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Narratives and Narrators:
Stories as Routes to Indigenous
Knowledge in Papua New Guinea
-- Regis Tove Stella
This paper accentuates the important function of stories (legends, myths, folktales, etc.) in
educating and disseminating indigenous knowledge in Papua New Guinea. We accentuate and
foreground the fact that stories and storytellers (whether traditional or modern) are routes to
indigenous knowledge at the same time as they are also storehouses of knowledge and important
educative tools in the perpetuation and maintenance of cultural values/traditions. The paper's orbit is
Papua New Guinea and we argue that stories are narrated not only for their aesthetic value and
enjoyment, but most significantly to impart indigenous knowledge and educate the young so that they
uphold and maintain the currency of their cultural ways. We also point out that stories can be
effective tools in (modern) education because they deal with human experience, which is considered
authentic and credible sources of information and wisdom. In the course of our discussion we introduce
the Banoni concept of the Ficus tree as a metaphor for traditional culture,
interrelationships/interdependency and indigenous knowledge and its numerous roots representing the
various `disciplines' of indigenous knowledge and the various modes of traditional education.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
From Lispeth to The Woman
of Shamlegh: Rudyard Kipling, India, and Indian Women
-- Karyn Huenemann
Critics have long grappled with the "eccentric, often troubling" nature of Kipling's fiction (Said, 160):
his complicity in and seeming subversion of Imperialist ideologies; his characterization of Indian people,
sometimes sympathetic, sometimes superficial and racially insulting; his portrayal of women, misogynist yet
admiring. One of the more interesting of these troubling contradictions is his representation of women, especially
Indian women. This article investigates the development of Kipling's representation of Indian women through
the cycle of his writing on India: from Plain Tales from the
Hills in 1888, to Kim in 1901. The focus is
on those Indian women who are central to his stories or novels, who are depicted in other than merely
stereotypic ways. Through the fifteen years that lie between
"Lispeth" the opening story in Plain tales from the
Hills, and Kim, Kipling's last Indian work, Kipling's narrative representations of Indian women, of India
itself, are transformed, becoming both more complex and more illuminating, and revealing a growth in maturity
and perception that justifies critics' claims for Kim as Kipling's greatest Indian work.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Transforming Multiple Hierarchies:
Polyvocality, Flux and Problems of Identity in Multicultural
Women's Writing
-- Kishori Nayak K
Based on the premise that feminist writing is pluralist and transgressive, the paper takes up an analysis
of works by women writers from different cultures. It discusses how the employment of multiple voices along
with characters in flux is a major strategy in women's writing, especially those from multiple cultures.
These writers generally depict the woman protagonists' quest for individual identity, something which 'they' are
often denied in 'other' cultures. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso
Sea, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman
Warrior and Shashi Deshpande's That Long
Silence contain fine examples of these feminist motifs,
as evident in the analysis made.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Human Rights and Testimonial Fiction: Alicia Partnoy and the Case of
Argentina's Disappeared
-- Pramod K Nayar
This essay explores a particular genre in postcolonial literature: the literature of human rights. It uses
a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical narrative, the Argentinian Alicia Partnoy's account of her
incarceration. The essay begins by proposing, following contemporary theorists of human rights, that a narrative tradition
of human rights exists. It then moves on to discuss the 'literature of trauma'. Partnoy's work, it argues,
demonstrates two strategies—the enumerative narrative of witnessing and self-witnessing. Partnoy produces a 'fiction
of trauma', or 'testimonial fiction'. This fiction, the essay concludes, works at the level of a 'moral
imagination', where the act of imagination is a performative through which the subject is formed, but also one that
allows Partnoy to speak of the victims who did not survive the camp. This becomes the 'fiction of human
rights' because it constructs the subjectivity—which includes agency—of Partnoy. If the focus of human rights
discourses is the protection of the subject's agency, then the construction of subjectivity in The Little School makes it a narrative of human rights. It concludes by proposing, via Ashis Nandy's argument that the
(postcolonial) Third World can become the 'collective representation of man-made suffering', that such narratives fit into
a global history of trauma and human rights.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Poems
Book Review
What Kind of an Animal are You?
-- Sally-Ann Murray
Love, Hades and Other Animals. Wendy Woodward. Protea: Pretoria, South Africa, 2008. 63 pages.
price R100.00. ISBN 978-1-86919-249-5.
© 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved. |
