The uses of racial melancholia in colonial education: Reading Ourika and Saleh: A Prince of Malaya as cautionary tales
by Adeline Koh
published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, iFirst article, October 2011. DOI:10.1080/17449855.2011.616341
This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and... more This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford’s Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires.
94 views
Seen by:Considerazioni sulla storia della comparazione lessicale egittosemitica e afroasiatica
Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica - Università di Firenze 16 (2006): 113-134
Pursuing his research on the Egypto-Semitic comparison the Author in this present note takes into consideration the... more Pursuing his research on the Egypto-Semitic comparison the Author in this present note takes into consideration the lines of development of Egypto-Semitic and Afroasiatic studies from the pio-neeristic period in the eighteenth until the last years, providing an interesting analysis on the different theories apply by the different school on the comparison. Among the more interesting observations ones can mention: the works of the three school: “Old School”, “neuere Komparatistik”, “Diako-noff’s School”; the real evaluation of glottochronology method; the more interesting field of lexical surveys: anatomy and wild world.
RAPPORTI PARTICOLARI TRA EGIZIANO E SEMITICO ALL'INTERNO DELLA COMPARAZIONE AFROASIATICA: I PRESTITI
Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica - Università di Firenze 18 (2008): 189-197
Since the first studies on Egypto-Semitic comparison many studies were made on the problem of the loan-words and its... more Since the first studies on Egypto-Semitic comparison many studies were made on the problem of the loan-words and its phenomena in the course of the history. This note following this stream of studies proposes to supply a general picture of the problem of borrowing, starting from two particular lexical field: Anatomy and Wild Nature. Its utility is obvious not only for Egypto-Semitic, but even in the Afroasiatic lexical comparison.
48 views
Seen by:
