Search

This paper studies postcolonial responses to prescriptive racial affiliations in contemporary America, tracing the transition of ‘race’ from a biological to a sociocultural concept, and the related rejection of modernist binaries in African American writing after the 1970s. In particular, African American writer, Rita Dove’s first collection of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner published in 1980, deconstructs race as a dynamic construct encoded in linguistic and cultural signifiers that turned ethnocentrism into a hegemonic tool rejected by poets writing towards the end of the twentieth century. Positing that Dove’s travels through Europe provide for a cultural and linguistic sensibility that is liminal in its repudiation of cultural absolutism, the paper argues that her writing foreshadows Hollinger’s ‘postethnic’ decentring of race through formulating non-prescriptive affiliations that transcend the colour line. Foregrounding history as a personal, transcultural space where frames of memory are juxtaposed to reveal the constructed nature of racially informed identities and affiliations, the poems create what Steffen terms ‘artistic enspacement’, exhibiting a post-black sensibility that revisits race, memory and history as racialised psycho-spatial domains, and celebrating the fluid nature of identity construction as a journey that must deconstruct race through a transatlantic crossing-over into the domain of the white to reclaim its share in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as a framework the theory of power as "domination over," a theory propounded by social critics such as Machiavelli (1961), Hobbes (1968), Foucault (1980), Weber (1986), and Bordieu (1994), this paper attempts to decipher the dilemma evident in the soliloquies of Shakespeare's Hamlet as the result of an unresolved conflict between a Machiavellian (external) political world and a Montaignian (internal) world guided by Platonic ideals. The paper traces how the changed dialectics of reason and power at the court in Denmark leave a chasm in Hamlet's personality, through which the relation of the past and present surface as a disjointed continuum, disturbing the metaphysical structure of temporality that gives meaning to action. Treating the play as a political statement on the discourse of power, it analyzes how a dissonance between the ideals that govern Hamlet's inner world and the political machinations that rule the court at Denmark leads to a crippling psycho-spatial imbalance that makes action impossible, and warns of the reification of power and the return to a pre-Renaissance Machiavellian structure of ethics that endangered England at the turn of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benedict Anderson's definition of nation as "an imagined political community" (6) is important in the context of the portrayal of home by diasporic writers. "Home," when re-calling or re-imaging the quest for belonging from the point of view of the diaspora, is often portrayed as an elusive metaphoric vision that is in resonance with the struggle against the attempt to pin the term down to physical dimensions. This paper explores the concept of "home" in terms of its changing connotations in the diasporic writing of Asian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri's 2003 novel, The Namesake, portrays the diasporic conflict between an essentialist Indian identity and assimilating into America's multicultural ethos. This conflict is more pronounced in the case of the female characters, portrayed through attempts at juxtaposing traditional expectations and complete assimilation. Home becomes a "presence in absence" for the female characters in Lahiri's novel, challenging the idea of an identity based on the nation as a fixed, geographical entity, and the culinary becomes the site for cultural negotiation. This paper seeks to delineate how conflicting identities make Vijay Mishra's concept of the diasporic "impossible mourning" (9) a ground to forge a new identity based on the concept of a postethnic transnational diasporic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]