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.