Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013
Browse
11 results
Search Results
Item Authorized Honesty: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul(East West University, 1/1/2013) Idris, Farhad BaniNo acquaintance of V. S. Naipaul could possibly imagine that during the scattering of Pat Naipaul’s ashes, the Quran was recited, but the author, highly acclaimed for both his fiction and non-fiction but also known for his hostility towards Islam, allowed the lapse and was even grateful. The recitation of Sura Fatiha in Arabic was performed by Naipaul’s newly-wed wife Nadira, a Muslim woman from Pakistan with links in Kenya. Naipaul was too distraught to accompany her into the woods on Cooper’s Hill; he stood by the car, crying the entire time. The location, near Gloucester, had memories for him, memories of Pat, wife of a forty-one year long marriage. Months earlier, the funeral at Salisbury Crematorium was austere and frugal. Curiously enough, Naipaul defended the minimalism to someone in Islamic terms: “’It was chaste, it was Quranic in its purity’” (480). There was no decent interval between the first wife’s death and the second wedding. Naipaul had met Nadira in Pakistan while collecting materials for a new book on Islam (Beyond Belief) and had proposed to her when Pat was still alive but dying of cancer. She passed away in February of 1996; the wedding occurred in April; Pat’s remains were dispersed in October.Item The Powerlessness of Cameroon’s Reunification Monuments(East West University, 1/1/2013) NFI, Joseph Lon PhDThis study attempts to investigate the symbolism and popularity of the Reunification Monuments constructed in Yaounde and Mamfe some years after the political reunification of the two Cameroons. These monuments were constructed to commemorate the reunification of Cameroon, considered by many as the most significant event in postcolonial Cameroon history. This study intends to investigate why the monuments became victims of neglect, indifference and even scorn from Cameroonians only a few decades after reunification. An analysis of the data collected from interviews and secondary sources reveals that the monuments remain unpopular like the reunification history itself largely due to the failure of the powers that be to project this aspect of Cameroon history. The monuments have, therefore, remained powerless, as they have not immortalized the reunification of Cameroon, as is the case with reunification monuments elsewhereItem Western Democracy in Africa as a Failed Project: Which Way Forward?(East West University, 1/1/2013) Nkwi, Walter Gam PhDThe role of democracy in societal transformation and nation-building in Sub-Saharan Africa has been compromised by political and social strictures created during more than three decades of autocratic rule of most countries that still underline the practical and moral workings of the state today. Western democracy remains mired in rigging cleavages that find expression in parochial tendencies ranging from divide and rule to ethnicism and to regionalism being orchestrated by the state’s political elites and those loyal to the ruling regime in a neo-patrimonial manner. As a result, the ability to mobilize all and sundry towards a meaningful democratic culture and development is limited. In this context good governance has remained, for the vast majority of Africans, illusory. With the end of the Cold War which characterized world politics since 1945, the United States of America and Europe have descended on the continent and re-launched a crusade for democracy without paying any attention to the structures which could harness meaningful democratic culture and development. This essay focuses on the dynamics that have impeded the development of western democracy in Africa. It interrogates even the raison d’etre of such a western buzzword with regard to meaningful development in most African countries. Does Africa really need western democracy to cure her developmental malady? This essay, while working on the argument that western democracy has botched woefully in most parts of the continent, attempts to proffer some suggestions, which if implemented would launch most African countries towards meaningful democratic culture.Item Homologizing Accident: Notes on Warhol’s Car Crashes(East West University, 2/1/2013) Sarkar, AbhishekThis paper focuses on some paintings by Andy Warhol depicting car crashes to demonstrate how he uses them not only to underscore the commodity fetishism of contemporary capitalism but also subversively to undermine such traits in contemporary American culture. It also explores the connection between the ambivalence reflected in the paintings and Warhol’s sexuality. In the process, it connects the paintings to the category Susan Sontag has famously categorized as “Camp” and Warhol’s own facetiousness and love of surfaces and mixed modes as well as gimmick and parody.Item Resistance of Achebe’s ‘Heroes’ Okonkwo and Obi Okonkwo: Defeated in the Flux of Nigerian Society?(East West University, 1/1/2013) Sharmin, SoniaThis paper analyzes the resistance of Achebe’s two ‘heroes’ Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, and Obi Okonkwo, the protagonist of No Longer at Ease. While Okonkwo takes up arms to preserve culture and tradition in a “things fall apart society”, Obi Okonkwo’s honesty and his love for Clara remain constant with him and he is “no longer at ease” in the flux of colonial Nigeria. In pre-colonial Nigeria, Okonkwo’s resistance to the white man’s religion, education and technology is defeated and Obi’s desire for a corrupt-free Nigeria fails during British colonial rule. In line with this development, we find Okonkwo’s son converting to Christianity. Eventually, Okonkwo commits suicide realizing that he is going to be defeated. However, the history of resistance does not end here and Okonkwo’s and Obi’s apparent defeats have far-reaching implications for Africa’s subsequent anti-colonial struggle.Item Re-presenting the margins: revisiting the Scottish countryside in L. G. Gibbon’s Sunset Song(East West University, 1/1/2013) Dasthakur, SauravIn his The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists Raymond Williams comments on the gradual institutionalization of the dominant (Anglo-American) version of modernism and the co option of its subversive possibilities by the capitalist market dynamics, which it at least in some forms tried to challenge, or bypass, in the initial phase of its emergence in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century (Politics 35). As several critics have amply demonstrated, one of the defining features of this ‘established,’ market-governed tradition of modernism was a many-pronged ideological ambivalence in its response to social modernity. 1 Such ambivalence or intensiveness of the modernists, which stands in conspicuous contrast to their aesthetic radicalism, as Williams has argued, was a part of the broader ‘structure of feeling’ of dominant cultural formations in their clash with emergent ones at a specific historical context. Hence Williams’ suggestion that artistic and other institutional practices, ‘these laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are so often claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance, simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class’ (Problems 36-37). The dominant modernist discourses, more often than not, either prioritized the middle classes over the working classes, the masculine over the feminine, the urban over the provincial, the elite over the popular, or took an ambivalent stance in times of conflict between the two poles of these dyad.2 The crises the hegemonic class, gender or space faced at the turn of the century and the culture of negotiations, new compromises and new institutional practices the crises generated have been subjects of extensive critical enquiry in several disciplines. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, for one example, has devoted an entire chapter, ‘Who’s Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie’ in his The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (165-91) to understand the nature of the culture of ambivalence which was one of the products of this crisis.Item The Theme of Crisis in the Poetry of Yeats and Eliot(East West University, 1/1/2013) Mozumder, Subrata ChandraW. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot demonstrate the crisis of modern society in their poetry. Both poets were concerned about the disorderly and fragmented social condition of their time – a time of political turmoil, anarchy and chaos. They yearned for the more humane, cultured and promising times of the past, as their contemporary chaotic world endangered peace, happiness, and solidarity of its people. Their poetry presents a gallery of characters, whose ideological conflicts, cultural differences and racial discrimination revealed the crisis of modern society. Both poets deplored the fragmentation of modern society, which once had strong traditions, customs and values. For them, the absence of ethical and religious values gives rise to perennial anguish, disquiet and chaos. However, though both Yeats and Eliot handle the theme of crisis, the ramifications of their treatment are strikingly varied. This paper seeks to explore the theme of crisis as a split in society that they highlight in their poetry by bringing a contrast between some common binaries such as past/present; ideal/corrupt; colonized/colonizer; love/lust; fertility/infertility. eItem Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Imagination: Nation, Gender, and Global Justice(East West University, 1/1/2013) De, Esha NiyogiThis paper focuses on Tagore’s increasing activism and his bid to persuade his readers in his later works of the importance of thinking globally and abandoning exclusionary perspectives. It shows how he strove in his writing to alter mentalities underlying the politics of domination and division in the world he lived in. The paper also attempts to draw out the implications of his critical approach to imagination and emotion and the way he used emotion-and affect enhancing literature to oppose divisive and instrumental attitudes and to bring people together by transcending nation or gender divisions.Item Court vs. Courtship in Jane Austen’s Emma(East West University, 1/1/2013) Mortuza, ShamsadThe paper examines the royal dedication of Jane Austen’s Emma as a critical engagement with the regency crisis. Austen decided to comply with a royal request to dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent and inserted it almost as a last-minute adjustment, even though she had the option to include it in one of her future works. I shall argue that this inclusion of the dedication is far from an accident. While the novel’s preoccupation with marriage and courtship probably hides its courtly interest, the textual treatment of contextual foils and foibles, disease and decadence directly implicate the ‘regency crisis’. The paper adopts a new historicist approach and claims that Emma is an Austenite search for an ideal ruler at a time when the court was troubled by the deficiencies in the reigning monarch.Item The Effect of Accent(s) and Pronunciations(s) of English on Bangladeshi English Language Learners’ Listening Skill Acquisition Process(East West University, 1/1/2013) Zarin, IsmatListening, the most vital skill in language acquisition, is often regarded also as the most difficult skill to attain by second language learners. This study investigates Bangladeshi English language learners’ problems in acquiring listening skills in connection to pronunciation(s) & accent(s) of English and its possible connection to the motivation of learners. To conduct the study, a number of 255 first year undergraduate students from twenty universities in Bangladesh were selected as subjects. The findings of the study suggest that native accent(s) and pronunciation(s) of English play a critical role in listening skills acquisition process and that motivation to learn listening skills among English language learners in Bangladesh is affected by native pronunciation(s) and accent(s) of English.