Derek Walcott

PANTOMIME (1978)
MASKS OF CONQUESTS (1989)—GAURI VISHWANATHAN

 Demonstrates how English Literature was

introduced in India by
 Rejecting native literary traditions in Sanskrit,
Persian and Arabic
 Installing English texts instead
 Using these texts as modes of creating a class of
Indians who would be trained to serve the
colonial administration
BASIC POSTCOLONIAL POSITIONS
 English Literary texts are neither universal nor
simply about human values.
 They encode prejudices that are racial, attitudes
that serve the empire and carry stereotypes that
are false but powerful in their consequences
IMPORTANT MILESTONES
 Chinua Achebe’s reading of Heart of Darkness
(1975)
 Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park
(1993)
 Sara Suleri’s reading of Kipling’s Kim (1992)
 Homi K Bhabha’s reading of A Passage to India
(1994)
 Peter Hulme’s reading of Robinson Crusoe
(1986)
PANTOMIME AS AN INTERTEXT
 The idea of the Intertext
 “A text is constructed of a mosaic of quotations.
Any text is the absorption and transformation of
another.”—Julia Kristeva (1966)
 For Barthes too, any text is a “tissue of
quotations”
 This intertextual view of literature, as shown by 
Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the
meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but
is produced by the reader in relation not only to
the text in question, but also the complex network
of texts invoked in the reading process.—Wiki
 “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut:
beyond the title, the first lines and the last full
stop, beyond its internal configuration and its
autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of
references to other books, other texts, other
sentences: it is a node within a network...”
Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974)
PANTOMIME—INTERTEXT
 Other examples, notably Jean Rhys’s Wide
Sargasso Sea as a reworking of Jane Eyre
 The desire of reworking from a poco standpoint.
 Pantomime hence becomes an interesting study in
the idea of intertextuality.
PANTOMIME—INTERTEXT
 Gilbert and Tompkins in Post Colonial
Drama write that:
 “given the legacy of a colonialist education which
perpetuates, through literature, very specific
socio-cultural values in the guise of universal
truth, it is not surprising that a prominent
endeavour among colonized writer/artists has
been to rework the European "classics" in order to
invest them with more local relevance and to
divest them of their assumed
authority/authenticity.” (16)
 For James Joyce, Robinson Crusoe is the epitome
of the English imperialist: “ He is the true
prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the
trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is
the symbol of the subject races” (1964)
PANTOMIME—INTERTEXT
 Choice of Robinson Crusoe—popularity, its status as
the first novel(!)
 —a simple story of shipwreck and survival yet packed
with a profound colonial ethic.
 In his poem "Crusoe's Journal," Walcott states
that Robinson Crusoe was "our first book, our profane
Genesis". Pantomime’s excellent take on the classic
imperialist text.
 Also Pantomime could be seen as an instance of
horizontal intertextuality, according to the theorization
by John Fiske as distinct from a vertical intertextuality.
INTERTEXTUALITY ON THE WEB
 http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem0
9.html