Failures in Decolonization and ‘the Return to the Past’: Reading V.S. Naipaul

Abstract

This study examines the failures in decolonization and its political outcomes leading to a phenomenon called 'totalitarianism' in a transitional post-colonial context, as characterized in the works of V.S. Naipaul. It attempts to articulate how the postcolonial nations, once 'abandoned' by their Colonial Masters and then taken over by unsuccessful indigenous rulers, have encountered symptomatic political development within themselves 'as finite limitations of their existence' as they have emerged and are ideologically embedded in a historically affected consciousness (Gadamer 2006). To escape from the humiliation, dislocation, anxiety, jealousies and alienation generated by modern secularism and rationalism transmitted through colonialism itself, they seem to 'return' (Amin 2014: 81) to an ideology largely borrowed from history and tradition as 'retrogressive nostalgia' for today's and tomorrow's problems, which ultimately results in nothing but violent totalitarianism. In such transitional contexts where societies still struggle to come to terms with modernity, though the material conditions of life improved, the shift in mentality (Miao 2000) from one condition to a completely unprepared and unexpected phase remains crucial. The destructive energy that is often used against the universal civilizing force is seen here as a 'compensation for the pain suffered through the disintegration of traditional forms of live ' (Habermas 2007: 102). This study, with the support of contemporary philosophical, political, literary and psychoanalytical interventions, dialectically examines how such symptomatic developments are empirically explored in the fictional and biographical works by V.S. Naipaul.

The Articulation of Migrant Spatiality in Kureishi’s Cinema: Revisiting My Beautiful Launderette

“…By the 1960s, the drastic paradigm shift in British culture manipulated a huge number of immigrants to migrate from the Centre to periphery in quest for progress in a land of plenty. The deep desire for this de-territorialization is broadly termed as pursuing the Eurocentric fantasy (Hapugoda, 2016). The inculcated notion of territorial mobility from periphery to the Centre for the acquisition of capital, which the periphery is devoid of, led to a drastic pour of colonial non-White immigrants to Europe.…”

Heideggerian `Out-of-Joint' Situation and New Horizons in Postcolonial Literature: Interpreting the Zizekian `Extimacy' in <i>The Mimic Men</i> by V.S. Naipaul

“…Though he locates himself far away from the above reality, this reality becomes 'externally intimate' to him. In other world, postcolonial experience that he leaves behind suddenly becomes his real inner core that he catharsis through his fictions which are widely known as the best postcolonial writings [Park, 1996, Kelly, 1989, Cader, 2008, Hapugoda, 2015. So, his centre is ex-centric with the inner postcolonial life despite his central existence is geographically located in the London metropolitan.…”