Session Six Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity

 Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time  Introduction: today’s session  Presentation:  cultural studies, postcolonial studies, postcolonialism  magic realism  Class room discussion:  Salman Rushdie, ”The Prophet’s Hair” (1981)  the thematic functions of postcolonial and magic realist elements in Rushdie’s story

 the literary text vs. the cultural text  high literature vs. products of popular culture, mass culture, media culture, consumer culture, minority culture  autonomous aesthtic whole vs. ’signifying practices’ (of modern culture): meaning, identity, representation, and agency  complexity, beauty, insight, universality, value vs. the functioning of cultural productions/the construction of cultural identities

 the literary text studied as a cultural ’signifying practice’ (just like any other cultural object)  the literary text expresses or represents culture vs. the literary text creates or constructs culture  culture is the source or cause of literary representations (foreground background)  the literary text has an ideological or politcal funtion  the literary text as oppressive or subversive (of oppressive cultural forms)?  the relevance for postcolonial literatures: English language and literature as expressions of colonialism

 Former colonies are independent and free of colonial rule (postcolonial)  However, former colonies remain dependent politically, economically, socially, ideologically, linguistically, aesthetically, etc. (neo-colonial)  Thus, former colonies are hybrids, mongrels, and in-betweens (post-colonial)

 Ngugi  Return to ’harmony’ by transcending colonial alienation and embracing your original culture and language (Gikuyu)  ”Language carries culture …(2538)

 John Agard: embracing the languages of the colonised (West Indian Creole, British Guiana) and the coloniser (the Queen’s English). Writing broken English is an attempt at breaking English linguistically, aesthetically, politically, etc…)

 John Agard, ”Listen Mr Oxford don” (1985) Tthdg7w

 Rushdie: Embracing English as a global language (”The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago”(2541)), but chutnifying it, spicing it up according to how it is used.

 ‘My’ India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once. (2852)

 Multiplicity vs. uniformity  Pluralism vs. essentialism, nationalism  Hybridity vs. purity  Heterogeneity vs. homogeneity

 Creole identity  A story about colonialism  Images of colonialism

 ”These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as materials derived from myth and fairy tales” (Abrams)

 Is "The Prophet's Hair" a work of magic realism or postcolonialism or both?  Elements of realism, of magic? Why and how are they used?  Elements of postcolonialism: multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity. Why and how are they used?