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Ekphrasis in the Postcolonial Novel: Midnight’s Children and Half of a Yellow Sun
Valentini, Silvia
Valentini, Silvia
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Abstract
This thesis investigates the presence and role of ekphrastic writing in postcolonial novels. In this thesis I propose to investigate John Everett Millais’ The Boyhood of Raleigh in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the Igbo pots in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, in order to explore how figurative art, in the context of these novels, both broadens the postcolonial discourse and serves as a medium of interaction between the colonizer and the colonized. I intend to look closely at Millais’ painting, which has come to represent the British expanding and colonizing influence, in the context of a novel, Midnight’s Children, centered on post-independence India, and at Richard’s, a white British man, obsession with the archaeological testimony of the Igbo autochthonous, pre-colonization, culture and art, as narrated in Half of a Yellow Sun. I intend to explore how the colonized relates to the art of the colonizer, as in Rushdie’s novel, and how the art of the colonized is observed and appropriated by the colonizer, as in Adichie’s. I propose to analyze both these cases of representation of visual forms of art as exemplifying instances of how figurative art can be explored, in postcolonial literature, as a means of cultural interaction between the colonized and the colonizer.
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Thesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Classical Studies)--John Cabot University, Fall 2021.
Date
2021
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Salman Rushdie, Midnight's children (Salman Rushdie), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 1977-, Half of a yellow sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Citation
Valentini, Silvia. "Ekphrasis in the Postcolonial Novel: Midnight’s Children and Half of a Yellow Sun". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2021.