Manifestation and Translation of Power Relationship in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Authors : Esra Melek Demir Eryiğit, Halil İbrahim Balkul, Mesut Kuleli
Pages : 84-102
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Publication Date : 2025-06-30
Article Type : Research Paper
Abstract :The extent of power one party exercises over the other in any social relationship exerts its influence on the signs and syntax conventions used in contexts. In addition to the socially normative manifestation of power relationships, literary texts are also among the media through which the reading public can observe the effect of power a character holds in addressing the supposedly less powerful. Power relationships and their definitive role in the production of a context by a character could be well-observed in postcolonial literature. With the colonizer attempting to exploit the valuables and the human labor of the colonized lands, social construction of power manifests itself more explicitly than an implicit narration of social mishaps. This study sets out to identify the power relationships between the characters in the novel titled Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe from the perspective of postcolonial literary criticism, followed by a discussion of the source of power each character holds in varying degrees. The analysis of the contexts with power relationship demonstrates that the binary oppositions of colonizer-colonized, white-black, and male-female favor the former elements, portraying them as the oppressors to the latter category. The contexts identified in the source text are further compared to two target texts in Turkish through the “Systematics of Designification” by Öztürk Kasar (2021) with a view to the evaluation of translation of contexts with unbalanced and socially constructed power relationship. The results of the evaluation yield preservation of the meaning as well as meaning transformations in target texts, which are discussed in relevance to the resulting signification of the signs of power for the target readers.
Keywords : Postkolonyal yazın eleştirisi, yazınsal çeviri, güç ilişkileri, Chinua Achebe, kolonyal söylem.

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