REDEFINING THE ORIENT: EDWARD SAID AND BUCHI EMECHETA'S SECOND CLASS CITIZEN
REDEFINING THE ORIENT: EDWARD SAID AND BUCHI EMECHETA'S SECOND CLASS CITIZEN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47333/modernizm.2021171856Keywords:
Edward Said, Orientalism, Western Discourse, Buchi Emecheta, Second Class CitizenAbstract
Throughout history, it can be seen that the Western countries have had imperial concerns in order to be the colonialist powers of the world. It won’t be wrong to state that the expansion of the West resulted in the East’s being dominated and oppressed by the Western countries to create a powerful domain for themselves by destroying the freedom of the Eastern countries. In this sense, it can be pointed out that the suppressing and isolating practice of orientalism comes to the fore as an influential term by means of its power of forming a perspective about the East under the Western eyes. In relation to that, literature can be regarded as one of the most important instruments in the creation of the Orientalist West. As it is the Western discourse that lies behind the term orientalism, it can be said that the Westerners wanted to describe their colonial subjects in an imaginative and discriminative way as Edward Said supports in his Orientalism (1979). In Orientalism, Said sheds light on the discriminative and influential orientalist discourse by the Eurocentric stance and emphasizes that the Easterners should get rid of such a biased discourse by creating their own discourse. It is known that the Easterners became successful in the post-colonial era in terms of reflecting their cultures, voices, and the racial problems that they had to struggle with. Buchi Emecheta’s well-known post-colonial novel, Second Class Citizen (1975), shows these struggles with a conscious narration. For this reason, the novel can be regarded as an example of the Eastern discourse. In this article, Edward Said’s Orientalism will be examined in terms of his views on the Western discourse and will be adapted into Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen.
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