THE SPACE OF TRANSCULTURATION IN THOMAS KING’S GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER
Abstract
This paper uses Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water (1994) to examine the contact between two cultures in Canada; the culture of the Indigenous people and the culture of the white settlers. Taking postcolonial studies as its framework, this paper relies on works written by critics such as Stephen Slemon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others, in its analysis of the transcultural space which Thomas King creates in his novel. The four mythical stories in the novel offer a fruitful ground upon which contact between the two cultural, social and political spaces can be analyzed. We hope that the research conducted in this paper can serve as an explanation of the nature of transculturation, and in the words of Bhabha (1994, 25), offer a textual “space of hybridity”.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ashcroft, Bill, et al. 2007. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd ed., Routledge.
Bailey, Sharon M. 1999. "The Arbitrary Nature of the Story: Poking Fun at Oral and Written Authority in Thomas King's "Green Grass, Running Water"." World Literature Today 73, no. 1: 43-52. doi:10.2307/40154474. Accessed April 2, 2019.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Cox, James H. 2000. ""All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something": Thomas King's Revisions of Narratives of Domination and Conquest in "Green Grass, Running Water".” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 2: 219-46. www.jstor.org/stable/1185872. Accessed April 2, 2019
Donaldson, Laura E. 1995. "Noah Meets Old Coyote, or Singing in the Rain: Intertextuality in Thomas King's “Green Grass, Running Water”." Studies in American Indian Literatures 7, no. 2: 27-43. www.jstor.org/stable/20736846. Accessed April 2, 2019
Frantz, Fanon. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. 2003. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader, Ashcroft, Bill et al, Eds. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 18-23.
King, Thomas. 1994. Green Grass Running Water. Harper Perennial.
Kristeva, Julia. 1941. “The Bounded Text.” In Desire in Language - A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, 36-63. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lutz, John S. 2007. “Introduction” In. Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, 1-15. University of British Columbia Press.
McMillan, Alan D, Eldon Yellowhorn. 2004. First Peoples in Canada. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Morton, Desmond. 1997. A Short History of Canada. McClelland & Stewart.
Nordin, Irene G., Edfeldt, Chatarina, Hu, Lung-Lung, Jonsson, Herbert, Leblanc, André, Eds. 2015. Transcultural Identity Constructions in a Changing World. PL Academic Research.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008, 15th Edition. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Said, Edward W. 2003, 25th Edition. Orientalism. Penguin Books Ltd, 1978.
Slemon, Stephen. 2003. “The Scramble for Post-colonialism.” In The Post-colonial Studies Reader, edited by Ashcroft, Bill et al, Eds. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 45-52.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. “Transculturality - the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194-213. London: Sage.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22190/FULL2002181I
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
ISSN 0354-4702 (Print)
ISSN 2406-0518 (Online)