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ASSIGNMENT OF: post colonial
ASSIGNMENT SUBMITTED TO: DR.saiyma
TOPIC: post colonial writers after year 2000
ASSIGNMENT SUBMITTED BY: sitara ayaz
ROLL NO: 1386 MA F11
DATE: 24May, 2013

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1. A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
BY KHALED HOSSEINI
Published May 22nd 2007 by Riverhead Hardcover
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan's
last thirty years, from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to post-Taliban rebuilding
that puts the violence, fear, hope and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of
two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where
personal lives, the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness, are inextricable from the
history playing out around them.
Propelled by the same storytelling instinct that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A
Thousand Splendid Suns is at once a remarkable chronicle of three decades of Afghan history
and a deeply moving account of family and friendship. It is a striking, heart wrenching novel of
an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love, a stunning
accomplishment.
Like diamonds and roses hidden under bomb rubble, this is a story of intense beauty and strength
buried under the surface of the cruel and capricious life imposed upon two Afghani women.
―She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved
woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, and
then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people
like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.‖
Staggeringly beautiful, deep, rich, sad, frightening and infuriating, Afghanistan certainly fit that
description, which makes me feel a significant amount of personal shame given how intertwined
the country has been with the history of the U.S. over the last 30 years. That same time frame is
also the primary focus of the novel so I feel like I got a real taste of the history of this mysterious
time.
That said, the historical events described in the novel are merely spice for the narrative and are
clearly not the entrée at this literary feast.

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The story revolves around two women, Mariam and Laila, born 20 years apart, but whose lives
are intertwined through the events of the novel. Mariam (born in 1959) is the illegitimate
daughter of a wealthy merchant named Jalil who has 3 wives and 9 ―legitimate‖ children.
Mariam‘s mother, Nana, was a servant in Jalil‘s house whose affair with Jalil resulted in Mariam.
As you might expect, the 3 wives were less than enthused and Nana and Mariam were forced to
live on the outskirts of town, making Nana a bitter often cruel person to Mariam.
The other main character is Laila (born in 1978) who lives in the same area as Mariam. Laila‘s
story begins with her close friendship with a boy named Tariq who loses a leg to a Soviet land
mine when he‘s 5 years old. Years later, with Kabul under constant rocket attacks, Laila‘s family
decides to leave the city. During an emotional farewell, Laila and Tariq make love. Later, as her
family is preparing to depart Kabul, a rocket kills her parents and severely injures Laila. Through
a series of mostly tragic circumstances, Mariam and Laila both end up married to a serious
scumbag named Rasheed. I want to clarify that last remark because I think it goes to the most
chilling aspect of the novel for me. One of the novel‘s primary strengths is the bright light the
author shines on the nasty way women are treated in countries like Afghanistan.
Now not being knowledgeable enough about the culture to make a well-informed analysis, I
strongly suspect that the character of Rasheed, while made somewhat worse for dramatic effect,
is close enough to what was ―the norm‖ as to be positively sickening.
Bottom-line, Rasheed is an ignorant, mean-spirited, petty little pile who will make even the most
serene and passive reader feel like loading the .45 with hollow points and performing a
gunpowder enema on his sorry, wretched chair cushion.
Anyway, once Mariam and Laila find themselves together, the story deepens as these two
women slowly learn first to live with each other and later to depend upon each other as they face
almost daily challenges, mostly from their abusive husband.
She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even
mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with

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punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and
sometimes not.
The lives of these women are an epic journey in every sense of the word and I felt like I was on a
journey of my own as I road along with them.
While there is much of darkness and pain throughout the book, Hosseini never allows the
emotional tone of the story to descend in melodrama. There is little self-pity or wallowing in
grief. There is pain, there is loss but there is no surrender. Instead, these women absorb
tremendous blows (both figuratively and literally) and continue to live.
There is a great passage near the end of the book because it reveals the final fate of one of the
characters, but it is simply a perfect summation of the strength and dignity that is the heart of this
story.
Some of the important quotes from text are as follows
―One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.‖
Marriage can wait, education cannot.‖
Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.‖
―A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed.
It won't stretch to make room for you.‖
―Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only
when nothing can be undone.‖ 1
1
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3271379-a-thousand-splendid-suns

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2. Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire
Alfred J. Lopez
SUNY Press, 2005
Postcolonial Whiteness examines the interrelations between whiteness and the history of
European colonialism, as well, as the status of whiteness in the contemporary postcolonial world.
It addresses two fundamental questions: What happens to whiteness after empire, and to what
extent do white cultural norms or imperatives remain embedded in the postcolonial or post
independence state as a part-"acknowledged or not-"of the colonial legacy? Presenting a wide
range of critical and theoretical responses, the contributors explore these questions by focusing
on such diverse topics as the legacy of Princess Diana; queer self-expression; the changing
situation of Gypsy, or Romani, minorities in Eastern Europe; literature, including Joseph
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness, Carryl Phillips's "Cambridge, and Gothic impact on the literature
of Australia; reconstruction of white South African social identity; cross-cultural discussions of
mental illness; Freud's case history of the Wolfman; and Australia's national anthems.
It has been almost fifty years since Harry Levin, who after World War II was a leader in
reinvigorating comparative literature in the United States, published The Power of Blackness.
Given that ―black‖ was not then widely recognized as a racial term, this myth-oriented study of
American fiction did not address race in any detail, analyzing instead an array of archetypal
undercurrents in Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe. The contrast with ―whiteness studies,‖ as
illustrated by the two books under review here, could hardly be greater, for this new field faces
racial issues head on, thinks in terms of historical contingencies rather than mythic continuities,
and stresses sociocultural and political contexts in addition to or even more than literary or
linguistic specificities. This final characteristic reflects the challenge (registered in the 1993
Bernheimer Report) that cultural studies began to pose for comparative literature two decades
ago and, more broadly, recalls familiar tensions between the humanities and the social sciences.
When framed in these terms, some comparatists may wonder whether this line of research has
anything to offer their field. Yet one fountainhead for whiteness studies is Toni Morrison‘s
playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), which credits ―some
students of comparative literature,‖ among others, for contributing to its insights (12). Based on
three lectures given at Harvard, this path breaking book looks at the charged scenes involving

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black characters in American literature, most notably in fiction by Poe, Twain, Cather, and
Hemingway. Morrison‘s point, however, is not to explore what these situations imply about
blacks, in a directly representational, ―realistic‖ manner of storytelling. Instead, taking a
psychological approach that turns our attention back toward the author, she aims to identify what
―racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of ornament21 Review Essay 19
masters,‖ rather than to analyze what racialization did to its victims. This reversal of perspective,
which refuses to take the white viewpoint for granted, is one defining gesture of whiteness
studies. Drawing on her experience as a novelist with narrative perspective and figurative
language as well as with nuances of characterization, Morrison goes on to ask what these
situations reveal about the authors‘ unvoiced, even unconscious assumptions while writing in a
culture where whiteness alone can confer automatic authority and power. In thus crossing
boundaries—though not between two literatures in different national languages, but between two
racial groups within a single literature—she is pursuing a recognizably comparative project.
When she speaks of black Americans as ―a population that has always had a curiously intimate
and unhingingly separate existence within the dominant one‖ (12), she defines her subject matter
in a way that has clear affinities with such familiar topics in our field as Franco–German literary
relations or Slavic–Western ones. Alfred J. López‘s reader Postcolonial Whiteness brings
together ten essays that, along with the editor‘s substantial introduction on theoretical
frameworks for broadening the geocultural scope of whiteness studies, extend this inquiry to
much of the English-speaking world and to Eastern Europe as well. The topics covered are
usually less specifically literary than those in Playing in the Dark, tending instead to apply
literary, psychological, or filmic modes of analysis to cultural issues that exhibit a lingering but
dubious fixation on whiteness. More than Morrison, the precursors most often acknowledged are
the black therapist cum postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon and the film critic Richard Dyer, with
the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the comparatists Edward Said, the media critic Ella Shohat,
and the postcolonial.2
3. The Post-colonial Studies Reader
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin
Routledge, 2006
2
http://www.amazon.com/Postcolonial-Whiteness-Critical-Postmodern-Culture/dp/0791463621

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The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this
second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works
in the field.
Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute
to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on Nationalism, Hybridity, Diaspora and
Globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in
the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the
metropolitan centers. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its
field, The Postcolonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent
challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.
The book has fourteen sections, each dealing with a major concept or issue in post-colonial
theory. Each section is introduced by the editors and includes up to seven extracts from various
theorists. As well as fundamental postcolonial issues, such as Language, Place, History and
Ethnicity, it also assesses the similarities and differences with postmodernism, explores concepts
such as Hybridity and The Body and Performance, and also examines the very important
material practice? of Education, Production and Consumption, and the modes of Representation
and Resistance. The uniqueness of this volume is in its range and comprehensiveness. By
bringing together nearly ninety extracts from over fifty different writers, it demonstrates the vast
spread of post-colonial theory, the degree to which such theory is emerging outside the
metropolitan intellectual centers, and the significance such theory has in the practical political
issues of living in this range of societies. This book makes accessible the full range of

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postcolonial theory, which otherwise would be either difficult or impossible for students,
teachers or researchers to fully utilize.3
4.The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies
Edited by Neil Lazarus
This book offers an introduction to post colonialism; this Companion examines different
aspects of postcolonial thought and culture that have had a significant effect on contemporary
critical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include post colonialism‘s relation to
modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, and modern
cultural studies. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.
Cambridge companion to post colonial studies proposes a lucid introduction and
overview of one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies. The
volume aims to introduce the key concepts, methods, theories thematic concerns and
contemporary debates in the fields. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, contributors explain
the impact of history, sociology and philosophy on the study of post colonial literatures and
cultures. Examined topic in the book include from anti-colonial nationalism and decolonization
to globalization, migration flows and the ‗brain drain‘ which constitute the past and present of
‗the post colonial condition‘. It also takes into account the sociological and ideological
conditions surrounding the emergence of post colonial literary studies as an academic field in
3
http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3985.pdf

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late 197os and early 1980s. The Companion turns as authoritative, engaged and discriminating
lens on post colonial literary studies.4
4
http://www.google.com.pk/url?q=http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Postcol
onial.html%3Fid%3DX66n_xiHn9EC&sa=U&ei=QgyfUcSQFpS5hAfi4YBY&ved=0CBkQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNH0GQCY2Qv
eB4-Vg9FPmmSgPZQISQ