Abstract

Art as Cultural Glue in Sinan Antoon’s ‘The Corpse Washer’

Mohammed Lateef Aziz, Prof. Zhang Longhai

Volume: 11 Issue: 1 2021

Abstract:

The cultural fragmentation of Iraq is a rich ingredient to be studied from the postcolonial perspective. Iraqi culture is incarnated in Antoon's postcolonial diasporic literary text The Corpse Washer (2010), which is a paramount novel that depicts how the indigenous culture has been distorted in Iraqi society due to colonial ideologies. Antoon's novel concentrates on the impacts of these ideologies on the Iraqi indigenous culture leading to the influence of the revolutionary spirit of Iraqis. It also demonstrates the Iraqi people who experienced feelings of marginalization due to internalizing the colonial culture through different educational institutions such as schools and universities. The study explores how Antoon uses a Western version of art as a medium for incarnating the effects of the colonizer, helping to rewrite history with a native perspective. The study also investigates how the postcolonial diasporic novel The Corpse Washer in the literary canon can help to restore the indigenous Iraqi culture for the indigenous people in the homeland and the diaspora. It works as a cultural glue for cultural fragmentation due to the colonial subject. The paper underlines Iraqi society's cultural means and symbols in Antoon's The Corpse Washer during American colonization.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v11i01.028

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