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2. PHD Thesis / Tesis PHD
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Title:	Resisting Colonialism Through Nature: An Ecopostcolonial Reading Of Mahmoud Darwish's Selected Poems
Authors:	Hamoud Yahya Ahmed Mohsen (P60507)
Supervisor:	Ruzy Suliza Hashim, Prof. Dr.
Keywords:	Resisting Colonialism Ecopostcolonial Reading Of Mahmoud Darwish's Mahmoud Darwish's Selected Poems Nationalism and literature
Issue Date:	27-Sep-2013
Description:	Throughout the fifty years of Mahmoud Darwish's writing life, the core of his poetry is to resist colonialism. The thesis is a two-pronged study to explore resistance and the employment of nature in Darwish's work. To do this, the conceptual framework proposed is a combination of two theories - ecocriticism and postcolonial theory. Ecocriticism is an aspect of literary theory, which has been growing swiftly since the early 1990s that focuses mainly on the study of the relationship between humans and the natural world. It has evolved out of many traditional approaches to literature and the literary works are viewed in terms of place or environment. The postcolonial theory stems from the dissatisfaction over colonial ways of reading the natives, and as a response to approaches of reading works that are produced in the aftermath of colonial rule. These two theories are combined by linking between the marginality of nature in postcolonial theorizing and the centrism of nature in ecocriticism. The blending of the two theories illuminates the new ways Darwish uses the imagery of nature for resistance throughout the span of hispoetic production.The methodology of analysis consists of three waves in accordance to the three distinctive phases proposed on the whole span of Darwish's poetic life. The first phase (1958-1978) focuses on the early poems of the first twelve years of his writing life; the second phase (1970-1996) covers the poems of the next twenty-six years in exile and the final phase (1996-2008) dwells on the poems upon returning home that span the last twelve years of Darwish's life. The analysis of the selected poems reveals several conclusions: Darwish utilizes a range of the forms of nature from the wild varieties of nature to the modes that have been cultivated to convey his protest against the colonizers of the homeland. Tracing the different facets of development in his ecoresistance such as the status, the tone, the imagery and the implications, it is shown that ecoresistance changes in accordance to the sequences and consequences of the three phases in which the poet is involved with in the context of his crisis-ridden homeland. Through the analysis of poems that speak of massive waves of resistance through nature, it is shown that the poets employment of nature in his homeland becomes the basis of his agenda as a literary activist and makes him deserve to be regarded as an ecopostcolonial writer of the Arab world. Thus, this study shows the implications of developing Arab ecocriticism as a means to read resistance and to understand the significance of the land-identity attachment in the psyche of Palestinians. The quest for identity is directly linked to the loss of land and this is central to ecoresistance as a new and a non-western perspective to resistance studies in Arabic literature.,PhD
Pages:	257
Call Number:	PN51 .M648 2013
Publisher:	UKM, Bangi
Appears in Collections:	Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Fakulti Sains Sosial dan Kemanusiaan

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