| Abstract (english) | This thesis is focused on analysing contemporary literature and its position concerning different mechanisms of power which have not been consistently addressed by the discipline within postcolonial studies. It argues for the need of acknowledging hierarchies of power that still burden and condition former colonies and stresses that it is necessary to incorporate into the agenda of postcolonial theory the analysis that will critically engage with prolonged colonization. Drawing upon sources outside of exclusively literary theory, the thesis shows the centrality of economic, political, and ideological mechanisms of power in revealing the neocolonial condition that prevails in today`s world. In the first chapter, the author delineates the theoretical framework of postcolonial literature and theory within their historical margins. The chapter demarcates not only postcolonial theory`s development and institutionalization, its predominantly discursive strategies, but also opens the possibility of reconsidering its vocation in terms of designating the contemporary world and conjuncture that characterize globality and unequal distribution of power. The chapter acknowledges the vital importance of postcolonial theory and its most prominent theoreticians who set the founding paradigms. Recognizing the theory`s importance in the period of newly gained independence, the author focuses on relevant concepts developed by Fanon, Said, Bhabha, and Spivak. In addition, the author considers a crucial aspect and importance of discourse and its relationship with power and production of power which owes much to Foucault and which was subsequently adopted by postcolonial theory and accepted as a valid subversive strategy. In the following section of the chapter, the author announces that, although postcolonial theory recognizes the privileged status of discourse in offering resistance to colonial forms and mechanisms of representation, the analysis of colonial and postcolonial discourse should not neglect material historical facts which characterized the process of colonization and today`s globalized relationships. Following this line of thought, the author points to necessary modifications of very frequent concepts in the postcolonial theory of migration and diaspora and argues that their oppositional strength as a textual strategy reveals their metaphorical dimension which is very different from real-life experiences. In the closing section of the chapter, the author makes references to aporias within the postcolonial theory, and criticism coming from Ahmad, Huggan, Dirlik, and Loomba who are cautious in welcoming it as a celebratory discourse equipped with a universal capacity of subversion. Instead, what should be taken into consideration are real material histories of colonialism and inequality which have continued to be present in today`s globalized conjuncture of replicated colonial matrixes of power. The second chapter addresses the issue of power and its mechanisms. Power as a phenomenon and theoretical concept is observed through an overview of different approaches that delineate its genealogy from Weber, Gramsci, and American debate to Lukes, Bourdieu, and Foucault. The author identifies how Foucault`s notion of productive and dispersed power exercised through discourse was greatly applied in postcolonial theory`s emphasis on the prominent position of discourse in establishing relations of power and providing subversive mechanisms to colonialism. However, not identifying the difference between dominant and dominated discourse along with stressing micro-processes of power without revealing the sources of power in different social structures, in the author`s opinion, poses a serious issue that should be addressed. In the next part of the chapter, the author is focused on delineating mechanisms of power and power system that dominates the globe. Acknowledging the cultural turn that characterized postcolonial theory, the author`s stance is that such a turn distanced theory from material reality and displaced it from social, economic, political, and everyday practice towards questions of race, gender, ethnicity, and hybridity. The author advocates approach that recognizes the importance of material evidence instead of textual and social constructivism. Focusing upon inextricable links between the colonial period, the postcolonial era of won independence, and neocolonial control of economic, political, and ideological relationships and structures in former colonies, the next part of the chapter illuminates how postcolonial emphasis on discursive strategies as subversion is not enough. The unwillingness of the theory to address the current position of former colonizers and colonized in advancing globalization ignores the contemporary global politics within the capitalist neoliberal system. The author concludes the need to observe material impulses, exploitation of resources and human capital, and institutional repression as the foundations of colonialism. Achille Mbembe expands these ideas by describing the process of colonization in terms of not only economic exploitation, but also colonial rationality that even today define societies of former colonies. The author analyses development of social, political, ideological, and economic structures and their configurations in the global distribution of power and how the colonial matrix of power is sustained by continued domination of economy, politics, and ideology in former colonies and justified with narratives of necessary progress and imminent globalization. Neocolonialism is the focus of the next chapter whose aim is to map the global condition of contemporary societies. The author contends that globalization is the neocolonialism`s avatar and that former colonies, regardless of the proclaimed global and hybrid multiculturalism, are dominated through economic processes, political decisions, and the ideological imperative of globalization and neoliberalism. The combination of economic interest and the logic of capital and the political promotion of neoliberal ideology form constitutive parts of the globalization agenda in which the role and scope of nation-states are significantly changing. The author argues for the necessity to give due attention to the revised notion of nation-states and their importance in the distribution of power with a special emphasis on the USA. The role of postcolonial theory could be revitalized again through an analysis of the connection of current forms of globalization with previous forms of colonial expansion and capitalist exploitation. The author`s departure point is that the material and ideological foundations of globalization can be seen as a continuation of colonial projects and relations. The next section of this chapter focuses on the relationship between postcolonial theory and globalization. Instead of advocating globalization`s transcultural aspect within the postcolonial theory, the author claims that postcolonial theory should look at permutations in neocolonial forms of global hierarchy and not insist on the discourse of globalization as the ultimate mechanism to overcome sharp binarisms between former colonizers and colonized. After a critical review of globalization, the author provides the analysis of chosen neocolonial writers. Returning once more to the disciplinary frame of the postcolonial theory, the author points to the beginnings of postcolonial thought which was inspired by anticolonial struggles and resistance towards colonialism seen as an economic, social, and political system in the works of prominent theoreticians such as Fanon, Sartre, and Césaire. In accord with the main idea of this thesis, the author explains that what we are witnessing today is prolonged colonialism or neocolonialism. While recuperating the importance of literature in contemporary commodified conjuncture and its role in illuminating neocolonial mechanisms of power, the author analyzes chosen novels and for that purpose focuses on migration, position, and role of the state, division and global movement of labour, economic crisis, class, race, poverty, conflicts, tradition and modernity, immigrants, the role of education and language, and, ultimately, globalization. The author concludes this chapter by presenting what has been gained with neocolonial readings of the mentioned novels. A different approach to postcolonial literature has been proposed to accept relationships of inequality that still burden former colonies and to acknowledge continuing superiority of the world order that we all live in. The link between the analysis of colonialism as a process and globalization principles and mechanisms establishes a framework within which the matrix of power can be discerned. Through analysis of novels` characters, plot, time, and space, the author presents evidence of how we live in a neocolonial world whose driving force and the ultimate goal is economic, but political and ideological power are harnessed to achieve that goal. In the conclusion, the author maintains that colonialism has not yet been abolished and that the world is globally defined by forms of colonialism and neocolonial networks of power and domination. Neocolonial reading stresses a framework in which economic, political, and ideological mechanisms of power have formative effects on the way societies function while the subjective experience presented in the novels can serve to stage objective oppression of the system. |
