“An Earth without Maps”: Antony Minghella's The English Patient

Abstract

This article attempts to look at Minghella’s film from a postcolonial perspective and tries to answer the following questions: How does Minghella challenge the dominant cliché ideas about the non-British people? How does Minghella present the hybridity of the postcolonial societies as inevitable? And how does he deal with the idea of transantionality in his film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel? The researchers probe the way Minghella, using cinematic techniques, debunks the dominant cliché features attributed to the non-Europeans, and subverts the status of a fixed binary separation between the English and the non-English people. Moreover, Minghella insists on the construction of a heterogeneous community in the two settings he depicts in his film, i.e. deserts of Africa, and the Italian monastery. The inscription of such heterogeneity, it is argued, functions as a strategy of resistance to the Euro-centric notions of national purity in the Western canon. Finally, Minghella presents transnationality as an ideal state hardly realizable in world affairs.

Key words: Antony Minghella; Heterogeneity; Hybridity; Michael Ondaatje; Postcoloniality; The English Patient; Transnationality