Race, space and post-colonial landscape in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants

Magdalena Klimiuk

Helena Chodkowska University of Technology and Economics in Warsaw


Abstract

The following article presents strategies for decolonizing complex ethno-racial and social relationships between Jewish and black characters within a restricted, multifaceted area of a decaying tenement in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants. This interpretation is concerned with finding features of post-colonial discourse such as the representation of the characters in dichotomous terms: the colonized/colonizer, the observed/the observer, superior/inferior. It focuses on the analysis of the main characters’ different methods of dominating the ‘space or subjectivity’ of each other through surveillance, mimicry and appropriation.

Keywords:

stereotype, power, space, colonized, colonizer, writing, Jews, African-Americans

Arteaga, Alfred. 1997. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen. 2007. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi, K. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Budick, Emily Miller.1998. Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Panthenon.

Fanon, Frantz. 1984. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Kawash, Samira. 1997. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Malamud, Bernard. 1972. The Tenants. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Martinot, Steve. 2007. “Race and the Ghosts of Ontology.” APA Newsletters. Newsletter on Philosophy and The Black Experience, Spring 2007. Volume 06. ed. John McClendon & George Yancy, Newark: University of Delaware.

Mishra,Vijay, and Hodge, Bob.1994. “What is Post (-) Colonialism?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Harlow, England: Pearson Education.

Noyes, John K. 1992. Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German Southwest-Africa 1884-1915, Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Sundquist, Eric, J. 2005. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Yancy, George. 2005. Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body. PhD Dissertation. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University.

Download

Published
2016-06-30


Klimiuk, M. (2016) “Race, space and post-colonial landscape in Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants”, Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies, (13), pp. 13–21. doi: 10.15290/cr.2016.13.2.02.

Magdalena Klimiuk 
Helena Chodkowska University of Technology and Economics in Warsaw