10
differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively postcolonial 2.
2. Theory of Place and Displacement
Theory of Place and Displacement can be found in several books talking about Postcolonial Literatures and its Criticism. Here, the writer will explain on
theory of Place and Displacement according two main sources which are entitled The Empire Writes Back and The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Those two books
are written and edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. According to The Empire Writes Back, the disjunction between place and
language is once proposed by D.E.S. Maxwell 1965. Place and displacement are major concerns of all postcolonial peoples 24. Maxwell said,
There are two broad categories. In the first, the writer brings his own language – English – to an alien environment and a fresh set of
experiences: Australia, Canada, New Zealand. In the other, the writer brings an alien language – English – to his own social and cultural
inheritance: India, West Africa. Yet the categories have a fundamental kinship…The ‘intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’ has as its aim
to subdue the experience to the language, the exotic life to the imported tongue 25; emphasis added.
In this field, the term ‘exile’ appears. ‘Exile’ is defined as the problem of
findings and defining ‘home’, physical and emotional confrontations with the ‘new’ land and its ancient and established meanings 27. The theme of ‘exile’ is
one manifestation of the ubiquitous concern with place and displacement in these societies, as well as with the complex material circumstances implicit in the
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
11
transportation of language from its place of origin and its imposed and imposing relationship on and with the new environment 29.
Furthermore, in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ‘Place’ has its own section and is considered as one of four fundamental postcolonial issues besides
‘Language’, ‘History’ and ‘Ethnicity’. Place and Displacement are crucial features of postcolonial discourse.
‘Place’ here does not simply mean ‘landscape’. The idea of ‘landscape’ is predicated upon a particular philosophic tradition in which the objective world is
separated from the viewing subject, while ‘place’ in postcolonial societies is a complex interaction of language, history and environment 391; emphasis added.
Moreover, the character of ‘place’ is firstly seen by what so-called as ‘a sense of displacement’ and secondly by ‘a sense of the immense investment of
culture in the construction of place’. A sense of displacement, of the lack of ‘fit’ between language and place,
may be experienced by both those who possess English as a mother tongue and those who speak it as a second language. In both cases, the sense of
dislocation from an historical ‘homeland’ and that created by the dissonance between languages, the experience of ‘displacement’ generates
a creative tension within the language. Place is thus the concomitant of difference, the continual reminder of the separation, and yet of the hybrid
interpenetration of the colonizer and colonized 391. The theory of place does not simply propose a binary separation between
the ‘place’ named and described in language, and some ‘real’ place inaccessible to it, but rather indicates that in some sense place is language, something in constant
flux, a discourse in process 391.
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
12
Place therefore, the ‘place’ of the ‘subject’. Thus a major feature of postcolonial literatures is the concern with either developing or recovering an
appropriate identifying relationship between self and place because it is precisely within the parameters of place and its separateness that the process of subjectivity
can be conducted 392.
3. Theory of Cultural Identity
Kategori