Introduction
George Orwell’s Animal Farmis an English literary classic. The novel has touched the imagination of
literature lovers and researchers since its publication in 1945 and
subsequent adaptation in films, cartoons, and motion pictures.11George
Orwell, John Halas, and Joy Batchelor. Animal Farm (Australia:
Siren Visual Entertainment, 2004); Alex Salmon. “Orwell’s Morality
Tale Staged.” Green Left Weekly , no. 1216 (2019): 19. . In
addition, most English departments worldwide teach the novel to
introduce beginners to English literature. Hence, the novel has been
widely read and researched, chiefly as an allegorical satire on
communist Russia.22Harold Bloom. Animal Farm . New York:
Infobase Learning, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central. (accessed August 16,
2021), 34-7, 37-9, 46-8.
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=516854.
Also, the animal narrative has become an excellent referent for any
state-level abuse of power—the existing research concerns
representations of the dominants’ corruption and the marginal’s misery
in the novel.33Shikha Thakur. “Understanding the Fundamental
Nature of Power through Myths in George Orwell’s Animal Farm .”Language in India 20, no. 1 (2020): 122.
http://www.languageinindia.com/index.html; H. Sewall. “George
Orwell’s Animal Farm : A metonym for a dictatorship.”Literator 23, no. 3 (2002): 81–96.
https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v23i3.344.
Specifically, the novel is well-known among literature researchers,
hailed from countries with British colonial history. Since Orwell was
born in a civil servants’ family in colonial Bengal and worked in the
Indian Imperial Police, his writings are significant sources to know
about the British and the Indian relationships during the British
Raj.44John Rossi and John Rodden. “A Political Writer.” inThe Cambridge Companion to George Orwell , ed. John Rodden,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 1–11. doi: 10.1017
/CCOL0521858429.001; Ian Williams. “Orwell and the British Left.”
in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell , ed. John Rodden,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 100–111,
doi:10.1017/CCOL0521858429.008. Orwell began his literary career in
1920 with some lively and thought-provoking essays. He then wrote four
fictions: Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter(1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for
Air (1939), and three memoirs: Down and out in Paris and London(1933), The Road to Wigan Peer (1937), and Homage to
Catalonia (1938). Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) are his final novels. Orwell’s last novels departed
from his earlier writer vision. During this time, Orwell bitterly
recognised the malfunction of socialism in Spain and the USSR that lent
Orwell the voice of a satiric writer. In Animal Farm , Orwell
satirises Communist Russia through animals’ everyday life and
illustrates how the power-mongers pawns the public for their
interests.55Erika Gottlieb, “George Orwell’s Dystopias:Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” in A
Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 , ed. Brian W.
Shaffer. (New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 241-53.
This power thesis enables some contemporary researchers to engage with
Orwell’s anti-imperial standpoints and study his writings through
colonial and post-colonial theories.66Hussein Zeidanin and
Abdullah Shehabat, “Revisiting the Concept of Freedom in George
Orwell’s ‘a Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’: A Postcolonial
Perspective,” International Journal of Arabic-English Studies21, no. 1 (2021); Pavan Kumar Malreddy, “Imperialist Shame and
Indigenous Guilt: George Orwell’s Writings on Burma,” European
Journal of English Studies 23, no. 3 (2019): 311-25; Ahmad Ghaforian
and Ahmad Gholi, “A Postcolonial Reading of George Orwell’s Shooting
an Elephant with Special Reference to Edward Said’s Orientalism and
Binary of the Self and the Other,” Theory and Practice in
Language Studies 5, no. 7 (2015): 1361; Mohammed Sarwar Alam,
“Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’: Reflections on Imperialism and
Neoimperialism,” IIUC Studies 3(2006): 55-62; and Ensieh
Shabanirad and Seyyed Mohammad Marandi, “Edward Said’s Orientalism
and the Representation of Oriental Women in George Orwell’s Burmese
Days,” International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences60 (2015): 22-33. Mainly, Ruly Indra Dharmawan analyses Animal
Farm through Bhabha’s mimicry and internal colonisation
theory.77Darmawan, “Revisiting Bhabha’s Mimicry in George
Orwell’s Animal Farm ,” PIONEER: Journal of Language and
Literature 12, no. 2 (2020): 141-56.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36841/pioneer.v12i2.731
Similarly, Yahya Barkhordar explains the farm’s events as colonialism,
focusing on animals’ enslavement and exploitation in the human and
animal eras.88Barkhordar, “Animal Farm and Its Analysis Based
on Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” ECONSPEAK: A Journal of
Advances in Management IT & Social Sciences 7, no. 3 (2017): 46-68.
Finally, Guillermo Verdecchia focuses on the relevance of Animal
Farm in contemporary neo-liberal, post-colonial Canada through Anthony
MacMahon’s adaptation of the novel for Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto.
Since Canada has not been an oppressive political country, MacMahon
moves away from the Orwellian story in his adaptation, Animal Farm
2.0 . Instead, he critically interrogates the capitalist economic system
that damages ordinary people’s lives.99Verdecchia, “Revisi
(Ti)Ng Animal Farm and the Cherry Orchard : Adapting
Classics for a Neoliberal, Postcolonial Canada,” Anglistik:
International Journal of English Studies 30, no. 1 (2019): 81-91.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6db9/0257b1c5fd5d9343c439485e5c03f63ad86e.pdf.
The present paper builds on this rereading of Animal Farm from a
post-colonial perspective.1010I use the hyphenated
“post-colonial” throughout the article, because the term means
“after colonialism” in the analysis of the novel. 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. Eventually,
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 transcultural and ambivalent. For that purpose,
it will first set up the theoretical framework and then analyse the text
in light of the theories.