RETHINKING ENGLISHNESS: MULTICULTURALISM AND THE QUESTION OF BELONGING
Journal Title: International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) - Year 2017, Vol 7, Issue 2
Abstract
The notion of Englishness defies any fixed framework of cultural representation which in the course of time has enlarged itself to include a medley of disparate culturalities and discursive possibilities. The idea of a multicultural society challenges its homogenizing premise of essentialist identification with its diversified heterogeneous accommodations pointing out a summative erosion of the legacy of the Empire and its exclusively nationalistic connotations. As a post-imperialist nation England is fast losing its hold on the faltering myth of Englishness and its sense of a coherent national identity making rooms for a large numbers of non-English populace at different levels of identification and belonging. The paper seeks to demonstrate these ways in which England with its cosmopolitan inclusivity manages to re-invent itself nourishing a common culture of fragmented loyalties and affiliations created out of the multiple movements and cross- connectivities of migration and multicultural realities.
Authors and Affiliations
GURUDEV MEHER
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP221968
- DOI -
- Views 153
- Downloads 0
Voice, Language, and Storytelling: the Craft of Narrative Experimentation in John Edgar Wideman’s Fiction
The self-assertion of marginalized people has always been made in a conscious distantiation from the cultural values of the mainstream. Self-assertion usually finds its way in literature through cultural memory, language...
Womb: The Acknowledged Touch Stone for ‘Womanhood’ As Portrayed in Bapsi Sidhwa’s the Pakistani Bride, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Osho’s the Book of Woman
“One is not born but rather becomes a woman” – writes Simone de Beauvoir in her book, The Second Sex. The feminist writers defies the representation of women as weak, docile, innocent or seductive in the cultural texts s...
Continuing Confrontation between Secular Modernity and Religious Conventions: A Reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
In the Novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk has highlighted, in subtle manner, the deep cultural polarization and clash between the traditional Islamic world and the secular modern world, with its inherent conflicts and uncompromisin...
The Change of Meaning of the Word 'Pengantin': "The Use of Word 'Pengantin' in Suicide Bomb Case"
This study discussesabout the change of the word meaning of“pengantin” which is used in the case of suicide bomb. The purpose of this study is to know the original emergence of the word “pengantin”in the case of suicide...
FAITH OF THE PEOPLE IN THE JUSTICE OF THE VILLAGE COUNCIL AND RESOLUTION OF DISPUTES AS OPPOSED TO MODERN COURTS (MUNSHI PREMCHAND’S ‘PANCH PARMESHWAR’)
Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) belongs to the literary culture and tradition of two languages, namely Urdu and Hindi and pioneered modern fiction writing in them. He has been the epic writer of social realism, etching the...