Author(s)

Kun Wang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University, School of English Studies, Xi’an International Studies University, China

Corresponding Author

Kun Wang

ABSTRACT

As Jonathan Culler notes, deconstruction can be regarded as "a philosophical position, a political or intellectual strategy, and a mode of reading" (Culler, 1982, p. 85). By using deconstruction as a mode of reading, this paper tries to explore how J. G. Farrell deconstructs imperialist discourse in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) with a post-colonial context. Farrell vividly describes the siege of the British in a fictional town, Krishnapur, which gives him the freedom to imaginatively deal with historical facts in this novel that is based on the Indian Rebellion of 1857. I argue that Farrell has successfully deconstructed imperialist discourse by inverting assumed inviolable binaries of ethical Western superiority/ native barbarism, the "self"/ the "other", and civilized/ degenerated subjects between the colonizers and the colonized.

KEYWORDS

Imperialist discourse, Deconstruction, The siege of krishnapur

CITE THIS PAPER

Kun Wang. The Deconstruction of Imperialist Discourse in the Siege of Krishnapur. Art and Performance Letters (2021) 2: 90-93. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/artpl.2021.020518.

REFERENCES

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