On the Road to a Postcolonial Consciousness of Selfhood: Narrator’s Quest for the Past in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
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Abstract
With no possibility of nostalgia for the lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or her own consciousness (or consciousness-effect as operated by the disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency [the colonialism], packaged with an insurgent consciousness does not freeze into to an object of investigation, or worse yet, a model for imitation (Spivak 287). Spivak’s argument forms a major shift in postcolonial thought. The tendency of postcolonial discourse until then was concentrated only on the question of how to retrieve the Past, what was there, solely of one culture, before the onset of west’s colonial enterprise. Works like Black Athena ambitiously brought out what we can, in a sense, call as a culture and civilization eradicated by the colonial enterprise and is not there anymore in the context of the African people. Aime Cesaire’s attempts to proclaim ‘Negritude’, one’s own native self, as a violent resistance against the ‘thingification’ of native people by ‘spiritually indefensible’ west is, to my understanding, again an attempt to retrieve the Past (101). The tendency has always been nostalgic, there was a major belief that going back to the Past was the future; the future is in the Past.
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References
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