Mapping The Colonial Conquer Of Native Minds: A Socio-Historic Critique Of Turquoise By Amir Husain

Abstract

A range of postcolonial literature has exhaustively discussed the negative traits of colonization, but many of the studies also fail to provide the socio-historic critique of the institutional practices of the postcolonial legacies. Amir Hussain, a contemporary Pakistani English writer, with his highly aesthetic expression of radiant imagery and metaphors has tried to trace the colonial history and the inability of the colonized to rise above the colonial archetypes. The present study is an attempt to provide a socio-literary analysis of one of his short stories, “Turquoise” in a short story collection entitled “Cactus Town”. The postcolonial context of the main characters of the story, their psychological transformations, and the cultural unconsciousness exhibited by their thoughts and actions, the text establishes a difference between the cultural cognition and the utopian dreams of post-colonial orients of South Asia. Keeping this as a point of departure, the study intends to analyze the stylistic and postcolonial analysisbased on Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theoryand Gramsci theory of progressive hegemonyto highlight the psychological complexities of the third world people and their internal conflicts to engage themselves in the first world.Husain does this, by making use of metaphors throughout the story by engaging metaphors as target and concrete concepts to construe his socio-historic critique. Therefore, the source-target pairing is analyzed to infer the semantics of the discourse.