CHAPTER-II Diasporic Consciousness and V. S. Naipaul Diasporic consciousness, as a dominant phenomenon in the world literature exposes the mental flight of people who constantly trying to reconstruct their present based on their past. Their past hunts them to a frozen and fractured consciousness that force them to search for locating their identity and this search for locating the identity became the starting point of diasporic literature. Their quest for the past and the assimilation into the alien culture of the adopted country gave way the concept of ‘ambivalence’ which means the conflicting feelings of people and things. The term also identifies with in-betweenness, half-ness and dilemmas of colonial natives and expatriates. This condition is true to V. S. Naipaul who sown the seeds of diasporic ambivalence from his birth. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, one of the most acknowledged literary figures of the contemporary world has gone through a long period to present himself as an ‘exilic’ person. Nanda Kishor Mishra, in his article …show more content…
His literary works achieve universal fame as he experiences different cultures by reflecting the idea that alienation is the universal predicament of the contemporary world. Naipaul’s basic concerned is with the displaced individual of postcolonial societies, but obviously it becomes one of the aspects of modern man too. It was Trinidad that made Naipaul sensitive diasporic writer with its diverse races, cultures and religions. All the heterogeneous people lived in this land, have sharing common characteristics of diaspora. They live in the dilemma of uncertain affiliation. Mel Gussow rightly observes: “Wherever he goes, it is a foreign country. For Naipaul home has lost its meaning… wherever he has gone, he has been an outsider (Gussow, 1976:
...d issues of post-colonialism in Crossing the Mangrove. It is clear that Conde favors multiplicity when it comes to ideas of language, narrative, culture, and identity. The notion that anything can be understood through one, objective lens is destroyed through her practice of intertextuality, her crafting of one character's story through multiple perspectives, and her use of the motif of trees and roots. In the end, everything – the literary canon, Creole identity, narrative – is jumbled, chaotic, and rhizomic; in general, any attempts at decryption require the employment of multiple (aforementioned) methodologies.
In “My Two Lives”, Jhumpa Lahiri tells of her complicated upbringing in Rhode Island with her Calcutta born-and-raised parents, in which she continually sought a balance between both her Indian and American sides. She explains how she differs from her parents due to immigration, the existent connections to India, and her development as a writer of Indian-American stories. “The Freedom of the Inbetween” written by Sally Dalton-Brown explores the state of limbo, or “being between cultures”, which can make second-generation immigrants feel liberated, or vice versa, trapped within the two (333). This work also discusses how Lahiri writes about her life experiences through her own characters in her books. Charles Hirschman’s “Immigration and the American Century” states that immigrants are shaped by the combination of an adaptation to American...
...spoke a Spanish Creole. This made a clear distinction between the two and made it easy for the government to identify the difference. The reader sees how such themes of Birth and Death show so prominently throughout the characters that one must focus on how birth and deaths affect the concept of the individual relating to their own Negritude. It is culture, not skin tones but rather the beliefs and values that each country be it Haiti or Dominican Republic relate to. Danticat’s novel helps us understand the strengths and limits that Rene Depestre states in The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation “there is a progressive ‘negritude’ that expounds the need to rise above all the alienations of man . . . and there is “an irrational reactionary and mystic version of ‘negritude’ which serves . . . as a cultural base for neo-colonialist penetration into our countries” (244).
Both Louis Althusser and Kenneth Paul Tan suggest that ideology might mislead people to a state of false consciousness. The former explain that this phenomenon is unconscious, whereas the latter suggest that it is imposed on the people. Althusser’s argument is that this state of false consciousness can be termed as the imaginary. We are born and stuck in this imaginary as an ‘always already subject’ (Ferretter, 2006) of what we want and desire. This happens even before we are born so that we can be ‘appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is expected’ (Brewster, 2001). On the other hand, Tan would disagree with Althusser’s theory that ‘we misrepresent the world in ideology because we want
...own unless they are remembered, until they are brought back into waking life and understood by the individual as memories, separated from the present. “Thus they lead one to cultural travel, to reminisce the culture of origin, the displaced space and time. They help soothe the pains of loneliness, thereby giving succor to survive in an alien land. Secondly, to survive in the foreign land the expatriates create an ambience there by establishing their own ghetto, celebrating their festivals, dining together or holding community feasts, sharing cultural markers, frequenting to the house of their colour and little socializing with the dominant group. Thus they create an ‘alternative world’ in their present world. These expatriates ignore the subtle desire to merge among the majority, oppose the willingness of their children to a just to and accept the dominate culture.
“As we journey through life, identity and belonging must be consistently renegotiated.” Each person’s identity goes through a process of stages in order to be fully developed and be a whole identity. Some people needs more time than others to attain a full, whole identity. There are many factors which play a role in sharpens people’s identity such as the environment that the people love in and the experiences that they went through. Undoubtedly, immigrants, especially those form two different cultures, need more time to achieve a stable and whole identity as they become trapped between two cultures, unable to categorize themselves with a particular one. For instance, it is very hard for Asian Americans, especially the first and second generations, to assimilate and adjust in America as they have different culture, traditions and features. This paper will depict how Obaachan in Silver like dust and Pearl in Shanghai Girls defines their identity and belonging during their lives’ journeys.
The negation of the Diaspora has a mythical character, which functions to legitimize social and political practices and mobilize action and identification with a cause. Gordon establishes this myth of identity through anchoring of the present in the diasporic past and actualization of the diasporic past in the present in the Yishuv.
This research study focuses at negotiating the shifting identities of immigrants and their traumas in postcolonial literature with reference to Lahiri’s fiction. The suffering of every immigrant in achieving a shelter and identity in a foreign land often leads to loss of identity. The qualms, agitation and nervousness of immigrants often increase the issues of identity, and immigrants often feel alienated in the midst of exotic land, they even start to think about achieving new identities. Stuart Hall (1987) a famous cultural theorist discusses the issues of cultural identity and migration as he says “Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to”. Change in the place and ambience totally change the circumstances in the lives of immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction, they often try to cling to their own cultural identity and costumes. But the cultural effect is often so strong that it deeply affects the identity of immigrants and they ultimately try to change their identities. Immigrants make an absurd attempt to get mingled in the culture of foreign country. Hall discusses “Cultural identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).
Flow is not a tangible reward for doing well in an activity, it is not a state of being you can achieve from a drug, or a type of mindset that certain people have. Flow is a state of consciousness. But before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi can define flow, the definition of consciousness must be presented. Consciousness is the awareness of ourselves and our environment. This is so important to know because what breaks the threshold to achieve flow is when one is not conscious of himself or the environment. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is a completely involved, focused state of consciousness, with diminished awareness of self and time,
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
In “One Out of Many,” Naipaul uses the literary device known as “stream of consciousness” in order to efficiently tell the story of immigrants who emigrate to the United States of America. Naipaul tells the story through an Indian man by the name of Santosh, who is emigrating from Bombay to America with his “master”. Santosh’s actions and thoughts of American life and culture is demonstrated unequivocally throughout the work. Naipaul begins his exposition of cultural alienation through the analysis of class. The author allows the reader to observe Santosh’s discomfort while he is on the plane traveling to America. (Norton 1662) Through this observation, the reader notes Santosh’s loss of his traditional Indian caste identity and his subseque...
Both the poems, explore the inner conflict between the native culture and the imposition of European culture on it. It also dramatizes the search of West Indies’ historical quest of individual and social identity. West Indies has no native historical memory. Its history started with the era of colonization, therefore, it is not their history but of the colonizers. Owing to their lack of past and present historical memory, the natives like Walcott are not able to determine their identity. Are they West Indian or English? They are black but equipped with a white mind and language. Their identity has been divided. Their lack of indigenous history, culture and traditions has made it impossible to erase the colonial influence. Thus, they are nameless fireflies stuck in molasses.
There is a sense of a Caribbean writer’s role as a “revolutionary hero” who must paint his words to restore a Caribbean sense of identity. This dedication t to the Caribbean’s story of struggle is, without a doubt, far from “dismissed” in Walcott’s work. Walcott delicately articulates that “In the Caribbean, history is irrelevant. Not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered, what has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention.” In order to explain the present conditions of the modern Caribbean, he cannot avoid recounting the tragic phases of its colonial past, as he does in “The Sea Is History.”
Hybridity and National Identity in Postcolonial Literature. Every human being, in addition to having their own personal identity, has a sense of who they are in relation to the larger community—the nation. Postcolonial studies are the attempt to strip away conventional perspective and examine what that national identity might be for a postcolonial subject. To read literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies is to seek out—to listen for, that indigenous, representative voice which can inform the world of the essence of existence as a colonial subject, or as a postcolonial citizen.
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing world. In his works one can find the agony of an exile; the pangs of a man in search of meaning and identity: a dare-devil who has tried to explore myths and see through fantasies. Out of his dilemma is born a rich body of writings which has enriched diasporic literature and the English language.