Browsing by Author "Korso Lamia"

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    Oppression and Resistance in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
    (Mouloud Mammeri University, 2022) Korso Lamia
    This dissertation has attempted to study the issue of colonial oppression and native resistance in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). We have intended to examine the literary work within the historical context of British colonialism in the Caribbean country of Jamaica, and the issue of slavery. Our research has relied on Frantz Fanon’s theory of colonial oppression, violence, and black counter-violence addressed in his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). We have also borrowed Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ developed in his Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970), and the way this concept is depicted in the narrative. We have investigated the way the settler oppresses and exploits the native relying on violence, and the way this violence is taken by the native and transformed to a means of resistance as the direct, logical response to the oppression he is subject to. We have come to the following findings: first, the violent acts performed by the colonizer, both in their direct and symbolic way, serve as a way to dominate and keep under control the colonized subject. The second finding is that the oppressed subject absorbs the colonial violence they are subject to, consequently transforming that violence into their means of resistance. The study has come to the conclusion that the violence performed by the natives is depicted as their means to resist the colonial violence and oppression they are the victims of.