نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 دانشجوی دکتری زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی، دانشگاه شهید بهشتی، استان تهران،
2 دانشیار ادبیات انگلیسی و نظریه ادبی و عضو هیئت علمی دانشگاه شهید بهشتی، استان تهران
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
Abstract
Postcolonial approach to literature is not merely restricted to analyzing the texts produced by those who
have experienced the bitter taste of colonization. The theorists of the field (Homi K. Bhabha, Edward
Wadie Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Robert J. C. Young, to name but a few) are mostly interested
in the interaction of colonizers/subalterns, and attempt to take a fresh look at the important concepts of
identity, hybridity, narratives of nation, im/migration and so on and so forth. Therefore, challenging the
dominant discourse, reconsidering the ideologically-charged texts, rethinking the relationship between
characters, and overall, creating enunciatory spaces for the subalterns (in which) to act and speak back to
power become the main pillars of this critical approach. In this way, this article attempts to introduce and
expound on these ideas and then to analyze the application of them to a Roman Polanski film (The Pianist),
mainly in the light of Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas. Bhabha holds that identities are hybrid, and repudiates any
essentialist, hierarchical view of it. He puts forth the idea of “negotiations of identity”, and goes on to call
hybridity a “strategy of survival”. In general, postcolonial theory maintains that identity is constructed
through a negotiation of difference. In the movie Pianist (2002) we see the main character, Wladyslaw,
is always on the move and as an exile he has to redefine the concepts of home and belonging for himself
frequently. We believe that Polanski’s mere act of recording his personal trauma of the Second World
War into a feature film is itself a postcolonial act, because he tries to rewrite the colonial history from
a postcolonial perspective. This sheer act of ‘re-membering’ becomes a necessary but perilous bridge
between the trauma of colonial oppression and post-colonial survival, which is not only nostalgic but is
almost always accompanied with a sort of Bhabhaian ‘time-lag’. The other important point in the film is
notion of ‘third-space’, which is the proper site of inbetweenness within the locality of cultural translation.
Wladyslaw resides in this transnational/translational site of enunciation and negotiation. What we witness
in Polanski’s movie is more than anything else an archetypal quest on the part of the hero to overcome
the binary of belonging/non-belonging, to come to terms with the “representational strategies of real and
imagined places.” This trans-national space if a site of (both personal and collective) resistance, on which
the essentialist issues of race, class, gender, nationality, etc. have no bearing whatsoever. All in all, this
research was an attempt to go through the notions of ‘hybridity’ and ‘identity’ from a postcolonial vista and
to trace those concepts in Polanski’s movie, which turned out to be quite receptive of such a (postcolonial)
reading. The Pianist was a tribute to transcendentality of art (especially music) and it amazingly showed
that art is not bound to ethnic, national, political or religious boundaries and it creates an enunciatory space
of its own.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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