A postcolonial Reading of Radwa Ashour’s A piece of europe

Orientalism, a prevalent critical approach in the late twentieth century, has helped critics and scholar to examine and identify the goal and purpose of Oriental writers and their works. Many writers around the world, particularly over the past few decades, have written their work from a postcolonial perspective to reflect not only historical and contemporary social realities but also their timeless inner conflicts. Radwa Ashour’s A piece of europe narrates the nature of the relationship between East and West through a postcolonial frame. This paper, using a descriptive and analytical methodology based on the postcolonial approach, attempts to analyze different concepts and ideas that the novel contains. The goal of the paper is to provide a better understanding of the novel’s narrative features, the representation of Western colonialism discourse in Egypt, the relationship between word arrangement and Western hegemony and authoritarianism, the reason behind characterizing the novel’s characters as lower-class ones, the importance of staging in different situations, the interaction between different voices in the novel that reflects the centrality or marginality of characters. The paper suggests that the Western mentality is most prevalent discourse in the novel, which marginalizes the Egyptian society and deprives people of the opportunity to play a role and recognize their rich indigenous culture. The interaction between the marginalized Egypt and the centralized west is reflected in author’s choice of words which challenge the interaction between the colonial West and the indigenous peoples. The central colonial discourse is wiped out through the efforts, demonstrations, and concerns of the lower classes of Egyptians. In this novel, Ashour not only passively reports history, but also dynamically - using the principles of postcolonial critique - depicts and analyzes important events in contemporary Egyptian history while preserving the literature of the work.Keywords: Postcolonial Criticism, Britain, Israel, Denationalization, Repression