A Postcolonial Feminist Perspective of Sherman Alexie’s Short Story “The Search Engine”

Abstract

The present paper aims to analyze a postcolonial feminist perspective of Sherman Alexie’s short story “The Search of Engine” in the Native American context. According to Postcolonial feminist perspective being a universal entity or group, women must be defined on the basis of their gender not on the basis of their social status, race, color, and ethnicity or on the basis of sexual preference. Its  main aim is to focus its attention on the experiences of women in the Western and former colonized cultures to give an account of how the nonwestern or the non-white women in these colonies face racism and that how are they affected politically, economically and culturally by the colonialism where women are often misrepresented, oppressed and marginalized. The paper aims to address the question that how Corliss, the leading character in the short story, struggles to survive in the Native American culture and that how she is underestimated by the social factors. The paper is qualitative in nature as it deals with the behaviors and day today experiences of Corliss. Gayatri Spivak (1985, 1988)’s postcolonial feminist literary criticism has been applied to highlight the importance of women in the colonized cultures as she believes that women in these cultures are mal-treated, marginalized and silenced and by applying her concept the writer has explored the issues of non-native American women among the Native-American people who are also under the influence of postcolonialism. The study highlights Corliss as a highly educated woman with having an excellent taste for reading of English literary works, possess a pride on her entity as Indian-ness that is unacceptable to her family. Her literacy and attitude towards the Native American and Indians reveals a unique postcolonial feminist perspective in the story.

Keywords: post colonialism, feminist perspective, White or Native  Amerians, Non-Native or Non –White Americans