Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Postcoloniality is the context of global understanding today. We cannot understand the presence of today’s world unless we accept the history of colonialism. At the aftermath of World War I, European countries have ruled over four-fifth of lands and seas of the world. Henceforward, it is not surprising today that almost all the tiny detail of our daily life is indicated with Western values and culture. However, we don’t have to be suspicious that the Enlightenment of Western philosophy and culture should be reasoned as a bad thing. As the history of the past records it, Western ‘civilization’ has contributed in the development of better world, such as rules of government and justice, aesthetics in arts and literature. Yet, though highly certified for its contribution, opposition is still inevitable. One fundamental cause is the development of homogeneous culture of man, and coincidentally, the oppression towards difference. Apartheid in Africa, seclusions of the Aborigines in Australia, and displacement in every colonized country are the evidence that colonial power has civilized the native people with exclusionary demand. Postcolonialism, then, was born when people started to realize it. It has its grain in the demand of justice for the deprived and oppressed. The problem is even when colonial discourse is said to “[be] initiated as an academic sub-discipline within literary and cultural theory by Edward Said’s 2 Orientalism in 1978” Young: 2001:74, this field still needs further elaboration in public consciousness. We should confirm, despite the globalizing awareness of inevitable tainted history, many people are still in ceaseless effort to retain the original, pure identity. It is shown in the nationalistic fetishism even in local level: people of second-generation of migrants are still constituted as minorities in some countries. Hence, the aim of this study is to learn how the postcolonial identity should be defined, as this demand exists also in some fictional works. The Glass Palace 2001 is the case in which postcolonial theory will be used as the means of analysis. The Glass Palace is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-born historian, journalist and writer who now lives in the U. S. The novel mainly tells about the struggle of a band of people in a turbulent transition. The displacement of Burmese Kinghood by British government, the course of World- wars, and migrations from one country to another seem to be the situational background in which the characters are bound. Postcolonial atmosphere permeates in this story because the story is conducted to tell the journey that exceeds the boundary of a nation, narrating an experience of cross-cultural interactions. . As a sort of epic-historical fiction, this novel is full of factual verifiable data. The Glass Palace is also praised for its openness to indigenous culture. The beginning chapter of The Glass Palace, The chronicle of King Thebaw of Burma, who began the quarreling over teak plantation with British Government in 1885, is said to be a true event. However, the overall story is obviously a work of creative hands and mind of Amitav Ghosh, so we should treat carefully the factual events in the story. 3 The most haunting, and also tragic, moment in The Glass Palace is perhaps the struggle of the Indian Sepoys, in which an Indian man named Arjun is among them. As one of the Indian Sepoys, men of arms who are native to India but working for British Indian Army, Arjun existence is somehow certified as only ‘tool’, without mind of his own; he “count[s] for nothing” Ghosh, 2001:30. In fact, Indian officers seldom realize it. They keep living in British military discourse and culture, unaware of the consequence. A reader would feel pity for Arjun when he is bewildered in realizing that he becomes the ‘British stooge’ indeed, after long years of attempt to be a sahib or a foreigner-like citizen: “…except for the colour of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognise us as Indians” Ghosh, 2001:439. This unmet expectation has aroused some questions: What would he do with his hybrid presence? How would he negotiate his identity? What aspects of himself would prevail in negotiating his identity? This study focuses on the identity negotiation of Arjun. From the defeat he feels and his regret of a ‘tainted’ self-identity, Arjun shows the moment of agony set forth by the truth of his search for ‘englishness’. In Bhabha’s term this revelation shows how the pursuit of ‘Englishness’ is just “a dream of the deprived, the illusion of the powerless” Bhabha, 2004: xi. Because realization is often too late to come, what we can do is to study the case and prevent it to spread more vastly. If the analysis of identity negotiation is on the right track, this study can be beneficial for re-imagining the orientation process of today’s postcolonial identity. 4

B. Problem Formulation