Reading Notes W14: Postwar/Postcolonial Literature, Part A

Postwar and Postcolonial Literature (671-675)
  • in the middle of the 20th century, the 2 superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union found themselves locked in a Cold War
  • by 1949, with success of Communist Revolution in China, led by Mao Zedong, almost half of the world's population lived under communism
  • to avoid planetary disaster, both sides fought war by proxy, notably by Korea and Vietnam (671)
  • Joseph Stalin were repudiated, after Stalin's death in 1953, by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev
  • during this period, the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn were briefly allowed to be published (672)
  • while the Communist world was undergoing radical transformations, the colonial powers of Western Europe began to relinquish direct political control of their colonies
  • in Western Europe, the postwar period saw rapid rebuilding and further industrialization 
  • Tadeusz Borowski shocked his compatriots with his account of life in Nazi concentration camps while the Romanian-born Jew, Paul Celan, writing in German, turned his experiences in the camps into austere and beautiful poetry (672)
  • glimpses if existentialism occur of Samuel Beckett's, Endgame
  • he develops the theme of choice in his account of  a teacher's experiences in Algeria in "The Gust"
  • these writers turned into either direct and realistic like Camus and Borowski, or elusive and minimalist like Celan and Beckett
  • during the weeks before and after independence, large populations were killed in communal violence, the subject of Saadat Hasan Manto's "Toba Tek Singh" and later of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (673)
  • the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict  and the Israeli Occupation are themes in the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish in this volume (673)
  • Arabic writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Tayeb Salih combined traditional literary language with the European form of the novel to chronicle the transformations of their cultures
  • Doris Lessing describes Sub-Saharan Africa a series of civil wars and dictatorships (673)
  • despite Africa's hardships, it developed a remarkable literature, typically in the languages of the former colonial powers, represented by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Niyi Osundare
  • although they took inspiration form the celebration of African identity, they explored village life as it has been transformed by contact with Europeans (674)
  • in the U.S., racial segregation, were challenged in the civil rights movement 
  • James Baldwin explores the challenges that African Americans faced in the North during and after WWII
  • the most intense linguistic playfulness can be found in the works of Vladmir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Samuel Beckett

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