Colonialism In Little Bee

MEMORY OF HOMELAND AND TRANSCULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN CHRIS CLEAVE’S LITTLE BEE

The tragic death of the stowing away refugees minimizes them to usual announcements and little is known about the survivor refugees whose mere possessions are their memories. Little Bee, the protagonist of Chris Cleave in Little Bee, is one of these survivors trying to conceptualize her position between her past in Nigeria and her present in England. As a little kid she is obliged to leave her hometown seized by an oil company. Except her sister, the family members and the villagers are killed by the company employees. To save their life, two sisters escape but the employees chase them and kill Little Bee’s sister as well. Little Bee stows away on a

But the lasting devastating consequences of imperialism and colonialism showed that colonialism was exploitation of the resources in the colonized territories besides degradation and abuse of indigenous people for the sake of industrialization of global market. The lasting outcomes of colonialism that persist to present day resulted in many dilemma and crisis. Bill Ashcroft et al state in The Empire Writes Back that “more than three-quarters of the people living of the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism” (Ashcroft, 1). Conceptually, postcolonial is the term used for the period when colonies gained independence from European colonization. It was first used by historians after World War II as “post-colonial state” referring to post-independence period. That’s to say in its original usage, the prefix “post” in post-colonial indicated its chronological meaning. Yet, from the late 1970s its scope has been broadened and moving beyond the limited discursive meaning of postcolonialism, referring to the chronological period of post-independence, literary critics used it to problematize the social, cultural, political and economic consequences of colonization on colonized countries. For instance, Ania Loomba defines postcolonialism as a theory about “… the complex forms in which subjectivities are experienced and collectivities mobilized; … and about the ethnographic translation of cultures” (Loomba et al., 13-14). In Postcolonialism- An Historical Introduction (2001), Robert Young proposes that “postcolonial theory is always concerned with the positive and the negative effects of the mixing of peoples and cultures” (Young 69). From a different standpoint, G. Rai assumes postcolonialism as “an enterprise which seeks emancipation from all types of subjugation defined in terms of gender, race and class” (G. Rai,