Jessica Loeb

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Colonization, Colonial Encounter, Literature, Representation, Resistance

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines representation and resistance in the colonial encounter through a literary analysis of the following four books: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) and Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1995). These books are organized in chapter form in pairs, representing masculine and feminine, colonized and colonizer, Western and native, fiction and non-fiction perspectives. The literature covers a multiplicity of diverse times and places, yet all deal with similar problems, and in many ways are in dialogue with one another despite their differences. Both colonizer and colonized perspectives are specific, localized, and limited. However, dominant perspectives are especially limited because they have trouble accurately viewing those below them. It is thus essential to look at a diversity of sources when attempting to understand colonialism because so many factors are at play. In setting into dialogue male and female authors who write from different times, places, and positionalities, I attempt to represent a small sampling of the nature of these difficult negotiations with colonial meaning making.

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