A voz da resistência em Monkey Beach, de Eden Robinson

Abstract

Colonialism is a term that refers to the cultural and economic exploitation caused by the European expansion, which victimized lots of people from other continents. The intensive ideological and social control, maintained through the colonizer discourse, was and still is an important tool of cultural submission as it creates an idea of inferiority and subordination of a culture upon another. Since the emergence of a greater awareness towards the subaltern condition of the people who faced the colonization process, resistance movements starts being shaped also in the struggle for the discourse appropriation. Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson represents the voice of the colonized people who is immersed in a reality determined by the cultural imposition, in a set settled by the Canadian First Nation peoples. The novel not only presents the every-day lives of the aborigine families in their reserves, but also problematizes the consequences of the European cultural assimilation and the governmental programs created for the native peoples. The conflicts between the old and the new, the native and the European, the cultural assimilation or cultural preservation permeate Monkey Beach narrative, and reveal the resistance nature through a discourse built in a context of contradictions. Thus, this work aims to analyze how the reflections of the European interventionist action in the Canadian native communities are expressed in Monkey Beach, and the discursive reaction to the cultural assimilation imposed by the white people. In order to substantiate this analyzes, it is used studies that are involved with Literature and its relations to the discourse, culture, Post-colonialism and resistance. Theorists like, Stuart Hall, Hommi Bhabha, Bill Aschcroft, Michel Foucault, Eduard Said, Édouard Glissant, Hellen Tiffin, and others, help to define the path of this work