Comparative Postcolonialisms: Alienation, Displacement and Interconnections in South African and Burmese Literature

Abstract

This article uses a comparative postcolonial approach to investigate colonialism’s displacement and dislocation of all beings, human and non-human, and to locate resistant writing in the selected postcolonial texts—Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Zoya Phan’s Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma—to show the disenfranchisement of the (post)colonised while also attempting to recuperate stories of interconnections and hope. While colonialist texts show the “abject” in troubling terms, I argue that in diasporic texts, the writers are able to show a “plurality of vision” due to their diasporic consciousness in their texts.