CROSS-CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTHER IN W.B. YEATS, JAMES JOYCE, JOSEPH CONRAD, CHINUA ACHEBE AND ASSIA DJEBAR

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates ‘Otherness’ through works which have thoroughly examined and questioned the creation of a “stable self” by putting it in dialogue with its others and to society as a whole, namely William Butler Yeats’s selected poems, James Joyce’s Dubliners, (1914) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, (1899) Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), and Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, La Fantasia (1985). By representing the results of English, Belgian and French oppression in tangible material terms as well as its spiritual bankrupcies, these writers mark their works as clearly critical of the colonial regime and opposed to colonial exploitation, positioning themselves as postcolonial through their representations. In this sense, their texts raise issues debated in current postcolonial discussions. Speaking in the voice of the oppressed, in the language of the oppressor as a weapon to make cultural difference visible, these writers indeed analyse the problem of identity crisis, displacement, disintegration and the effects of colonialism on the culture and psyche of the colonised subject. These authors moreover offer possibilities of dismantling polarized constructions of alterity in a way similar to postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, among others, whose theories are central to the analysis of the above-cited narratives. This study also draws on Bakhtin’s theory on the dialogues of voices in texts, heteroglossia and polyphony among others and theories of intertextuality such as Julia Kristeva’s and Roland Barthes’s, who by using metaphors of “mosaic” and “social text,” encourage us to view a text as part of, and being overrun by a larger “social context,” hence the importance of a socio-critical reading of these writers’ texts to show that their artistic creations are social practices and ideological productions. Each theoretical approach mentioned above will be used where appropriate to bear on some aspects of our analysis in the various chapters of this thesis, which has been organised into two parts respectvely comprising four chapters and seven chapters. One important way to understand the effects of colonisation and decolonisation on Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria is to gauge the institutional legacies of history. Part one therefore addresses the colonial legacy in Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria. The examination of the British, Belgian and French models of colonisation will reveal common features. Our concern however lies elsewhere, with those forms of domination that revolve around the construction of the Other. It is particularly important to see to what extent the otherness of the Nigerians, Congolese, Algerians and Irish, their supposed ‘inferiority’ and ‘savagery’ justified the colonisers’ intrusion on their respective territories. In Part two, we have therefore first examined the role played by ethnocentric prejudices in shaping the relations of England, Belgium and France towards their respective colonies. We have also focused on the repercussions this thinking had on the minds of the British, Belgian and French colonisers. Working against the background of the West’s history of the colonial enterprise and its exploitation of other societies and cultures, postcolonial theory has thus been used as a vital tool to re-read the texts of Western imperialism and offers a powerful framework for analysing identity formation. We have then analysed Yeats’s,Joyce’s, Conrad’s, Achebe’s and Djebar’s aforementioned texts in the light of postcolonial theory such as Edward Said’s, Frantz Fanon’s, Homi K. Bhabha’s and Gayatri Spivak’s among others. The gist of our argument in the various chapters of this doctoral thesis is therefore twofold: colonialism and postcolonialism as essentially a critique of colonialism in Ireland, Nigeria, the Congo and Algeria.