Post-colonial Nation and Cultural Hegemony in George Orwell’sAnimal Farm : A Rereading

Umme Salma*

Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh,

ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1545-2785

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-umme-salma-44a62649 

Corresponding author: 4/8 Augustus Street, Toowong, Queensland-4066, Australia. Email: *u.salma@uq.edu.au

Post-colonial Nation and Cultural Hegemony in George Orwell’sAnimal Farm: A Rereading

Animal Farm by George Orwell is an English literary classic. The novel is taught and read in most English departments worldwide to introduce beginners to English literature. It has been widely read and researched as an allegorical satire, focusing chiefly on communist Russia. Specifically, this 1945 novel is an excellent referent for any state-level abuse of power. Researchers also read the novel’ representations of the dominants’ corruption and the marginal’s misery from a post-colonial perspective. The present paper builds on the post-colonial research tradition. However, it turns the interpretative screw a little, employing a cultural lens. The paper reads the novel as an allegory of a post-colonial nation that dismantles the imperial powers but becomes destabilised under the sway of cultural hegemony. It divides animal time through the colonial/post-colonial binary. It explores how the colonial time enforces cultural authenticity and why post-colonial times dislocate it. The paper situates the study within colonialism, nation and cultural hegemony framework. In this way, the article uncovers various power axes in society and contends that the post-national period becomes unstable when various forms of cultural hegemony render people from transcultural to ambivalent.

Keywords: Orwell; rereading; post-colonial nation; cultural hegemony; cultural dislocation; transculturation

Subject classification codes: post-colonial reading