Dr. Haifa Saud Alfaisal, an independent scholar, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Essex. She focuses her research on religious discourse within the framework of postcolonial studies.
2006 0-7734-5686-4 No other study explores the topic of religious discourse from within the context of postcolonial studies. This book uniquely analyzes two novels from very different contexts, Guatemala and Sudan, to illustrate that there is a profoundly problematic area within the ‘ethical purchase’ of postcolonial studies. It relates this problem to the ‘magical realism’ label that is applied to various postcolonial fiction. The book demonstrates this problem within postcolonial studies by critiquing the works of some of the foremost postcolonial critics. The study ends by bringing theory down to reality when it asserts that because of the differences between societies and cultures as they stand today, and with postcolonial studies lacking the necessary theoretical apparatus to deal with these differences, cultural contact is bound to elicit violence in one sense or another.