LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:6 June 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Writing Back to the Empire: Righting Creole Identity in Wide Sargasso Sea

Inayat Ullah, Ph.D. Candidate, M.Phil., M.A.
Muhammad Arif, Ph.D.

Abstract

Twentieth century witnessed writers challenging certain canonical English texts. The slow yet steady collapse of the imperial powers’ direct control over their colonies, during the century, and at the same time, the desire on the part of the earlier colonized people to ascertain their cultural recognition, in a way other than the one established by the colonizers, have caused a great as well as new representative literature. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, being emblematic of this literature, portrays the voice of the formerly oppressed Other and thus sets up an assertion to the cultural distinctiveness of the earlier colonized Creole people. In this manner, this novel questions the elitism and exclusiveness of the say of the literature produced by writers from the powerful imperial nations, examining their well-established perceptions about the weaker and, at the same time, colonized nations. While using the critical tool of Postcolonial Criticism as a basis for the analytical endeavour, the paper analyzes Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a part of this mammoth postcolonial literature, which “corresponds to stages both of national and regional consciousness of the project of asserting differences from the imperial center.”

Keywords: Twentieth century, canonical English texts, imperial, other, Wide Sargasso Sea, Postcolonial literature, imperial center

Introduction

The twentieth century literature questions the imperial hegemony of the colonizers in a bid to give voice to the earlier colonized folks, who have either been silenced or misrepresented in literature for such a long time. This literature shows that the time is ripe for the world to hear “the other side” of the account, which is the voice of disparaged and subdued colonized cultures, the ones considered by the colonizers as inferior and simply incapable to represent themselves.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Inayat Ullah, Ph.D. Candidate, M.Phil., M.A.
Assistant Professor
Mohammad Ali Jinnah University
Islamabad
Pakistan
inayat.ullah@jinnah.edu.pk
inayat_ktk@yahoo.com

Muhammad Arif, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Mohammad Ali Jinnah University
Islamabad
Pakistan
arif@jinnah.edu.pk
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