نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 سجاد قیطاسی، استادیار، زبان وادبیات انگلیسی، دانشگاه پیام نور، تهران، ایران
2 Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at University of Kurdistan, Iran.
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague in a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. It is worth mentioning that drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters—constitutes a crucial ethical praxis of witnessing that sits with, rather than resolves, historical loss. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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