1. Lecture Code: PS_L.13
ENGL 559: Postcolonial Studies UNIT 2: Multi-Disciplinarity “Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race” by Stephen Morton
Min Pun, PhD, Associate Professor
Dept of English, PN Campus
Pokhara
2 December 2018

2. Introduction What is marginality?
Marginality is the process of some groups being disadvantaged in society.
Marginality is one of the key terms used in postcolonial studies.
In this chapter, Stephen Morton has considered marginality as a form of colonial domination and oppression that is based on race, class, gender or religion.
In this chapter, Morton has given examples of postcolonial authors who supported marginality as representatives of subalternity, Aboriginality and race.

3. Postcolonial Writers Who Defend Marginality in Their Writings
Ranajit Guha
Mahasweta Devi
Bama
Bassie Head
Sally Morgan
Joy Kogawa
Maria Campbell
Witi Ihimaera
Patricia Grace

4. Ranajit Guha’s “Chandra’s Death” (Essay)
The essay describes the circumstances leading to the death of a young woman named Chandra in Bengal, India. Chandra has an affair with her brother-in-law Magaram and discovers that she is pregnant. Upon discovering this, Magaram approaches Chandra’s mother and informs her that Chandra has to two options availabe to her - to have an abortion tor to be leave the village forever (a punishment known as bhek). Chandra’s mother decides to have abortion, but Chandra dies in the process of abortion. Chandra’s death is considered a murder by the colonial authorities and Chandra’s relatives are tried for the crime.
Through this essay, Guha supports women’s resistance to patriarchy, a voice against male domination (Chandra is presented as subaltern who speaks; this is postcolonial resistance to domination)

5. Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow (Autobiographical Novel)
Devi’s novel Chotti Munda and His Arrow describes how the adivasi community in Chotti’s village regard India’s independence movement as a bourgeois revolution, which benefits wealthy landowners, who are described as outsiders (dikus).
'I had but that one arrow’, says Chotti Munda, the hero ofthis epic tale. A 'magic' arrow that stood for the pride, the wisdom, the culture of their society, a society threatened within evitable disintegration as its traditional structures crumbled under the assault of 'national development'.
It raises questions about the place of the tribal on the map of national identity, land rights and human rights, the 'museumization' of 'ethnic' cultures, and the protest of a marginalized people.

6. Bama’s Karukku (Autobiographical Novel)
In Karukku, Bama describes the social marginality of a dalit community in a South Indian village. The narrator tells the traumatic experience of caste discrimination from the standpoint of a dalit woman. She struggles to get an education within the village school system. In one incident on the bus, the narrator refuses to leave seat for a higher caste woman (a Naicker woman). This is a postcolonial protest against the discriminating caste system in India.
Through this novel, Bama as a postcolonial writer speaks for the dalit community as representatives of subalternity.

7. Bassie Head’s Maru (Novel)
The novel is about two tribal groups – Bushman (high caste) and Masarwa (low caste). Here, Margaret belongs to Masarwa tribe by birth, but she is known as a Bushman tribe because she is adopted by a lady who belongs to this high ethnic group. Maru who is a Bushman tribe loves Margaret though he knows the social status of Margaret and even leaves his tribal status to marry her.
Bassie Head, through the character of Maru, challenges the racial prejudice of the villagers towards the Masarwa community.
The writer also recognizes the need to decolonize the social structures that has contributed to the marginalization of the ethnic group.

8. Sally Morgan’s My Place (Novel)
The marginalization of Aboriginal identities and histories has also been a major concern for indigenous writers in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
In the novel My Place, Morgan discovers her Aboriginal ancestry which is removed by the racist policies of the Australian white government towards mixed-race Aboriginal population.
The novel articulates the historical experience of racial discrimination and contributes to a public acknowledgement of the marginalization of Aboriginal peoples in Australia.

9. Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (Novel)
Two Canadian writers like Joy Kogawa and Maria Campbell who are known as postcolonial writers, writing about marginality.
Through his novel Obasan, a Japanese Canadian writer Joy Kogawa articulates the experience of social and political marginalization in Canada.
Specially, the novel articulates a history of the Canadian government's treatment of Japanese Canadian immigrants during the World War II.
As is mentioned in the novel, the Canadian government suspended citizenship for Japanese Canadians during the war in Canada.

10. Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed
Another Canadian writer Maria Campbell in her novel Halfbreed articulates the history of Metis community who are people of mixed Aboriginal and European descent in Canada.
Campbell, in her autobiographical novel, expresses the examples of agency and resistance to state institutions and their racist policies towards aboriginal peoples.
As the title itself suggests that the novel deals with the problems of mixed race people in Canada which is examined from the postcolonial standpoint.

11. Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi (Novel)
Now, there are two postcolonial writers from New Zealand; they are Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace who explore the importance of social and cultural rituals for empowering indigenous Maori communities in New Zealand.
In her Tangi, Witi Ihimaera focuses on the relationship between a young man and his father. The story ias about a moving account of father’s death, but also an affirmation of life. It describes, simply and affectionately, rural Maori life, with its emphasis on family unity, in the hope that such a life will never be lost.
The novel is about a synthesis of Maori and European culture that denies the histories of European colonization and the European political hegemony in contemporary New Zealand.

12. Patricia Grace’s Potiki (Novel)
The co-existence and conflict between Maori culture and the late capitalist development in New Zealand is further developed in Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki.
The protagonist Roimata Kararaina, her husband and their four chidren live peacefully in a tribal community along the unspoined coast of New Zealand. But developers have big plans for the area trouist facilities road as and modernization and they offer Roimata’s Maori people huge sums of money for its lands. The Maori people refuse to sell their lands but the developers do whatever they get the lands.
So the novel documents a Maori community’s struggle to protect their ancestral land from development.

13. Conclusion
The above postcolonial writers and their texts are some of the examples that give voice to the subaltern histories in order to question the disempowerment of subaltern peoples in the age of globalization.
Thus, marginality is a rhetorical device that has produced many postcolonial texts and is always connected to a struggle for social and political empowerment.

14. Associate Professor, Dept of English Tribhuvan University
Min Pun, PhD
Associate Professor, Dept of English
Tribhuvan University
Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara
Website: