Conceptual Metaphor, Schema Disruption and Colonial Identity in Pakistani and South Asian Anglophone Fiction: A Cognitive Poetic Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates two specific cognitive mechanisms for encoding colonial subjectivity in Pakistani and South Asian Anglophone fiction: conceptual metaphor and schema disruption. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and cognitive stylistics form the theoretical framework; Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) are the literary corpus of the investigation. It demonstrates that postcolonial novelists creatively draw upon pre-established mappings and on contraventions of master cognitive schemas to fashion hybrid, de-essentialized and resistant subject positions. It focuses on extracts in each of the three texts, showing that conceptual metaphor in these novels cannot be simply equated with rhetorical figure, but must be considered as a cognitive strategy through which colonial reality, cultural hybridity and self-division are negotiated. The study provides three key claims: that the metaphor systems used by all three novelists target the Western liberal schema of autonomous selfhood for subversion; that schema disruption takes place at the levels of syntax, lexis and deixis; and that the cognitive mechanisms can be fruitfully aligned with postcolonial studies’ theoretical categories.