| Pub. Date | : March, 2019 |
|---|---|
| Product Name | : The IUP Journal of English Studies |
| Product Type | : Article |
| Product Code | : IJES41903 |
| Author Name | : Niyi Akingbe |
| Availability | : YES |
| Subject/Domain | : English Studies |
| Download Format | : PDF Format |
| No. of Pages | : 18 |
The paper approaches the question of female identity in Willa Cather's My Antonia from a psychoanalytic perspective based on opposing Jacques Lacan's view of identity as a form of "masquerade" and Julia Kristeva's view of identity as a form of "jouissance." Though Antonia is a victim, she manages to establish herself as a desiring subject in the Symbolic.
A preponderance of literary works on the Niger Delta crisis1 are often crowded with themes of possession/dispossession, location/dislocation, and belonging/marginalization to foreground the problematic of economic exclusion by the successive Nigerian governments and reiterate the ecological degradation of the Niger Delta communities apparently perpetrated by the oil multinationals like Shell, Chevron, and Agip. To many scholars on Niger Delta, the writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa served not only as a pointer to the cause of the region's crisis but also as a compass for navigating a nonviolent resistance against a perceived economic strangulation of the Ogoni nation effectively coordinated by General Sanni Abacha's military junta in collaboration with the Shell multinational. This paper examines the motive for Saro-Wiwa's launching of a vitriolic protest against the Nigerian ethnic majorities' political tyranny in his detention memoir A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. It is a detention memoir which attempts to deconstruct the economic exploitation and political subjugation of his oil-bearing Ogoni people and by extension other Niger River Delta minorities and nationalities by the Nigerian ethnic majorities.