Subalterns’ Reclamation of Position as the Ultimate Response of Postcolonial Mind in Iranian Nights

Authors

  • Faiza Jabbar Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature, Govt. APWA Graduate College for Women Lahore

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36755/ijll.v3i2.90

Keywords:

Post Colonialism, Colonialism, Re-Orientalism, Third World, Subaltern, Orientalism

Abstract

This paper deals with the subalterns’ reclamation of their position as the ultimate response of postcolonial mind in the play entitled Iranian Nights by Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton. This re-appropriation of subalterns’ position, through the literature produced in the third world countries, is the counter attack on whites’ long hegemony in depicting them as uncouth, female-like, childish, brute, baboons, illiterate, and uncivilized. Subaltern, literally, refers to any person or group of inferior rank and station, whether because of race, cast, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion. By deconstructing the power structures and re-orienting the western taboos about the ‘Third World’ countries, this paper traces the process of re-Orientalism that is an attempt of the subalterns to renovate their history, reinstate their self-worth, and redefine their identity either through freedom of speech or writing back to the empire. In addition this research paper applies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of ‘Subaltern’ and extends its research compass in order to redefine the western thought about the portrayal of non-western woman.

References

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Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. BookZZ.Web. 02 April 2015.

Spivak, GayatriChakravorty (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Spivak, GayatriChakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313. ProjectMuse.Web. 25 July 2015.

Thompson,Lynsie. “In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,Spivak offers the sentence ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ as one interpretation of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. How far does this sentence reflect the representations of British dealings with India in the texts you have studied?” Innervate 4 (2011-2012): 143-49. Web. 27 July 2015.

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Published

2024-03-16

How to Cite

Faiza Jabbar. (2024). Subalterns’ Reclamation of Position as the Ultimate Response of Postcolonial Mind in Iranian Nights. Inception - Journal of Languages and Literature, 3(2), 161–173. https://doi.org/10.36755/ijll.v3i2.90