Chronicle of a death foretold
Gabriel Marquez
key terms in postcolonialism texts:
Imperialism
o Empire-building.
Colonialism
o Empire-building in the sense of geographical dominion over sovereign
territories. Imperialism could be seen as an ideological force whilst
colonialism is its practice.
Manicheanism
o Abdul JanMohamed’s term for the binary structure of imperial
ideology: white/black, self/other, centre/periphery,
coloniser/colonised, civilised/primitive, north/south, etc.
Otherness/Alterity
o Anyone separate from oneself generally, the process of self-definition
via others. The colonised subject is constructed as other or “othered”
by the colonial discourses of exclusion and primitivism which
establishes the difference of the other as natural and preordained.
Essentialism
o The assumption that groups of people share one or more features
exclusive to all members of that category; that essential
characteristics differentiate men from women, white from black,
Swazi from Zulu, etc.
Colonial discourse
o For Edward Said discourse operates as an instrument of power in the
colony: “Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible
positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of
possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the
relative upper hand” (Orientalism).
Nationalism
o The idea that the nation state is the locus of value and meaning,
particularly as the ground for opposition to imperialism and
colonialism. National resistance struggles. The naturalness of national
borders is contested in later postcolonial theory.
Postcoloniality
o The period after colonialism, but also in opposition to colonialism.
Postcolonialism
o The theory and culture of the period after colonialism, but also in
opposition to colonialism. This initially was characterised by
nationalist resistance and colonial discourse analysis, but turned more
towards analyses of the mutual imbrication of dominance and
opposition in the theories of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Bill
Ashcroft et al.
Neo-colonialism
o Forms of non-geographical imperial dominance and hegemony.
, Hybridity
o The creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone of the
colonial encounter. Homi Bhabha’s work emphasises the
interdependence and mutual constructions of coloniser/colonised in
the in-between, interstitial space of the colonial contact zone.
Transculturation
o Fernando Ortiz defines transculturation as changing an object or
practice by moving it from one culture to another and making it mean
something different in the process.
Mimicry
o For Homi Bhabha, mimicry or copying the West reveals the hypocrisy
of colonial discourse. Colonial culture was never as dominant as it
seemed.
Chronicle of a death foretold
Emphasizes both romance and criminal aspects
1. context and background
set in columbia
Colombia is a large country with a surface area equal to that of France, Spain
and Portugal combined
Independence from Spain 1810.
Largely Catholic, but split between the culture of the tropical Caribbean zone
and the mountainous Andean zone of the interior associated with the capital
Bogotá.
The population of the former area is mixed African, Indian and Spanish
descent (mestizo - mixed European and Indian descent), whilst in the interior
the Spanish legacy is more prominent and the social advantages of a white
face are more evident.
Garcia Márquez tends to represent the hot tropical zone of Colombia and
most of his work is set in the lush, hot, colourful, light and dramatic aura of
this zone.
Colombian politics has been dominated by two parties, liberal and
conservative, under the control of rich elites, and there has been incredible
political violence in the country, largely as a result of conflict between these
two parties.
This has been complicated by the fact that Colombia is the world’s largest
exporter of cocaine and the source of approximately 80% of the cocaine and
marijuana consumed in the United States.
So what characterises Colombian politics and culture?
o Hybridity
o Caudillismo - (Spanish-speaking countries) military or political leader
o Machismo - the replacement of love by power
o BUT, Colombia has a strong literary culture: newspaper, journals,
magazines, books, online writing, all are popular as it has a high rate
of literacy.
