Relationality and the Transnational Indian Family in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit”

in Postcolonial Text (2011), 6(1),

In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil this Visit,” Arvind, a Toronto-based Sikh, returns to the homeland to visit his family with his new wife Janet, a white Canadian of Hungarian origin. Drawing ... [more ▼]

In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil this Visit,” Arvind, a Toronto-based Sikh, returns to the homeland to visit his family with his new wife Janet, a white Canadian of Hungarian origin. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s critique of the general consensus within post-colonial theory that automatically conflates migration with the transgression of boundaries and the destabilisation of identity, this article discusses Baldwin’s short story with a view to showing how the Indian context proves crucial in deconstructing the intersecting forms of fetishism upon which Arvind’s and Janet’s multicultural and inter-relationship is based. In this return narrative, it is striking that the transnational tendencies of the contemporary world are definitely not an occasion for creating more border-crossings, more plurality, more confrontations and interaction. The encounter with otherness is indeed presented by Baldwin as always-already framed by broader relations of power that are far from being acknowledged as such. What is at stake in this text, I argue, is the somehow counterintuitive truth that migration might well work in favour of, not against, fixed notions of identity. [less ▲]

An Ambiguous "Freedom Song": Mind-Style in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

in Postcolonial Text (2009), 5(1), 1-18

This article attempts a stylistic analysis of Purple Hibiscus (2003), the first novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Using Roger Fowler's concept of "mind-style" and Halliday and Matthiessen ... [more ▼]

This article attempts a stylistic analysis of Purple Hibiscus (2003), the first novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Using Roger Fowler's concept of "mind-style" and Halliday and Matthiessen's functional grammar, the essay examines the language of the book's first-person narrator, a fifteen-year-old girl whose father is a violent Catholic extremist. It is argued that the unveiling of linguistic patterns in her account leads to a deeper understanding of the concepts of freedom and tyranny in the novel. Thus, while the narrator's deceptively simple style initially conceals her prejudices, it gradually grows into a more straightforward type of language as the character liberates herself from her father's authoritarian grip. [less ▲]