Cultural Politics and the Nobel Prize

Given Soyinka\u27 s creative output, particularly his unique infusion of African folk traditions and mythology into his English language work, and equally important, his bringing in new life-blood into the language itself, the Nobel Prize was long overdue. In fact, Soyinka has been on the short list of candidates for several years. However, given the familiar history of predominantly Western recipients for the Nobel Prize in Literature over the past 85 years, the Nobel Committee has been lethargic in acknowledging a major writer from the African continent. (Some non-Western recipients of the Prize were India\u27s Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, Chile\u27s Pablo Neruda in 1971, Colombia\u27s Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982.

"Mother-weights" and lost fathers: parents in South Asian American literature

That parent-child relationships should play a significant role within South Asian American literature is perhaps no surprise, since this is crucial material for any writer. But the particular forms they so often take – a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic, leading to the search for maternal surrogates; and the figure of the prematurely deceased father – are more perplexing. Why do families adhere to these patterns in so many South Asian American texts and what does that tell us about this œuvre? More precisely, why are mothers subjected to a harsher critique than fathers and what purpose does this critique serve? How might we interpret the trope of the untimely paternal death? In this article I will seek to answer these questions – arguably key to an understanding of this growing body of writing – by considering works produced between the 1990s and the early twenty-first century by a range of South Asian American writers

Language and Geography: The Postcolonial Critic

The map of the world has been crucially re-drawn by colonial history. In postcolonial literary studies today, the question of language relates in significant ways to a critic\u27s geographical location. Issues of identity and belonging, crucially tied to choice and use of language, assume new configurations in the light of one\u27s geographical locale. Where the postcolonial writer and critic live and work influences their uses of language on emotive, intellectual, and psychological levels. Words are not forged only within the smithy of (one\u27s) soul ; they carry echoes reverberating from our geographical locations. There are indeed many reasons for these confluences, at times happy, at othertimes painful, of language and geography, of speech and space for both postcolonial writer and critic today. Recent flag independences in several African countries, India, the Caribbean, continuing neo-colonial trends in most of these societies; more recently, migrations of postcolonial peoples living as expatriates and exiles in various parts of the western world, are all a part of significant and often conflictual predicaments of identity, language and belonging