http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/keyword/postcolonial-literature Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:47:48 -0400 Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:47:48 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1887/reconstructing-ruin-as-future-rethinking-the-spatiotemporality-of-race-and-gender-in-glissant-and-spillers-middle-passage By Yiyang Chen - Intersecting Edouard Glissant’s poetics with Hortense Spillers’ theory of race, gender, and sexuality alchemizes a new conception of the Middle Passage’s spatiotemporality. With the slave trade haunting the living, this paper attempts to orient a rupture in the fabric of spacetime, through which implosion leads to a new future. The destructive and destabilizing abyss of the Middle Passage, in itself, creates a philosophy of alterity, where linear, universalizing logics of the West become ruin through which new paradigms emerge. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant delineates three... Wed, 10 Mar 2021 08:59 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1887/reconstructing-ruin-as-future-rethinking-the-spatiotemporality-of-race-and-gender-in-glissant-and-spillers-middle-passage http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1843/a-postcolonial-theory-of-value-broadening-economic-scholarship-through-disciplinary-mimetic-valuation By David L. Myers - This work aims to integrate postcolonial scholarship into some basic theoretical foundations of a mainstream economic curriculum. Noting the insufficiencies of neoclassical economics to deal with problems of cultural difference and priority, the work offers a basic critique of economics and its aspirations for universal applicability. It does this by building upon existing postcolonial critiques of economics as a social science and focuses specifically on economic notions of value. Using postcolonial and anthropological scholarship, it sketches out a broader, more inclusive theory of value than... Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:49 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1843/a-postcolonial-theory-of-value-broadening-economic-scholarship-through-disciplinary-mimetic-valuation http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1706/the-body-as-a-weapon-of-resistance-in-postcolonial-short-stories-the-cases-of-augusto-monterroso-and-zulema-de-la-rand#250;a-fernand#225;ndez By Kyle S. McQuillan - The arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the “New World” at the end of the fifteenth century triggered an age of violence, oppression, and colonization that lasted until the United States took the stage as a modern colonial power in 1898. Overt colonization was transformed and reinvented as neocolonialism under the guise of “international policy” written with the intention of controlling the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. The economic, social, and political systems put in place by the Spanish, and later the Americans in the postcolonial period, are still tangible in... Mon, 20 Nov 2017 10:28 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1706/the-body-as-a-weapon-of-resistance-in-postcolonial-short-stories-the-cases-of-augusto-monterroso-and-zulema-de-la-rand#250;a-fernand#225;ndez http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1495/post-colonial-duality-and-identity-in-ballards-the-crystal-world By Emma O. Volk - J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) is a prismatic text, apparently translucent yet linguistically opaque, with moments of unexpected ontological intricacy. Like the crystals consuming the forest, Ballard’s descriptive language itself multiplies, encrusting the novel in adjectival embellishment and convoluted pseudo-science. Yet beneath the pop-apocalyptic overtones, The Crystal World is a text deeply informed by its post-colonial setting. In his seminal work Colonial Desire: Hybridity in theory, culture, and race, post-colonial theorist Robert J.C. Young identifies the &ldquo... Mon, 14 Nov 2016 09:45 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1495/post-colonial-duality-and-identity-in-ballards-the-crystal-world http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/416/the-politics-of-transgression-history-society-and-the-individual-in-postcolonial-literature By Shreya Singh - In two postcolonial novels, The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Secrets by Nuruddin Farah, both authors use the politics of families to paint a vivid picture of the social, cultural and political conditions of their nations. Roy and Farah both write about families where significant acts of moral and sexual transgressions take place often leading to the ruin and death of various characters in their stories. The transgressions in both the books also act as devices to portray the state of flux between history’s impositions and individual desires. However, while both authors use transgressions... Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:29 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/416/the-politics-of-transgression-history-society-and-the-individual-in-postcolonial-literature http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/217/mind-sweet-mind-a-closer-look-at-salman-rushdies-invisible-homeland-in-east-west By Cassandra A. Clarke - Every person has a birthplace, a starting point that offers a sense of identity for an individual. Through this start, this receding to the roots mentality, one examines their present in terms of their constructed past. Salman Rushdie touches upon this concept of past to present comparison within his vignette “The Courter,” in his novel East, West. Throughout “The Courter,” there is an everlasting push and pull of “worlds in transition,” between the Indian character Mary and her family, as they attempt to adapt culturally to England (Bahris, 13). However, since... Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:04 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/217/mind-sweet-mind-a-closer-look-at-salman-rushdies-invisible-homeland-in-east-west