• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.163-183
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• 2012

This paper is one of those attempts to explore some possibility of agreement between feminist discourse and postcolonial discourses through the approach of postcolonial feminism in the reading of the controversial novel, So Far from the Bamboo Grove and Year of Impossible Goodbyes. So Far from the Bamboo Grove, when read from the perspective of postcolonial feminism, reveals 'domestic nationalism' of imperial narratives in which the violence of imperial history in Korea is hidden behind the picture of every day lives of an ordinary Japanese family and Japanese women. Furthermore, postcolonial feminist's perspective interprets Yoko family's nostalgia for their 'home,' Nanam in Korea, as 'imperialist nostalgia' working as a mask to hide the violent history of colonization of Empire. In this way, postcolonial feminist reading of the story detects the ways the narrative of Empire appropriates women, family image and even nostalgia for childhood. At the same time, this perspective explains the readers' empathy for Yoko family's suffering and the concerning women issues caused by wartime rape and sexual violence by defining Yoko as a woman of Japanese Empire, whose life of interstice between imperial men and colonial men cannot be free from violence of rape during anti colonial wars. Year of Impossible Goodbyes as a counter discourse does not overcome the traditional binary opposition of nationalism which quietens gender and class issues. As an attempt to fill in the interstice between the two perspectives of feminism and postcolonialism. postcolonial feminist reading turns out to be a valid tool for the reading of the two novels chosen here.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2016

Under the inhumane oppression of imperialism, the Third World's political violence has been often represented as an immediate and explosive one with an instant, concentrated visibility. Yet the ecological and psychological exploitation of the Third-World countries by empires, as Rob Nixon insists, shows the relative invisibility of slow violence. This paper is to reveal this slow violence of the marginalized areas symbolized as the lowland. Although Arne Naess' deep ecology promotes the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. this paper deals with three postcolonial ecological textbooks which criticize the white-centered deep ecology: Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Through postcolonial critical study, this paper finds out that all these three works have some themes in common. First, these postcolonial works assume a shape of family saga which is parallel to the slow violence of ecological and psychological plundering of empires in the postcolonial countries. Second, like the mangroves which have a tenacious hold on life, these postcolonial people rather overcome the heterogenic challenge with the sturdy and tough mind than defeated. Third, the native people's ethics of earth functions as the stronghold for their respectable lifestyle in their indigenous historicity. Finally, as a big fat brother, the Americanized globalization or neoliberalism is warned as the neocolonialism which is often shown as the disguised pattern of greenwashing. Namely, the people's self-enhancement is always prior to the imperialistic development or neoliberalism in the postcolonial ecological texts which sharply contrast the native's life consciousness and the empire's development theory.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.3-25
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• 2015

This paper reflects on the relationship between postcolonial criticism (PC) and Southeast Asian Studies. The emphasis is on the apparent premature retreat from PC as well as its unfulfilled promises and persistent pitfalls. I argue that it is premature to abandon PC because it remains relevant, even essential, in the context of the much ballyhooed age of "knowledge economy" or "information society." There is a need to take another look at its promises and to work towards fulfilling them, but at the same time be conscious of its persistent problems.

• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.131
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• pp.49-75
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• 2014

European philosophy helped to justify colonialism through a philosophy of history that privileged Europe. This paper reviews and examines postcolonial African philosophy's efforts to overcome colonialism. Postcolonial African philosophy has been trying to reexamine the essence of philosophy determined by European philosophy for freeing African philosophy from that determination. The emergence of postcolonial African philosophy itself has been a challenge to European philosophy. When European phil. will open itself to this challenge, there will be a possibility of dialogue for desirable relationship between two philosophical traditions. For European philosophy to open itself is to be seen and judged by the non-european, ie, African philosophical regard. Postcolonial African philosophy's efforts to overcome colonialism give questions and challenges to us who experienced and are remain to be under the influences of colonialism and has the task of overcoming it.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.289-306
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• 2010

In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator grows up with the burden of colonial legacies embedded with Englands' imperial disciplinary projects, its language, educational institutions, discourses. Colonial education interpellates the narrator into a colonial subject through its multiple ideological discourses and systems. Teaching the literature of England is the most insidious form of the Empire's disciplinary colonial projects, more powerful than military enforcement: Its mode of operation is creating phantasy and instigating and planting desire for such phantasy. As Homi Bhabha aptly theorizes as colonial mimicry and ambivalence, the narrator as colonial subject grows up split and confused as an ambivalent subject, simultaneously mimicking and desiring for the phantasized England as real, while resisting and criticizing such up-bringing and mimetic desire. This paper explores Kincaid's rhetorical strategy of employing Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud," especially her use of the flower "daffodil." Employing the concept of "daffodil gap" suggested by postcolonial critics, this paper closely examines two episodes involving the flower daffodil in the novel, one in a colonial classroom and the other in a garden in a new world and suggests that Kincaid accomplishes intertextual critique of colonial education and imperial projects.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.70
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• pp.66-94
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• 2015

Postcolonialism, as a school of thought, has become enormously influential for understanding the recent phenomena of globalization. While rejecting the universalizing categories of the Enlightenment, postcolonialism has called into question the old idea of culture and identity as a transcendent regime of authenticity and purity. It has also celebrated the diasporic experiences that entail porous and hybrid cultural identities as a potential site of struggle and resistance against the dominant cultural and discursive order. It is argued, however, that postcolonial theory's emancipatory claims relating to the diversified global culture tend to be complicit with transnational capitalism that brings about global issues of material as well as cultural injustice. This article, through a thorough review of the ways the postcolonial theoretical framework has been developed and appropriated by main figures in postcolonial scholarship, seeks for a theoretical and critical strategy to grasp the complex conditions of global inequality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.441-458
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• 2009

The Imperial Road is Jean Rhys s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, The Imperial Road is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys s honest and serious concern over a white Creole s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In The Imperial Road, unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator s racial disorientation, The Imperial Road exposes the white Creole s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.31-60
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• 2020

This paper investigates changes in relativization in Singapore English broadsheet newspapers from 1993 to 2016. One of the first diachronic studies in Singapore English (SgE), it also explores corresponding data from the diachronic Siena-Bologna (SiBol) news corpus. As SgE is in the endonormative stabilization phase in Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of postcolonial Englishes, divergence from British English (BrE) is to be expected. In this study, the dataset is a new Singapore English Newspaper (SEN) corpus compiled from local news articles in 1993, 2005 and 2016, and the corpus tool employed is Sketch Engine. The results reveal changes in relativization practices in SEN over the given period, many of which occur in a similar pattern as those identified in SiBol, albeit at varying rates of change. Most significant of these include a sharp decline in the which relativizer in restrictive relative clauses with non-animate antecedents, complemented by a rise in that. The change has been so rapid that although which relative clauses were more common than that clauses in 1993, that has subsequently overtaken which for both the corpora. One shift in SEN that is different from SiBol is the increase in frequency of non-restrictive relative clauses in SgE. The likely motivators for the changes in the two varieties are identified as colloquialization, densification and prescriptivism. The effect each of these factors could have had on the varieties are discussed, as well as the implications that the findings have on our understanding of the evolutionary status of SgE as a postcolonial variety.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.115-124
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• 2008

My former thesis was about the present status of Korean film aesthetics of Korean blockbusters through the cultural hybridity. Now this thesis focuses on hybridity and tragedy in Korean blockbusters from the postcolonial perspectives. Typical examples are Shiri, JSA, Taegukgi containing a special Korean situation of division ideology and expressing an extremely Western style of production. These movies hardly provide any historical causes, critical explanation, or vision beyond the discourse of national tragedy. They simply supply sentimental feeling of sympathizing with the misfortune of heroes in the course of national suffering. Therefore, these movies shows limitation not to accomplish postcolonial resistance.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.51
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• pp.161-191
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• 2018

In the beginning of the 20th century, post-colonialism has directly raised questions about western-centered universalism. One of its main achievements is that the political liberation of a colonial society does not guarantee the social, economic and cultural liberation of a society. Therefore, the discourse of liberation in the Western society, in particular, Marxism, nationalism, feminism and postmodernism, cannot be directly applied to the non-Western society. As a result, Western and non-Western societies are unfortunately dreaming of different futures and liberation; therefore, a'geopolitical dialogue' is needed between them. However, the theorists' efforts for postcolonial liberation failed to distinguish themselves from the western-centric traditions. It is also true that they have, in conjunction with these traditions, established their own power. As we know, many of the postcolonial criticisms somehow had relations with the West. This study will re-read the postcolonial thought of $Aim{\acute{e}}$ $C{\acute{e}}saire$, the father of the so-called $N{\acute{e}}gritude$, as a 'non-western resistance discourse'. Through this process, we have a chance to reflect on $C{\acute{e}}saire$ and his postcolonial thoughts.