Resetting Power structures in Rosemary Ekosso’s House of Falling Women (Published)
The paper, entitled “Resetting Power Structures in Rosemary Ekosso’s House of Falling Women” has as objective to analyse the objective presentation of the woman, her experiences and responses in an African and European setting. Life is meant to be enjoyed and celebrated in its wholeness, but this is not often the case because of some barriers and assumed ideologies set aside as fixed rules for the majority to follow. As such, some characters either follow the crowd, succumbing to the prescribed way of life whether they find it comfortable or not, while others categorically carve out their own unique path to follow based on their sense of self and individualism, while shunning all negative criticisms. This paper contends, that Rosemary Ekosso’s heroine is a pathfinder for many caged women who live unfulfilled lives due to patriarchal norms which for the most part are not in their favour. The theories of Post colonialism and Deconstruction will be employed in the analysis and interpretation of the novel under study. The theories are chosen because they share a common ground on power relations and resistance to forms of oppression and binary oppositions based on historical facts
Citation: Nchia F. M. (2023) Resetting Power structures in Rosemary Ekosso’s House of Falling Women, Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol.11, No.1, pp.1-8
Keywords: Identity, power structures, resetting, resistance. Ashcroft
Female Identity Reconstruction in Saudi Arabia (Published)
Saudi Arabia is experiencing an era of unprecedented socio-cultural reforms, one of which is the empowerment of women. The Saudi Vision 2030 aim to provide equal opportunity to both genders has necessitated intervention to reformulate the social identity of women, which has long been thought to be subject to the socio-religious domination of men. The descriptive discursive approach of this paper aims to briefly highlight attempts upheld by the Saudi Arabian government to combat the inferior social image of women, and the steps advocated to reconstruct it. Analysis of real-life data has revealed that officials have used the media and the education system to advance their ideology among the wider population.
Keywords: Gender, Identity, Men, Women, education media
Pictures of Persuasion: Hong Kong’s Colonial Travel Posters (Published)
Hong Kong Baptist University recently purchased one of the world’s finest collections of vintage Hong Kong travel posters. The collection, which includes approximately one hundred posters dating from 1930-1980, is significant in many ways. These pictures of persuasion “offer a wealth of art, history, design, and popular culture for us to understand”. The posters provide a glimpse into evolving mid-century commercial art and the visual languages of Western modernism. Perhaps more importantly, however, they offer a valuable historical and social perspective on Hong Kong’s self-conception and its image in the West during the city’s late colonial period. The posters touch on many important historical themes, including a defence of colonialism, Hong Kong’s local and overseas identities and the ways people shared a now-lost urban environment. Hong Kong’s colonial travel posters belong to the collective memory of Hongkongers and the city’s rich cultural heritage.
Keywords: Colonialism, Commercial Art, Hong Kong, Identity, Travel Poster
AN EXAMINATION OF MULTICULTURALISM AND RACISM IN EDGAR MITTELHOLZER’S A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (Published)
This paper is examines Mittelholzer’s depiction of the multicultural and multiracial character of the West Indies in his novel, A Morning at the Office. It unfolds that the West Indies is inhabited by various peoples, from different parts of the globe and who had no indigenous link or ancestral claim on the islands. The paper further traces the roots of this multiculturalism in the West Indies and how it has engendered racism to the various colonial ideological onslaughts on the Islands, the importation of millions of African captives as well as the presence of Chinese and East Indians who served as planters and overseers on the newly established mines and plantation. Indeed, it is this conglomerate of peoples with diverse cultures that has made the Islands to be described as “A Stew Pot’. It is the submission of this paper that in a multicultural society, the issues of racism and racial segregation abound. The paper particularly uses Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office to project this view. At the end it asserts that the West Indies can only maintain its genuine national identity if all racial barriers are removed and the various races learn to appreciate the cultural and racial diversities of the Islands without prejudice to skin pigmentation.
Keywords: Identity, Multiculturalism, Racism, Stew Pot