Matters of Archives and Memories: Postcolonial Identities in mass cultural Products
by Giulia Crippa
pp. 160-186 Issue 14 ( 7,2) – July-December 2020 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2020.7.2.8
Abstract
Starting from a proposal of Cultural Studies, this paper analyzes some products of cultural industry, more specifically: the novel Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flannagan (2003) and Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay, first published in 1967, both in its version as a novel and in the two subsequent adaptations, first as a movie (Weir, 1975) and lately as a TV series of the same name (2018), available on streaming on the Amazon platform. We also focus on the BBC recent short series named Noughts + Crosses (2020), in which we observe the impossibility of representing “reverse racism”. These cultural products are observed through the prism of postcolonial theories. The paper identifies some issues related to the historical narrative produced through colonial archives and the silencing of other voices. It observes how the phenomenon of hybridization and cultural appropriation develops as a tool suitable for the construction of collective national identities in a postcolonial era of globalization.