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Title Questioning Idées Reçues: A Study of Interpellative Strategies and Environmental Ethics in Basharat Peer and Ghada Karmi’s Memoirs

Author(s) Ms. Rabia Aamir

Abstract ABSTRACT Questioning Idées Reçues: A Study of Interpellative Strategies and Environmental Ethics in Basharat Peer and Ghada Karmi’s Memoirs Adding a new dimension to postcolonial mode of inquiry, my dissertation is an ecopostcolonial appraisal of selected texts with an attention to social justice in the debates of environmental ethics. I examine the memoirs of two writers from Kashmir and Palestine, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir (2010) and Ghada Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015) as my key texts. The strategic location of Kashmir and Palestine and their contested political statuses have inspired writers to address the issues therein in their creative writings. Therefore, taking into account an overview of other literary writings coming from these regions, the bearing and implications of the selected texts are studied by multiple lenses of selected theories. The multi-modelled theoretical framework helps situate the logic of neocolonialism as spelled out by hegemonic convictions informing these two narratives. Subsequently, the questions raised in these texts are studied for their validity and impact. In addition to the interpellative consequences, the implications and ramifications of these imperialistic and colonizing idées reçues and strategies are studied thematically with the means of factual presentiments as articulated by the two writers. Making no claims for any closure, the alternatives voiced by the two writers in their respective contexts, are also studied and analyzed. Studying appropriation in terms of land, culture, and resources as engines of colonialism, I explore if neocolonialism and settler-colonialism, as identified in the two texts, are fueling an environmentalism due to their amnesiac relationship to the wars of dispossession as Rob Nixon has discussed in the Nigerian context. Drawing on these works of Kashmiri and Palestinian writers, I argue how their narratives depict a compromised local agency of the indigenous space, and how they phrase the issues of marginalization and erasure. I also examine how the official accounts, the Idées reçues, built around Kashmir and Palestine are subverted by the texts of the two selected writers. By narrating the interpellative strategies of neo/settler colonialisms manifested in the social, cultural, and political spaces of their lands, the two writers state the disruption created for the ethnic others. And by stating the environmental ethics of their respective homelands, Peer and Karmi are extending the scope of contemporary knowledge produced in this field. (372 words)

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2020-12-29

Subject English Literature

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