Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days: The Allegorical Sequel of The Arabian Nights

This article examines the influence of The Arabian Nights on Najib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. The Arabian Nights provides an archetypal narrative structure which Mahfouz utilizes in his Arabian Nights and Days. The purpose of this study scrutinizes the reformulation of four narrative elements pertinent to The Arabian Nights, namely, plot, narrator, characters, and setting. These elements exemplify the allegorical depiction of political corruption in the Egyptian society. The study’s narrative scrutiny follows a textual analysis of the cyclical plot as used in The Arabian Nights. The narrator’s name and identity is similar to The Arabian Nights’ traditional narrator, but he will be studied in the light of modern Egyptian citizenship. A close reading of the characters’ dialogic voice will extricate the author’s implicit voice in the novel’s magical real context. This voice critiques the dominating political corruption transpiring in an allegorical setting which resembles the contemporary Egyptian society. The conceptual framework used in this study draws up Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel; whereby the author expresses his/her monologic, or abstract ideology, through the novel’s dialogic voices

The Ethnic Intersection between Culture and Identity in Selected Postcolonial Works

This paper examines culture and identity in selected postcolonial works. The study looks into identity and culture to investigate the ethnic traits of Haitian, American, and Nigerian ethnicity depicted in the selected stories. It follows a close reading of the stories’ texts to explore the thematic nuances of Danticat’s, Walker’s, and Nwokolo’s postcolonial style. That is, the selected stories portray the literary reverberations created by Danticat and Walker, and Nwokolo to offer a universal view of the Haitian-American and Nigerian cultural changes that affected their native identity. By studying the characters and settings, the mythology applies the concepts of culture and identity to unravel the authors’ attempts to enhance their ethnicity teetering on the brink of postcolonial cultural transformation

Anthropomorphism as an Embodiment of Natural Gothic and Man in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This essay examines anthropomorphism and gothic elements in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood offers several textual clues regarding animals and birds that represent ideal environment. Moreover, she reinforces the narrative descriptions of such animals by polarizing other natural elements, like trees and bird. She constructs the decisive improvement of the literary characters’ lives. These character resort to natural places to elevate their peace of mind by spending time in tranquility among environmental circumferences since countryside helps them to live peacefully. Here, Atwood’s narrative appropriation of animals and birds essentially relates to the environmental capacity to make the characters relived and contended with nature desired by the characters. The study will apply the concept of anthropomorphism which encompasses the sense of gothic elements. Animals are one of the basic environmental components of the story’s natural milieus. Atwood appropriates the view of the Animals through inextricable natural elements, birds, water, forests, and woods. As for birds, they function as the equilibrium of the ecological integrity tackled in literary works. Thus, the study tries to reveal the vital significance of natural biodiversity; and its literary function lies in offering implied textual insights on biodiversity depicted in the novel.

Aversion and Desire: The Disruption of Monolithic Ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article is an attempt to explore colonial ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). The significance of study brings to light a major issue which has been hardly emphasized in the existing academic scholarship on the novel. The study will reveal an ambivalent identity in an individual colonial locales and societies. It will analyze and show the many complex ways in which Butler uses her fictional savvy as a medium to broker, affiliate, and project the places, peoples, cultures, and ethnicity to work through the ethical, political, and affective conceptualization of ambivalent identities. Butler’s ambivalent writing, correspondingly, asserts a sense of belonging to the locality in which post-colonial subjects have evolved, and, at the same time, expresses the specificity of the actual racial experience of being ethnic, or alienated in homeland. The study will add to the remapping of contemporary postcolonial fiction and the reevaluation traditional ambivalent identities. It will testify to the increasingly progressive and long-awaited destruction of cultural national containment. The study addresses a vastly under-examined area, namely the impact of colonialism on the native identities of the blacks. Ambivalent subjectivities have always coexisted within and outside the long inherited history of the blacks’ nation, but their text has long been disregarded. As a mode of demonstration, the problem with politically correct perspectives on ambivalent relations and those with the neat postcolonial and colonial oppositions are manifold, including the effects of hegemonic policies. Such hegemonies will be scrutinized by applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence as a conceptual framework for the study’s textual analysis

The fall of national identity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

This article examines Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart within a postcolonial discourse. While the majority of postcolonial critiques argue over indigenous identity, this study explores the deterioration of national identity in Things Fall Apart. Such deterioration is brought about by the spiritual and tentative defeat inherent in the failure of the protagonist, Okonkwo, to face the colonial whites. Ultimately, the protagonist's failure leads to a tragic death. In the novel's context, Achebe exhorts the fall of national identity and its pathetic aftermath. The deterioration in national identity symbolically correlates to the protagonist's personal irresolute experience which is at first physically powerful but in the end spiritually weak. The focus of this article is a textual analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, applying postcolonial theoretical concepts, especially aboriginality, hegemony, subaltern and identity. These concepts facilitate a smouldering conceptualisation of national identity as it is exterminated in the novel. Thus, the these terms will be cited mainly with reference to Bill Ashcroft, Gayatri Spivak, and Laura Chrisman's postcolonial critiques