By Jessica Habib
“There is nothing outside the text” (Derrida, 2010, p. 1682). Using Derrida’s quote and Roland Barthes’s concept of ‘death of the author’, this essay will examine how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance” ...Read more
Kamal's Women: Agency, Feminity, and Identity in The Magic of Saida
By Iffat Siddiqui
The Magic of Saida (2012) by M.G. Vassanji is a postcolonial novel set in Tanzania. The novel explores questions of identity, agency, and history in the colonial, and the postcolonial discourse. The novel looks ...Read more
By Marziah Rashid
On the surface, it appears that literary criticism is one of the principal ivory tower disciplines in academia: elitist, self-interested, distant, and without practical use. However, this notion is complicated in light...Read more
By Farah Nada
Amitav Gosh’s novel In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (1994) recounts two parallel narratives: the first is the personal narrative of the author who goes to a village in Egypt to...Read more
"To Become an Indian:" An Exploration of Kamal's Ambigious Identity in The Magic of Saida
By Ayesha Alshared
The Magic of Saida is a multifaceted novel written by African-East Asian-Canadian author M. G. Vassanji, published in 2012. Vassanji (2012) often explores issues of home, history, and identity through....Read more