Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Summary, about Buchi Emecheta, and related quetion about novel.
About The Joys of Motherhood
The Joys of Motherhood is a novel written by Buchi Emecheta. It was first published in London, UK, by Allison & Busby in 1979 and was first published in Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1980 and reprinted 1982, 2004, 2008. The basis of the novel is the "necessity for a woman to be fertile, and above all to give birth to sons".It tells the tragic story of Nnu-Ego, daughter of Nwokocha Agbadi and Ona, who had a bad fate with childbearing. This novel explores the life of a Nigerian woman, Nnu Ego. Nnu's life centres on her children and through them, she gains the respect of her community. Traditional tribal values and customs begin to shift with increasing colonial presence and influence, pushing Ego to challenge accepted notions of "mother", "wife", and "woman". Through Nnu Ego's journey, Emecheta forces her readers to consider the dilemmas associated with adopting new ideas and practices against the inclination to cleave to tradition. In this novel, Emecheta reveals and celebrates the pleasures derived from fulfilling responsibilities related to family matters in child bearing, mothering, and nurturing activities among women. However, the author additionally highlights how the 'joys of motherhood' also include anxiety, obligation, and pain.
Buchi Emecheta, in full Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England), Igbo writer whose novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity.
Buchi Emecheta, in full Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, (born July 21, 1944, Lagos, Nigeria—died January 25, 2017, London, England), Igbo writer whose novels deal largely with the difficult and unequal role of women in both immigrant and African societies and explore the tension between tradition and modernity. Her Notable Works: “Adah’s Story” “Destination Biafra” “Double Yoke” “Gwendolen” “Head Above Water” “In the Ditch” “Kehinde” “Second-Class Citizen” “The Bride Price” “The Joys of Motherhood” “The New Tribe” “The Rape of Shavi” “The Slave Girl”.
Emecheta married at age 16, and she emigrated with her husband from Nigeria to London in 1962. She began writing stories based on her life, including the problems she initially encountered in England. These works were first published in New Statesman magazine and were later collected in the novel In the Ditch (1972). That work was followed by Second-Class Citizen (1974), and both were later included in the single volume Adah’s Story (1983). Those books introduce Emecheta’s three major themes: the quests for equal treatment, self-confidence, and dignity as a woman. Somewhat different in style is Emecheta’s novel Gwendolen (1989; also published as The Family), which addresses the issues of immigrant life in Great Britain, as do Kehinde (1994) and The New Tribe (2000).Most of Emecheta’s other novels—including The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Destination Biafra (1982), and Double Yoke (1982)—are realistic works of fiction set in Nigeria. Perhaps her strongest work, The Rape of Shavi (1983), is also the most difficult to categorize. Set in an imaginary idyllic African kingdom, it explores the dislocations that occur when a plane carrying Europeans seeking to escape an imminent nuclear disaster crashes. Tap to read more.
Question
"The most celebrated female character in African creative writing is the African mother." by Marie A. Umeh according to this, is the character of Nnu Ego celebrating motherhood or not? Explain.
As Marie A. Umeh said that,"The most celebrated female character in African creative writing is the African mother." We find that the novel tries to bring that in character of Nnu Ego. She is shown as celebrating motherhood but at another point we find that she is also loosing her woman rights while nurturing her child and being ideal women.
African women are representation of African society itself. The condition of African women are poor as a women. They are seen as reproductive machines. And that's why the same potrayal of women came in many narrations of novels, stories, poetries etc. Generally the role women has to play are protecting, comforting, nourishing and nurturing their children.
This video uploaded by WHO AFRO ( World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa) is showing women situation and women role in African culture and society.
In the novel 'The Joys of Motherhood' we find breakdown of glorifying images of African Mother. Since childhood as a girl, she is taught that her sole functions are to bear and raise children. That's what she did throughout her life. The ideas of Motherhood informs her fantasies and her dreams. But when Nnu Ego really became mother she started facing lots of difficulties and struggles to raise her growing family and childrens.initially her idealism begins to change. In the beginning Buchi Emecheta in the favor of Motherhood stated that,
"The joy of being a mother is the joy of giving all to your children."
This is showing a kind of enthusiasm of mother. Nnu Ego wants to raise her children the best way she can. Also wants to give them everything they diserve. But as time passes Nnu Ego ultimately regrets having so many children and investing so much of her life in them since they seem to have little concern for her well-being. This lines indicating her regret for having so many childrens.
"A woman with many children could face a lonely old age and maybe a miserable death all alone, just like a barren woman".
Throughout the novel we find Nnu Ego face so many struggles in her marriage life, some failed marriage, her children also died and after all this Nnu Ego remains with her husband and bears him nine children of whom seven live, among them three boys and four girls. She now diverted her all attention towards her childrens and husbands because she believes that if she gave her attention and time to husband and children then only her old age would be happy and Even when she died someone (Her Childrens) refre their mother with good intentions and good Memorie.
"She was now sure, as she bathed her baby son and cooked for her husband, that her old age would be happy, that when she died there would be somebody left behind to refer to her as 'mother' ".
Instead of praising Motherhood in the novel.Buchi Emecheta criticise Motherhood. He described that here Motherhood is a barrier of Womanhood. For that he use suffering of Nnu Ego. Here in the novel we find representation of a women who want to be mother and has high dreams and imagination for her motherly roles. But soon after having children she started realizing that a single woman can be happy even though she has no children.at last we can say that Instead of an honored and revered figure, Nnu Ego becomes a sacrificial lamb, one who gave to her family selflessly while receiving little, if not nothing, in return.
To know more about the character of Nnu Ego watch the video given below.
I hope this blog will be helpful to you. Thank you.
Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about two articles.1) Tejaswini Niranjana, “Introduction: History in Translation”, and 2)E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”.
Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry. - E.V. Ramakrishnan.
Watch video recording of this article explanation here.
This article is divided into 8 parts.
Introduction
This chapter examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970. Translations of major European poets such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Eliot and Yeats contributed towards clearing a space for the modernist discourse in Indian poetry. The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translations of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetic modes. Many of the major Indian poets - such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators.Their translations were 'foreignising' translations that disrupted cultural codes that legislated regimes of reading and writing poetry.it is translation that enabled poets to turn away from the modernist 'high' style, providing a critique of its elitism and complicity with nationalist discourses. Translations from African and Latin American poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism.
This chapter uses the term 'translation' to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual texts. Following André Lefevere's concept of translation as refraction/ rewriting, the chapter argues that 'rewritings' or 'refractions' found in the 'less obvious form of criticism, commentary, historiography, teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of plays' are also instances of translation.
essay on T. S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranath Dutta, or a scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also be described as 'translational' writings as they have elements of translation embedded in them.
conservative poet such as Gopalakrishna Adiga in Kannada, or a radical dissident like Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in Hindi, belonged to the larger modernist tradition which accommodated diverse political ideologies and innovative experimental styles.
Part - 1
An elaboration on the relation between 'modernity' and 'modernism in the Indian context will need a separate chapter.The project of modernity in India was implicated in colonialism and imperialism. This colonial modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century.
Dilip Chitre observes, 'what took nearly a century and a half to happen in England, happened within a hurried half century' in Indian literatures.While introducing the works of B. S. Mardhekar, a major Marathi modernist, Chitre says, 'The poet B. S. Mardhekar was the most remarkable product of the cross- pollination between the deeper, larger native tradition and contemporary world culture'.
D. R. Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state, writers who had earlier found nationalism to be a form of resistance to colonialism, retreated to individualism. He adds, 'When ideologies like nationalism and spirituality become apparatuses of the state, a section of the intelligentsia has no option other than to seek refuge in bunkers of individualism'.
Part - 2
The term 'modernism' implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as the popular, and the cultivation of an individualist, cosmopolitan and insular world view.Due to its postcolonial location, the Indian modernism did not share the imperial or metropolitan aspirations of its European counterpart. It invested heavily in regional cosmopolitan traditions. It was oppositional in content and questioned the colonial legacies of the nationalist discourse.
The postcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian modernism. How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi, Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that non- Western modernisms are not mere derivative versions of a European hegemonic practice.The problematic that informs this argument is manifest in the critiques of Eurocentric accounts of modernism by Gikandi, Friedman, Doyle and Winkiel, and Rebecca L. Walkonwitz in different ways.
Part - 3
The oppositional content of the modernist sensibility functioned differently in each regional language. In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, 'It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adhunik [modernist] Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath; on the contrary, Modernism was the means by which they turned away from Rabindranath and they had to turn away, for their history demanded it'. R. Sasidhar writes,
If European modernism was drawn between the euphoric and the reactive, in Kannada the precipitate modernism was drawn between the Brahminical and the non-Brahminical. Just as the cuphoric and the reactive modernisms were part of the internal dynamics of modernism itself, so also the Brahmanical and the non-Brahmanical modernisms in Kannada were part and parcel of a modernism that came as a reaction to the Nehruvian environment. (in Satchidanandan 2001, 34)
Issues of caste, ethnicity, progress, freedom, individualism, region and nation figure variously in different modernist traditions in India.
Part - 4
Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literatures.Sudhindranath Dutta (1901-60) from Bengali, B. S. Mardhekar (1909-56) from Marathi. and Ayyappa Paniker (1936-2004) from Malayalam. These authors help us see the chronological trajectory of modernism across Indian literatures. While the modernist shift in Bengali emerged in the 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, it manifested itself in Marathi from the 1950s to the 60s.
Translation is central to the modernist poetic as it unfolded in these literary traditions. Each of these three authors was bilingual and wrote essays in English as well as their own languages, outlining their new poetic, thus preparing the reader for new poetic modes. Their essays elaborated the basic features of a new aesthetic against the prevailing Romantic-nationalist or Romantic-mystical traditions. Sudhindranath Dutta translated Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry into Bengali.Buddhadeb Bose, another Bengali modernist, rendered 112 poems of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil into Bengali, apart from translating Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens and Boris Pasternak. Ayyappa Paniker translated European poets into Malayalam, while B. S. Mardhekar's Arts and the Man (which was published in England in 1937) was a treatise on formalist aesthetic that legitimated modernist practice. Mardhekar had earlier attempted original poems in English, while he was in England in the 30s.
Part - 5
In "The Necessity of Poetry', Sudhindranath Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies, particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity.Though he claims himself to be a pragmatist, Dutta believes that 'only the poetic mind, whatever its norm, can intuit associations where reason faces a void.In another essay, The Highbrow". he observes, 'I agree with Virginia Woolf that creative artists must from time to time seek shelter within the much maligned Ivory Tower'.
He constantly invokes the progressive role of the writer in a society, and underlines the role played by the masses in the creation of a literary tradition.In Dutta's well-known poem, "The Camel-Bird', one may glimpse this critical spirit and desire to reinvent tradition from a cosmopolitan perspective. The poem is about the crisis of perception that can only be remedied by reinventing oneself completely.The poem speaks of the poet's alienation in the present, his disjunction with the past, his need to recover a bond with the world outside and the angst inherent in the quest for meaning in a world haunted by violence and servility.
Part - 6
B. S. Mardhekar was deeply aware of the entire 'tradition' of Marathi poetry from its beginnings. He published a treatise on aesthetics, Arts and the Man, in London in 1937, and Two Lectures on the Aesthetic of Literature in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1944.Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien tradition. Mardhekar's creative reclamation of tradition is a response to the disruption of a moral order in his culture.
Mardhekar's own poetic practice, which was much more complex than his critical arguments, problematised the relation between the poet and the reader, contemporary poetry and its past, and poetic form and its ideological function in society.Mardhekar's poetic line carried echoes of saint-poets like Tukaram, creating a self- reflexive idiom.
Part - 7
Like Mardhekar, Ayyappa Paniker also began as a Romantic poet but transformed himself into a modernist with a long poetic sequence titled Kurukshetram published in 1960. In an article on T. S. Eliot, Paniker had highlighted the idea that it was not form and prosody that created poetry but the invention of rhythm and resonance that befit the emotion.He urged Malayalam poets to reject prosody in favour of rhythmic free verse. In a scathing attack on Vallathol Narayana Menon, a canonical figure of Malayalam Romantic poetry, Paniker brought out Vallathol's lack of intellectual rigour, his dubious political attitudes and adherence to wornout idioms and stale diction.
One may also recall the contribution of M. Govindan, a poet-critic who was closely associated with the modernist movement in Malayalam from its very beginning, particularly through his patronage of young writers such as Paniker, through his avant-garde journal, Sameeksha Govindan advocated a return to the Dravidian sources of Malayalam poetry, which he thought could rejuvenate its syntax and rhythm through a robust earthliness that had been curbed by the scholastic Sanskritic tradition.Kurkshetram is a poem of 294 lines in five sections. The opening lines of the Bhagavad Gita are cited as the epigraph of the poem, thus setting a high moral and critical tone in relation to contemporary life and society. As in Eliot's The Waste Land, Kurukshetram's opening lines communicate a pervasive decline of moral values and a disruption of the organic rhythms of society:
The eyes suck and sip The tears that spurt;
The nerves drink up the coursing blood;
And it is the bones that
Eat the marrow here While the skin preys on the bones
The roots turn carnivore As they prey on the flowers
While the earth in bloom
Clutches and tears at the roots.
The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place.
The second section of the poem retreats into a private space, away from these public images. The inner movement of the poetic structure signifies the undercurrents of a conflict that cannot be paraphrased in moral terms.
The third section returns to the public world of conflicts. The mythical characters of Sugriva, Vibhishana, Vashistha, Lord Ram, Arjuna and Oedipus are invoked in this section.
In the fourth section, the poet denounces the promises made by faith as well as politics, to turn towards the inner resources of the self.
In the last section, with the figure of Gandhi as a failed prophet standing at its centre. But the poet also addresses the dream which has been haunting him all through. He has wandered after false gods all his life and now, in the hour of acute self fragmentation, he turns to his dream which shines like a beacon of life.
Part - 8
It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity.They 'translate modernity/modernism through the optics of postcolonial 'modernities". There is an internal dialectic and an external dialogic involved here.
The act of translation answers something deep within their ambivalent existence, as it embodies their complex relation with a fragmented society. Translation allows them to be 'within' their speech community and 'without it, at the same time. Their bilingual sensibility demanded a mode of expression that could transit between native and alien traditions.
Colonial modernity operated within the Indian context as a realm of desire which brought into being a new social imaginary. The formalist poetic of modernist poetry corresponded to an inner world of desire that produced a language bristling with disquiet and angst.language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to.
I hope this blog will be helpful to you. Thank you.
Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about two articles.1) Tejaswini Niranjana, “Introduction: History in Translation”, and 2)E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”.
What is Comparative Studies?
The studies which reveal similarities or differences between different markets, countries, aspects of companies, etc. They help to illustrate links and dissimilarities between these different elements. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,
"Comparative Literature is the study of the interrelationship of the literature of two or more national cultures usually of differing languages and especially of the influences of one upon the other."
In another words Comparative Literature is traditionally known as the study of two or more literatures in comparison (English and German, for example) and their multi-dimensional components which may encompass aspects such as the historical, gender, economic, cultural, social, philosophical, religious, and linguistic factors of the distinct cultures being analyzed.
Comparative Literature focuses on the study of literature from different cultures, nations, and genres, and explores relationships between literature and other forms of cultural expression. Comparative Literature poses such questions as, What is the place of literature in society? How does literature as a form change over time, and in relation to other forms of making art? How does literature shape and respond to values, social movements, or political contexts? Click to Read more.
Article - 1
About Tejaswini Niranjana
Tejaswini Niranjana (born 26 July 1958) is an Indian professor, cultural theorist, translator and author. She is best known for her contribution to the fields of culture studies, gender studies, translation, and ethnomusicology (particularly relating to different forms of Indian music). She is the daughter of Kannada playwright and novelist Niranjana and writer Anupama Niranjana. Her partner is Indian author and cultural theorist, Ashish Rajadhyaksha.
In 2021, Tejaswini Niranjana was awarded the American Literary Translators Association Prize for Prose Fiction Translation for No Presents Please, a translation of author Jayant Kaikini's short stories centred around the city of Mumbai. In 2019, No Presents Please was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2018, which Niranjana shared jointly with Jayant Kaikini.Niranjana was also awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for Best Translation of 1994. Read more about her.
Introduction: History in Translation - Tejaswini Niranjana
Watch here video recording of article.
The article begin with quote by Charles Trevelyan (On the education of the people of India)
The passion for English knowledge has penetrated the mostobscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India.The steam boats, passing up and down the Ganges, areboarded by native boys, begging, not for money, but forbooks. . .. Some gentlemen coming to Calcutta were astonished at the eagerness with which they were pressed forbooks by a troop of boys, who boarded the steamer froman obscure place, called Comercolly. A Plato was lying onthe table, and one of the party asked a boy whether thatwould serve his purpose. "Oh yes," he exclaimed, "giveme any book; all I want is a book." The gentleman at lasthit upon the expedient of cutting up an old Quarterly Review, and distributing the articles among them.
In a post-colonial context the problematic of translation be-comes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity.Translation as a practice shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism. translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality ,representation, and knowledge. Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.As Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."
Chapter - 1
This chapter outlines the problematic of translation and its
relevance to the post-colonial situation. Reading the texts of different kinds of colonial translators.
Chapter - 2
This chapter is about how "translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation.
Chapter - 3,4,5
The chapters are focusing on the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). analysis of Tejaswini Niranjana shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin.
In Final Chapter
In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, Tejaswini discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.
The word translationnot just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a "field," charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. So does Ubersetzung (German). The French traducteur exists betweeninterprete and truchement, an indication that we might fashiona translative practice between interpretation and reading, carrying a disruptive force much greater than the other two.
Her study of translation does not make any claim to solve the dilemmas of translators. It does not propose yet another way of theorizing translation to enable a more foolproof "method" of "narrowing the gap" between cultures; it seeks rather to think through this gap, this difference, to explore the positioning of the obsessions and desires of translation, and thus to describe the economies within which the sign of translation circulates. Her concern is to probe the absence, lack, or repression of an awareness of asymmetry and historicity.
Derrida's critique ofrepresentation, for example, allows us to question the notionof re-presentation and therefore the very notion of an originor an original that needs to be re - presented. Derrida wouldargue that the "origin" is itself dispersed, its "identity" undecidable. A representation thus does not re-present an "original"; rather, it re-presents that which is always already Tejaswini represented. The notion can be employed to undohegemoni "representations" of "the Hindus," like, for example, those put forward by G. W. F. Hegel and James Mill.
TRANSLATION AS INTERPELLATION
That translation became part of the colonial discourse of Orientalism is obvious from late eighteenth-century British efforts to obtain information about the people ruled by the merchants of the East India Company.
William Jones who arrived in India in 1783 to take his place on the bench of the Supreme Court in Calcutta make clear in his project that,
translation would serve "to domesticate the Orient and thereby tum it into a province
of European learning."
Jones, whose Persian translations and grammar of Persian had already made him famous as an Orientalist before he came to India, declared that his ambition was "to know India better than any other European ever knew it."
Grand Jury at Calcutta, his letters, and his "Oriental" poems to show how he contributes to a historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation. The most significant nodes of Jones's work are
(a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable Interpreters of their own laws and culture.
(b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" laws.
(c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf. The interconnections between these obsessions are extremely complicated.
In Jones's construction of the "Hindus," they appear as a submissive, indolent nation unable to appreciate the fruits of freedom, desirous of being ruled by an absolute power, and sunk deeply in the mythology of an ancient religion. In a letter, he points out that the Hindus are "incapable of civil liberty," for "few of them have an idea of it, and those, who have, do not wish it".Jones's disgust is continually mitigated by the necessity of British rule and the "impossibility" of giving liberty to the Indians. He brings up repeatedly the idea of "Orientals" being accustomed to a despotic rule.The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: administrators like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward. The latter were among the first to translate Indian religious texts into European languages. Often these were works they had themselves textualized, by preparing "standard versions" based on classical Western notions of unity and coherence.
William Ward's preface to his three-volume A View of the history , Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos 38 is instructive for the virulence with which it attacks the depravity and immorality of the natives.The author claims, in his obsessive references to "native" sexuality, to have witnessed innumerable scenes of "impurity," for the Hindu institutions are "hotbeds of impurity," and the very services in the temples present "temptations to impurity".
Macaulay did not think it necessary for the entire Indian populace to learn English: the function of anglicized education was "to form a class who may be interpreters between us (the British) and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian.in.blood.and.colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
For years a controversy raged between "Orientalists" and "Anglicists" as to whether the money set aside for education
by the act of 1813 was to be used for indigenous education or
Western education. Finally, the compulSions of the changing nature of Company rule enabled, during Bentinck's tenure, the Resolution of March 7, 1835, which declared that the funds provided should "be henceforth employed in imparting to the Native population knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language."
As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out, the introductionof English education can be seen as "an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between Parliament and the missionaries, between the East India Company and the native elite classes."
The construction of the colonial subject presupposes what Pierre Bourdieu has called "symbolic domination." Symbolic domination, and its violence, effectively reproduce the social order through a combination of recognition and misrecogni tion (reconnaissance and méconnaissance) recognition that the dominant language is legitimate (one thinks again of the use of English in India) and "a misrecognition of the fact that this language.
David Kopf puts it, "By 1805 the college had become a veritable laboratory where Europeans and Asians worked out newtransliteration schemes, regularized spoken languages into precise grammatical forms, and compiled dictionaries in lan-guages relatively unknown in Europe." When a fire in 1812destroyed the printing shop of the Serampore missionaries,one of whom-William Carey-taught in the college, among the manuscripts destroyed was that of a polyglot dictionary "containing words of every known oriental tongue."
The critique of historicism may help us formulate a complex notion of historicity, which would include the" effective history" of the text; this phrase encompasses questions such as: Who uses/interprets the text?How is it used, and for what?
THE QUESTION OF "HISTORY"
Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, Samuel Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture of "capitalizing History" to address the "challenge of 'post-structuralist' thought."Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those (on the right as well as the left) who accuse it of denying "history."
Tejaswini Niranjana's central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willillg to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates. She use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, Tejaswini's concern being with "local" practices (or micro-practices as Foucault calls them) of translation that require no
overarching theory to contain them. As Foucault declares,"effective history affirms knowledge as perspective"; it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism," which we may be
able to work from.
In "Speech and Phenomena," his essay on Husserl, Derrida says:
When in fact I effectively use words ... I must from the outsetoperate (within) a structure of repetition whose basic elementcan only be representative. A sign is never an event, if by eventwe mean an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular.A sign which would take place but "once" would not be asign .... Since this representative structure is signification itself, I cannot enter into an "effective" discourse without being from the start involved in unlimited representation.
What Derrida is claiming is that there is no primordial "presence" that is then re-presented. The "re-" does not befall theoriginal. In a series of detailed readings of Husserl, Heidegger,Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Rousseau, Derrida demonstrateshow representation and writing already belong to the sign and to signification: "In this play of representation, the pointof origin becomes ungraspable There is no longer a simple origin."
In an essay on the Subaltern Studies historians, GayatriSpivak argues that their practice is akin to "deconstruction,"since they put forward a "theory of change as the site of displacement of function between sign-systems" and this is "atheory of reading in the strongest possible general sense."The significant post-structuralist "themes" Spivak refers to are the critique of origins, writing and the attack on phonocentrism, the critique of bourgeois liberal humanism, the notion of the "enabling" discursive failure, and the notion of "affirmative deconstruction."
The notion of consciousness, then, is used strategically, deliberately, unnostalgically, in the service of "a scrupulouslyvisible political interest",to refer to an "emergent collective consciousness" rather than that of the liberal humanist subject.
Derrida would say lhat it should aim to be the kind of writing that ''both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke," for this "double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth," reinscribing it without over-turning it. This displacement is not an event; it has not "taken place." It is what "writes / is written."Derrida's double writing can help us challenge the practices of "subjectification" and domination evident in colonial histories and translations. question of the hybrid will inform our reading. As Bhabha puts it:
Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its
shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination.
Clearly, the notion of hybridity, which is of great importance for a Subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambiguous and historically complex."" To restrict "hybridity," or what I call "living in translation," to a post-colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination. This is not to present a meta- narrative of global homogenization, but to emphasize the need to reinvent oppositional cultures in non essentializing ways. Hybridity can be seen, therefore, as the sign of a post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it points toward a new practice of translation.
Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar, student of MK Bhavnagar University. This blog i have written as a response to Thinking Activity, Which is a Part of my academic Work. Which we get after each unit. In this blog, i am going to discuss about some questions related Plagiarism and Academic Integrity.
What is plagiarism? Write in detail with its consequences and forms.
Definitions
According to Oxford Dictionary,
"Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own."
According to Cambridge Dictionary,
Plagiarism is the process or practice of using another person's ideas or work and pretending that it is your own.
According to Marriam Webster Dictionary,
plagiarize is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source [… or] to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”
Watch one interesting Ted - Ed video on plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.While precise definitions vary, depending on the institution, such representations are generally considered to violate academic integrity and journalistic ethics as well as social norms of learning, teaching, research, fairness, respect and responsibility in many cultures. It is subject to sanctions such as penalties, suspension, expulsion from schoo or work, substantial fines and even imprisonment.
Plagiarism is typically not in itself a crime, but like counterfeiting, fraud can be punished in a court for prejudices caused by copyright infringement, violation of moral rights, or torts. In academia and industry, it is a serious ethical offense. Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap to a considerable extent, but they are not equivalent concepts,and many types of plagiarism do not constitute copyright infringement, which is defined by copyright law and may be adjudicated by courts. Read more.
consequences of plagiarism
The consequences of plagiarism can be personal, professional, ethical, and legal. With plagiarism detection software so readily available and in use, plagiarists are being caught at an alarming rate. Once accused of plagiarism, a person will most likely always be regarded with suspicion. Ignorance is not an excuse. Plagiarists include academics, professionals, students, journalists, authors, and others.
1) Destroyed Student Reputation
Plagiarism allegations can cause a student to be suspended or expelled. Their academic record can reflect the ethics offense, possibly causing the student to be barred from entering college from high school or another college. Schools, colleges, and universities take plagiarism very seriously. Most educational institutions have academic integrity committees who police students. Many schools suspend students for their first violation. Students are usually expelled for further offences.
2) Destroyed Professional Reputation
A professional business person, politician, or public figure may find that the damage from plagiarism follows them for their entire career. Not only will they likely be fired or asked to step down from their present position, but they will surely find it difficult to obtain another respectable job. Depending on the offense and the plagiarist’s public stature, his or her name may become ruined, making any kind of meaningful career impossible.
3) Destroyed Academic Reputation
The consequences of plagiarism have been widely reported in the world of academia. Once scarred with plagiarism allegations, an academic’s career can be ruined. Publishing is an integral part of a prestigious academic career. To lose the ability to publish most likely means the end of an academic position and a destroyed reputation.
4) Legal Repercussions
The legal repercussions of plagiarism can be quite serious. Copyright laws are absolute. One cannot use another person’s material without citation and reference. An author has the right to sue a plagiarist. Some plagiarism may also be deemed a criminal offense, possibly leading to a prison sentence. Those who write for a living, such as journalists or authors, are particularly susceptible to plagiarism issues. Those who write frequently must be ever-vigilant not to err. Writers are well-aware of copyright laws and ways to avoid plagiarism. As a professional writer, to plagiarize is a serious ethical and perhaps legal issue.
5) Monetary Repercussions
Many recent news reports and articles have exposed plagiarism by journalists, authors, public figures, and researchers. In the case where an author sues a plagiarist, the author may be granted monetary restitution. In the case where a journalist works for a magazine, newspaper or other publisher, or even if a student is found plagiarizing in school, the offending plagiarist could have to pay monetary penalties.
6) Plagiarized Research
Plagiarized research is an especially egregious form of plagiarism. If the research is medical in nature, the consequences of plagiarism could mean the loss of peoples’ lives. This kind of plagiarism is particularly heinous.
The consequences of plagiarism are far-reaching and no one is immune. Neither ignorance nor stature excuses a person from the ethical and legal ramifications of committing plagiarism. Before attempting any writing project, learn about plagiarism. Find out what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. The rules are easy to understand and follow. If there is any question about missing attribution, try using an online plagiarism checker or plagiarism detection software to check your writing for plagiarism before turning it in. Laziness or dishonesty can lead to a ruined reputation, the loss of a career, and legal problems. (Reference)
Forms of Plagiarism
There are different types of plagiarism and all are serious violations of academic honesty. Here are all the forms of plagiarism.
1) Repeating and Paraphrasing wording.
When one can take words or paragraph from any text or from any other cite without citing the text or website then it falls under the category of Repeating and paraphrasing wording plagiarism. For example, if we write Virginia Woolf's quote, "Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." While writing our own ideas. And don't even cite it then it will be problematic.
2)Taking a particular apt phrase.
When we borrowe any phrase or word from any particular website or text, we have cite it. For example when we use phrase, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” from The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkein. We have to cite it, otherwise it will be plagiarism.
3) paraphrasing an argument or presenting a line of thinking.
When we don't take any word or phrase from any text or website but just take ideas of text then also it should be cite otherwise it is plagiarism.
2] How to know Plagiarism and how to avoid it. Explain.
Plagiarism means using someone else’s words or ideas without properly crediting the original author. Sometimes plagiarism involves deliberately stealing someone’s work, but more often it happens accidentally, through carelessness or forgetfulness.When you write an academic paper, you build upon the work of others and use various credible sources for information and evidence.
At its core, plagiarism is an ethical issue. A writer who submits plagiarized work is committing theft with the hope of benefiting from that theft. This is true whether you’re turning in a school paper to get an “A” or are a writer by trade expecting monetary compensation.
Avoiding plagiarism is paramount as a writer because it compromises your integrity. Aside from losing the respect of your mentors and peers, it could cost you valuable professional referrals and future career advancement. Read more
Here are some easy way to avoid plagiarism.
1) Keeping track of the sources you consult in your research.
2) Paraphrasing or quoting from your sources (and adding your own ideas).
3) Crediting the original author in an in-text citation and in your reference list.
