African and Chinese Counter Colonial Fictional Narratives: A Comparative Study of the Retrieval of Indigenous Cultural Identities
Pinkish Zahra, Sabir Hussain and Ghulam Murtaza 272 Global Social Sciences Review (GSSR) Research Questions How do the authors, irrespective of their spatial and temporal relations, retrieve their identity and culture while encountering the hegemonic cultural writings? How do the utterances of both colonizer and colonized intersect in different novels leading them to the neutralization of one another? Research Methodology A text is considered to be constructed as a mosaic of different quotations, citations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like; consequently, it is a kind of absorption and transformation of another text. Human activities, dialogues, writings, etc. are appropriation of the same structure which is prevalent in society. In African and Chinese novels we find two kinds of personae: the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressors, irrespective of their belonging, resort to the exploitation of colonized with the purpose of draining material resources, while each oppressed in the colonial world, irrespective of his dwelling, determined to revive and preserve the indigenous culture, takes on the colonizer in a similar way. The world is divided into two: the governing world and the governed world; each part of the world transcends the cultural and political boundaries in securing their respective interests. In other words, it can be said that the governing world is transcultural in formulating policies for sustaining their hegemony, and, on the other hand, the governed world is also transcultural in redeeming the receding identity and culture. So there is intertextuality in governing the distant people as well as in encountering the governing hegemonic structure. This research explores the aforementioned phenomenon with the principles of intertextuality in order to unearth the same structure that serves the interest of both the colonizer and colonized. Moreover, postcolonial theory helps unveil the tactics of colonizers and means of reassertions of colonized. M. H. Abrams defines intertextuality as a creative tool used to signify the various ways in which a piece of literary text echoes, or linked to, other texts, whether by implicit or explicit citations and allusions, or by incorporating some of the features of earlier texts by later texts, or "simply by participation in a common stock of literary codes and conventions" (1999, p. 200) Intertextuality refers to the presence of effect and literariness in the text of another text. Julia Kristeva, a French linguist, coined the word 'Intertextuality' after studying the theory of dialogism by Mikhail Bakhtin. But intertextuality has had a presence in the thoughts and philosophies of great writers since Greek age to modern time. Plato's concept of imitation highlights intertextuality as the poet copies the creation which itself is a copy of reality. For both Quintilian and Cicero, Imitation is a method of developing personal discourse as well as a conscious intertextual strategy (Bakhtin, 1986) T.S Eliot's concept of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is also a kind of intertextuality, and his masterpiece poem, The Wasteland, is the epitome of Intertextuality which has mashed up not only the literary texts, figures, cultures and antique civilizations but also the languages of the world. He is of the view that no artist, weather a creative writer or a practitioner of any other art caries complete signification of his art in isolation (1963) Julia Kristeva asserts the perspective of Allen that a text is a permutation in the intertextual space of a text wherein, many utterances overlap and intersect one another (2000) It is observable that the utterances of both Japan and Great Britain intersect each other and form a replica with a change of governing bodies. Similarly, the utterances of Chinese, Indian and African novelists intersect and neutralize in order to form a cohesive universal resistance as Rushdie says the empire's vengeance finds expression through counter writing. It means that writing back involves the process of intertextual dialogue. In order to unearth the deeper structure of colonization which has sustained itself even after the apparent decolonization, besides intertextuality, Said's conception of "filiative" and "affiliative" criticism helps to interpret and evaluate the transcendence of "liminal intellectual(s)" in encountering the oppressive ideology. Liminal intellectuals understand and acknowledge the imperatives of the dominant culture but carry an individual consciousness sufficient to recognize dominant culture and interrogate its foundations. Achebe and Yan also recognize the totalized version of the dominant culture with the individual consciousness of the indigenous culture and traditions. Hence, intertextuality helps in bringing the apparently discrete, disjointed and fragmented utterances found in the texts which are latently ordered and in sync with each other, Hebel (1989) and William Irwin (2004) are acknowledged as its pioneers; their concept of i) Influence, ii) Quotations and iii) Allusion is of great significance in the analysis of both the works. In influence, one can relate the latest text with the previously written texts especially the classics and it also includes tradition and imitation. Besides this, the influence also includes the incorporation of one or more features of one text by another. Morawski (1970) believes that quotation can be "easily detachable from the new whole" (p. 691) and their salient features are their individuality and accuracy. Alluding to the previous incidents, characters and historical events is a prevalent phenomenon in literature. Most of the writers allude to the classic characters. African and Chinese Counter Colonial Fictional Narratives: A Comparative Study of the Retrieval of Indigenous Cultural Identities Vol. IV, No. III (Summer 2019) 273 When a reader relates a text to other texts he develops a link between these two texts. Sometimes it happens that a writer deliberately draws connections with the prior written text just to emphasize certain points. These allusive references enable the reader to develop a link with his prior knowledge. In this way, intertextuality opens up new frames of meaning within and beyond the social, cultural and political scenario. Kristeva gave the concept of the subject of enunciation and the subject of utterance to clarify the role of the author. The utterance is what one can call how a human mind produces and creates the words and enunciation are those words that are independent of human mind. In this way, various kinds of meanings are produced.