people in this society. At any moment, race, class, or gender may feel more salient or meaningful in a given person’s life, but they are overlapping and cumulative in their effects’. (Andersen and Hill Collins, ‘Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter’ p. 34)

Think about the question in conjunction with two stories from Chimamanda Adichie’s That Thing Around Your Neck. Give examples of scenes that show the intersection of the three.

6. Hybridity

‘Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third, ‘hybrid’ species. Hybridization takes many forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc.’ (Ashcroft et al. p 108).

Relate Bhabha’s concept of hybridity to one character (or one object) in the first two chapters from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

7.Colonial Guilt

“Chait notes that, in the case of South Africa, the transition to democracy had been sufficiently gradual to allow white South African writers “a gestation period in which to ponder collective guilt and, as in Germany, to search the past for answers to that inevitable question, ‘How could it have happened ”1 Yet for South African whites generally, as for white South African writers, there has been, perhaps expectedly, no consensus about the appropriate ethical response to the historical guilt of apartheid, just as there has been a deep anxiety to acknowledge the culture of violence in post-apartheid South Africa as part of the enduring legacy of apartheid.” (Diala p. 50)

Bring Diala’s quote into conversation with two stories of your choice from Nadine Gordimer’s Jump and Other Stories. How do Gordimer’s characters handle the guilt of apartheid and what kinds of ethical responses do they offer

8.Colonial Discourse

“Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas of the centrality of Europe, and thus in assumptions that have become characteristic of modernity: assumptions about history, language, literature and ‘technology’. Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the relationship between these two. It is the system of knowledge and beliefs about the world within which acts of colonization take place” (Ashcroft et al. p. 37)

Read Herge’s Tintin in the Congo and find examples of colonial discourse. How are the Congolese people represented in the comic How is Tintin represented How do these representations show the power dynamics of colonization

9.Fire

“As an element of nature, it is inscribed in the landscape of the Caribbean archipelago. However, it also bears symbolic values and turns into a strategy of survival, helping women come to terms with the colonial past (…) As an element of nature, it is inscribed in the landscape of the Caribbean archipelago. However, it also bears symbolic values and turns into a strategy of survival, helping women come to terms with the colonial past” (Esposito p. 227).

Why is fire a postcolonial element in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea How can we read the symbolism of fire in that context Refer to a few specific scenes from the novel.