Volume 1, No. 2Volume 1, Issue 2

This paper explores the ethics of surrogate bodies in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake
(2003) through the lens of material feminisms. The first section of
the paper examines the exploitation of the surrogate mother, the
Handmaid, by the Gilead administration and the genetic
engineered nonhuman entities, the pigoons, and nature, by the
authoritative scientists in the Compounds. In doing this, the author
uncovers the ideologies of patriarchy, reductionism, and
mechanization embedded within Gilead’s surrogate system and
food distribution system and the Compound’s production of the
genetically engineered pigoons ersatz food cultures. The latter part
of the article highlights the parallel irony embedded within each
novel, whereby the Handmaids, the pigoons, and nature resist and
offer revenge through adapting and surviving throughout the
stories. These reversed power relationships function as a
composite material feminist counter-narrative as opposed to the
patriarchal, anthropocentric, reductionist consciousnesses imposed
by the Gilead administration and the Compounds. This emphasizes
that the core element to “survive” in a dystopian environment is
embracing material feminisms.

The article draws on a dubious cultural practice by a group of Sri
Lankan migrant/diasporic writers in naming local characters using
unrealistic and unlikely names. Through representational examples
drawn from the fiction of Su Dharmapala (Saree), Romesh
Gunasekera (Reef, Heaven’s Edge and Suncatcher), Michael
Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost), and Roma Tearne (Mosquito) the article
establishes this malpractice to be a failure in cultural
representation within the migrant/diasporic tradition. In
responding to such authorship the article calls for a rigorous
discussion that extends beyond the “exoticism debate”: a
conversation that, among others, has been developed by Graham
Huggan, Elleke Boehmer, Benita Parry. In the course, the paper
examines the position of migrant/diasporic writers within the
global capitalist market of transnational publication and the place
of the global and local (Sri Lankan) academy to collaboratively
develop a critique that challenges dubious cultural representation.
The discussion concludes that cultural representation comes with a
responsibility and that conscious mis-directions need to be
academically critiqued; and that the global and local knowledge
centres need to think anew in working towards such an end. 

J.M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron, set in South Africa of the 1980s,
depicts the brutality rampant in its society and the various
repercussions of a nation-state in violent transition. Maternity is a
recurring trope in the novel and one of the chief principles along
the lines of which Mrs Curren curates a sense of her own self and
the body politic of South Africa. Curren’s cancer-ridden White
body comes to represent the ravages of Apartheid within the South
African landscape and its people, both afflicted by a disease
fostered and nursed within its own body. The perverted
motherland which anchors itself to the corrupt system of Apartheid
can only further the systematised bigotry. This necessitates a
complete and absolute rooting out of the previous ethos and its
adherent's their engenderers to make space for the new. The figure
of the dying mother is linked to the figure of a motherland
reordering itself as the older order is cast off to
beget engendering a new ethical and political system within the
country. Coetzee deploys the conventional mother-land
dialectic and reorients it within the Apartheid-ridden South
Africa to allegorise the nation-state and its
people losing their antiquated moorings in the face of
rebelling and the unsettling change it effects.

The plays that Martin Esslin famously classified as belonging to
the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ are characterised by the presence of
nihilism and the influence of pessimism of existential philosophy.
The plays of such Absurd playwrights as Beckett, Pinter and
Ionesco have been criticised for portraying a world of nihilism and
dominated by the angst of existentialism. The major mode of
criticism is dominated by the sense of hopelessness and despair of
the post Second World War. It has been argued that the plays
comprising the absurd theatre are characterised by their depiction
of the sense of senselessness and the inadequacy of rationality.
While acknowledging the presence of nihilism and the influence of
existential philosophy in the plays of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’,
this paper claims that the nihilism in these plays is essentially
Nietzschean and hence not pessimistic. This paper will argue that
the plays of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ is essentially based on
Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Amor fati’ and that they project an
alternative modernity in its response to the pessimistic tone of the
existential philosophy.

In her 1997 novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan
emphasizes the role of water in decolonial resistance and
Indigenous healing. Solar Storms is a coming-of-age novel about
17-year-old Angel, who arrives at her ancestral homeland, a
community called “Adam’s Rib,” in the boundary waters between
Minnesota and Ontario. The language in Hogan’s text assigns
sentience and agency to bodies of water. Hogan’s water imagery
stresses the interconnectedness of humans and nature that
neocolonialism aims to sever with the construction of the dam in
the novel, echoing the real story of the James Bay Hydroelectric
Project and its destruction of the James Bay Cree and Inuit lands in
the 1970’s. Hogan's indictment of the hydroelectric industrial
complex and her use of water as a counternarrative to extractive
capitalism remain relevant, as Indigenous people continue resisting
in places such as Standing Rock and the lands of the Wet'suwet'en
Nation in Canada. 

Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus analyses colonial and
postcolonial writings about Cyprus, before and after its independence
from the British Empire in 1960. Nunziata uses a postcolonial lens to
address Cyprus’s history as a “strategically located Mediterranean
island that has had a distinct experience of major world
events” (Huggan 2). Cyprus is a postcolonial space, an island in the
East Mediterranean in between Africa, Asia and Europe; as such it is
referred to as being part of the Middle East, ceded by the Ottomans to
the British in 1878 and independent with a divided capital since
1960s. Despite 1960 being the year of independence the UK
maintains two sizeable military bases on the island, the British
overseas territories Akrotiri and Dhekelia. In addition, after the island
gained independence, intracommunal conflict broke out between
Greek speakers and Turkish speakers still feeling the impact of
British divide of politics from the preceded decades. These events
culminated in the events of 1974 leaving the island divided by a
buffer zone which was in view partial opened in 2003. Most Turkish
speakers now live in the north of the island whereas Greek speakers
live in the south. Thousands became refugees during this new part of
the twentieth century