Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi (Jun 2017)
The Representatons of Alienation in Postcolonial Novels: Shame by Salman Rushdie and Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame
Abstract
Colonialism, which is the settlement movements and implementation of the political and economic exploitation ideology of the Western and Northern 1st World countries that were thought to be more powerful than the Eastern and Southern 3rd World countries, started in the ancient times and went on until the mid-20th century. As a result of the decoloniztion movements, beginning after World War II and with India in 1947, colonized countries historically started to be denominated as post-colonial. While the term post-colonial refers to the time after decolonization, the term postcolonial, without hyphen, refers to the cultural consequences or conditions of post-colonial period. During the decolonization process, the postcolonial individual felt the loss of the sense of belonging, marginalization, and alienation. Postcolonial literature, reecting these senses felt by the postcolonial individual, questions the colonial process and challenge the colonial discourse. In this study, Pakistan and New Zealand, gaining their independence in 1947, are studied as post-colonial countries, and the sense of alienation of post-colonial Pakistani and New Zealander individuals, who are either in their home countries or in the host countries to which they emigrated, is depicted mostly with its negative connotations. The alienation which is felt by Rushdie's Pakistani and Frame's New Zealander narrators in his Shame and in her Towards Another Summer is also felt by the other characters in the novels. In this sense, the aim of this study is to delineate, also by mentioning the positive meaning of alienation, that in a postcolonial literature a postcolonial individual is depicted as the one feeling alienated mostly in its negative context although alienation, as a notion, has both positive and negative meanings.
