A glimpse at two poems of Jean Arasanayagam

The humanistic empathy one finds in the lines of Mrs. Arasanayagam in the two poems ‘Ancestors’ and ‘Sundry bloodlines’ speak not on the biasness of race or power or even the moral divide of who was right and wrong. Her poetry comes as a singular journey into the past and to decipher how much of it resides in her as an individual how it is an heir to a legacy that may not always be seen in the light of gloriousness.

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Encounters:

Literature and varieties of history

[Part 3]

In my last two columns I discussed the relationship between literature and history in relation to the writings of historians such as Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and the Annales School. Today I wish to focus on a group of historians who are said to subscribe to the idea of psychohistory. Admittedly, this is not a large group, and many of them are found in the United States.

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Cultural SCENE:

Issue of gender

[Part 1]

In this week’s column, I explore the issue of gender in postcolonial literature. In a number of postcolonial critical texts documented the modes through which the European imperialism ‘colonised’ women. The critical essays which documented the ‘double colonisation’ of women by patriarchy and colonialism began to appear as early as 1986.

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