Literary Terms
The speech of characters in a story, usually punctuated with quotation marks.
Dialogue
The process of occupying, administering, and extracting resources from various places across the globe between the fifteenth to the twentieth century.
Colonialism
"The dark brown circles of his irises looked like pots a toddler could fall into."
Simile
This person might be the OG mad women in the attic, but in Wide Sargasso Sea, she gets to tell her story.
Antoinette "Bertha" Cosway
This type of critical theory analyzes the gender relations which prevail in society in order to argue for more equity among and across genders.
Feminist theory
The main character of a story might be called this.
Protagonist
The extension and expansion of a colonial government into a foreign land without settling its citizens there.
Imperialism.
"Effia hung her head, embarrassed that she had done something to cause Abeku shame, embarrassed he could not call her his wife, embarrassed he had not called her by her name."
Repitition
This person was a skilled ship builder and family man, but ended up drinking alone in NY.
Kojo
“From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself.”
Edward Said
Unifying points or repeated images, meaning, or ideas. Often this is important to the overall meaning of the work.
Themes.
The action of depriving someone of land, property, or other possessions.
Dispossession
"He ran his fingers across the full landscape of her face."
metaphor
This person lit a fire and escaped, igniting a story which would follow generations of her descendants.
Maame.
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
Franz Fanon
An act, person, or thing which represents something else, usually something more abstract than the named thing.
Symbol
This phrase has multiple meanings: It can refer to a concrete period of time after colonization OR the political or cultural condition of a former colony OR a theoretical lens in which to study the world.
Postcolonialism
She walked over to Effia and handed her a black stone pendant that shimmered as though it had been coated in black dust."
Symbolism
This person was imprisoned in a mad house, even though they were right about the danger.
Mrs. Cosway aka Antoinette's mom
Gayatri Spivak coined this term which refers to the ways in which women have simultaneously experienced the oppression of colonialism and patriarchy.
Double Colonization
The events of the story told by either a character in the story or an omniscient voice outside of the story.
Point of View (1st, 2nd or 3rd).
A colony wins the right to govern and manage their own government. You can also use this phase abstractly to refer to the mind, an ideology, or other cultural things.
Decolonization
"Cargo ships like black specs of dust in the blue, wet Atlantic floated so far out that it was difficult to tell how far from the castle they really were."
Imagery/
This person was a teacher, a writer, and a father to Marjorie.
Yaw
This is a socially constructed system of classification that ascribes qualities of masculinity and femininity to people.
Gender