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Abstract
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This scholarship fills a significant void during a crucial moment in literary and cultural studies. Postcolonial criticism has seen remarkable theoretical development and methodological innovation since 2019. The emergence of 'postcolonial narratology' as a coherent and self-conscious methodological framework, such as in interdisciplinary studies of silence in postcolonial writing, marks a major shift in scholarly approaches to colonial texts. We have a much better sense now that formal analysis and ideological critique are fundamentally bound up with one another: how something is told is already related to the ideologies it upholds and naturalizes.
Contemporary academia now tends to agree that silence in a postcolonial setting is not just an absence or a kind of oppression, but it can take the form of something that is symptomatic of epistemic violence and resistant tactics. Fred Moten’s work in sound studies and Achille Mbembe’s theorization of postcolonial power dynamics provide us with ways to read silence not as absence, but full of meaning, likely resonance, and occasionally subversive potential. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s method of speaking beside” rather than to the colonized subject serves as an ethics of interpretation that acknowledges interpretive paradox while maintaining a critical relation to it.
This study is significant because it links postcolonial theory with narratological method to demonstrate that literary form has generative force in power relations. 5 In this sense, Spivak's conceptualization of the subaltern and epistemic violence is brought in dialogue here with a narrative analysis of subtle but very telling formal strategies—focalization (in all its facets ranging from zero to internal), narrative distance, unreliable narration, linguistic fragmentation as a consequence of trauma that leads to an altered or distorted perception on behalf of the narratee (not narrator) who tries straining out truth from lies), or frame narration that create silenc
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