The Postcolonial Theory and
Literature
COLONIALISM
• Important in defining the specific form of
cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years.
• Considered as the consequence of
imperialism, the implanting of settlements on distant territory.
• European post-Renaissance colonial expansion and the development of a modern capitalist
system of economic exchange meaning that colonies were established to provide raw
materials for the colonial powers.
Leading to a rigid hierarchy of economic, cultural and social differences between colonized and colonizer.
The idea of the ‘evolution of mankind’ and the survival of the fittest ‘race’, in the crude
application of Social Darwinism, went hand in hand with the doctrines of imperialism that evolved at the end of the nineteenth century.
• Enlightenment
• Civilization (a term with regard to increase of wealth and the refinement manner)
• Enlightenment thinkers, claiming that Europe is the most civilized place on the planet. The rest of the world is further down the scale of civilization, ranging from the underdevelopment that
Western Europeans perceived in Eastern Europe to the barbarity that they saw in the “Orient” and among the Amerindians.
The literature(s) of the colonists:
• Having moved into new landscapes, people of British heritage established new founding
national myths.
• Every colony had an emerging literature which was an imitation of but differed from the central British tradition, which articulated in local terms the myths and experience of a new culture,
• such literature also expressed that new culture as, to an extent, divergent from and even
opposed to the culture of the "home", or colonizing, nation.
What is Postcolonial (theory)?
• Focusing on the historical fact of European colonialism and the resulting consequences,
based on the philosophy, history, literature, anthropology, psychology, cross-cultural
research.
• the term “ ‘postcolonial’ is used to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present
day”.
• Post-colonialism marks the end of colonialism by giving the indigenous people the necessary authority and political and cultural freedom to take their place and gain independence by
overcoming political and cultural imperialism.
*Consisting of a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are
concerned with literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other
countries.
* Postcolonialism is a counter-ideology that excludes, negate the writing representing either British or
American viewpoints and concentrates on writing from colonized or formerly colonized cultures.
What is the difference between Post- colonialism and Postcolonialism?
•Post-colonialism means the period after any formerly colonized country
took its independence officially.
•Postcolonialism means the effects and the results of any sort of intervention or
domination over a country.
When exactly does the postcolonial begin?
• It began when the third world intellectuals arrived in the first world academe
Historical Development of Postcolonialism
• Postcolonialism develops from a long history of constrained cultural relations between
colonies in Africa, Asia and the Western world.
• During the nineteenth century, Great Britain emerged as the largest colonizer and imperial power, quickly gaining control of almost one quarter of the earth’s landmass.
• By the middle of the nineteenth century, many British people beleived that Great Britain was destined to rule the world and the British people were biologically superior to any other race.
• Such beliefs directly affected the ways that the colonizers treated the colonized. In this sense, forced labor of the colonized became the rule of the day, and thus the institution of slavery was commercialized.
• As a consequence of this hegemony, many Westerners subscribed to the colonialist ideology that all races other than white were inferior or subhuman.
• By the early twentieth century, England’s political, social, economic and ideological domination of its colonies began to disappear, which is also known as decolonization.
• By mid-century, India gained its independence and this development also ignited outrage of various scholars, writers, and critics concerning the social, moral, political, and economic conditions of third-world countries.
• Along with India’s independence, during the 1950s;
The ending of France’s long involvement in Indochina and Sartre, Albert Camus with their views on
Algeria; the publication of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Chinua Achebe’s novel
Things Fall Apart (1958).
• In 1960, the Caribbean writer George Lamming published The Pleasure of Exile, in which he
critiques William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective.
• The next year, Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a work that highlights the tensions or binary oppositions of white versus black, good
versus evili and rich versus poor.
• In particular, postcolonialism gained the attention of the West with the publication of Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978) and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s celebrated text, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- colonial Literatures (1989).
• Thanks to the publication of these two texts, the voices and concerns of many subaltern cultures were heard in both academic and social arenas.
Assumptions of Postcolonialism
• Similar to deconstruction and other
postmodern approaches to textual anaylsis, postcolonialism is a heterogeneous field of study. Morever, different cultures that have been subverted, conquered, and often
removed from history repond to the
conquering culture in multiple ways. For this reason, no single approach to postcolonial theory is possible or even preferable.
Highlighting postcolonialism’s major
concerns, all postcolonialist critics believe:
• European colonialism did occur.
• The British Empire was at the center of this colonialism.
• The conquerors not only dominated the physical land but also the ideology of the colonized peoples.
• The social, political, and economic effects of such colonization are still felt today.
FRANTZ FANON (1925-1961)
• One of the earliest postcolonial theorists. Born in the French colony of of Martinique, Fanon fought with the French in World War II and remained in France after the war to study medicine and
psychiatry.
• Fanon provides postcolonialism with two
influential texts: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.
• In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon asserts that colonized (the other) suffers «psychic warping»,
«collapse of ego» in the face of colonizer.
• As soon as the colonized (the blacks living in
Martinique) were forced to speak the language of the colonizer (the French), the colonized either
accepted or were coerced into accepting the collective consciousness of the French.
Consequently, the colonized will identify blackness with evil and sin and whiteness with purity and
rightenousness.
• In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being to
overcome the binary system in which black is evil and white is good.
• In his work, Fanon elaborates a Marxist-influenced postcolonial theory in which he calls for violent
revolution, a type of revolution in which Fanon
himself was involved when he became a participant and a spokesperson for the Algerian revolutionaries against France.
• From his analysis of social and economic control, Fanon developed his idea of a comprador class, or elite, who exchanged roles with the white colonial dominating class without engaging in any radical restructuring of society.
• The black skin of these compradors was ‘masked’
by their complicity with the values of the white colonial powers.
• Fanon argues that the native intelligentsia must radically restructure he society on the firm
foundation of the people and their values.
• According to Fanon, pre-colonial societies were never simple or homogeneous and that they
contained socially prejudicial class and gender
formations that stood in need of reform by a radical force. Unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into social
consciousness, the future would not hold liberation but an extension of imperialism.
• Neo-colonialism
• «Fact of Blackness» (1952) black consciousness)
Edward Said (1935-2003)
• A Palestinian-American theorist and critic, born ib Jerusalem, where lived with his family until the
1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• In his most influential work, Orientalism, Said
criticises the literary world for not investigating and taking seriously the study colonization or
imperialism.
• According to Said, 19th century Europeans tried to justify their territorrial conquests by propagating a manufactured belief called Orientalism.
• The creation of non-European stereotypes suggesting so-called Orientals were indolent, thoughtless, sexually immoral, unreliable, and demented.
• According to Said, colonialism was certainly dependent upon the use of force and physical coercion, but it could not occur without the
existence of a set of beliefs (discourse) that are held to justify the possession and continuing occupation.
• For Said, the discourse of Orientalism was much more widespread and endemic in European
thought. As well as a form of academic discourse it was a style of thought. As well as a form of
academic discourse it was a style of thought based on ‘the ontological and epistemological distinction between the «Orient» and the «Occident».
• The significance of Orientalism is that as a mode of knowing the other it was a supreme example of
the constitution of the other, a form of authority.
OTHER
• The ‘other’ is anyone who is separate from one’s self. The existence of others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own place in the world.
• The colonized subject is characterized as ‘other through discourses such as primitivism and
cannibalism as a means of establishing the binary separation of the colonizer and colonized and
asserting the naturalness and primacy of the colonizing culture and world view.
Gayatri Spivak
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in 1942
• Considered as one of the three co-founders of postcolonial theory.
• Her main work on the postcolonial theory was her
Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)
• Her work combines Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction.
• “My position is generally a reactive one. I am viewed by Marxists as too codic, by feminists as too male-
identified, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western Theory. I am uneasily pleased about this”
• She also coined the term ‘othering’ for the
process by which imperial discourse creates its
‘others’.
• Whereas the Other corresponds to the focus of desire or power in relation to which the subject is produced, the other is excluded or ‘mastered’
subject created by the discourse of power.
• Othering describes the various ways in which colonial discourse produces its subjects. In Spivak’s explanation, othering is a dialectical process because the colonizing Other is
established at the same time as its colonized others are produced as subjects.
Homi K. Bhabha
• Homi Bhabha was born in India and educated at Bombay University and Christ Church
College, Oxford.
• One of the leading contemporary voices in
postcolonial studies, built on Said’s concept of the other and Orientalism.
• In works such as The Location of Culture
(1994), Bhabha emphasizes the concerns of the colonized.
• Bhabha asserts that the colonized observes two somewhat distinct views of the world: that of the colonizer and that of herlsef/himself (the
colonized).
• To what culture does this person belong?
Seemingly, neither feels like home. Bhabha calls this feeling of homelessness, of being caught between two clashing cultures, unhomeliness, in-between.
• This feeling or perception of abandonment by both cultures causes the colonial subject to become a
psychological refugee.
• Bhabha engages with deconstructive practice in order to critique certain violent hierarchies: the West and the Orient, the center and the
periphery, the empire and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed, and the self and the other.
• Dismantling these binaries that conceptualize national cultures as stable, fixed and monologic, Bhabha argues that nationalities, ethnicities, and identities are dialogic, indeterminate, and
characterized by hybridity.
• Bhabha argues against the tendency to essentialize third-world countries into a
homogenous identity. One of Bhabha’s major
contributions to postcolonial studies is his belief that there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance.
• Bhabha wants the colonized writer must create a new discourse by rejecting all the established
signifieds created by the colonizers.
• Such writers must also embrace pluralism,
believing that no single truth or metatheory of history exists. To accomplish such goal, Bhabha consistently uses the tools of deconstruction
theory to expose cultural metaphors and discourse.
Questions/ key words for Postcolonial Criticism
• What happens in the text when the two culturess clash, when one sees itself as superior to another?
• Describe the two or more cultures
exhibited in the tex. What does each value?
What does each reject?
• Who in the text is “the Other”?
• How the worldviews of each of the cultures are described?
• What are the forms of resistance against colonial control?
• Demonstrate how the superior or privileged culture’s hegemony affects the colonized culture.
• How do the colonized people view
themselves? Is there any change in this view by the end of the text?
• Describe the language of the two cultures. How are they alike? Different?
• Is the language of the dominant culture used as a form of oppression? Suppression?
• Cite the various ways that the colonized culture is silenced.
• Are there any emergent forms of Postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
• How do gender, race, or social class function in the colonial and Postcolonial elements of the text?
What postcolonial critics do?
• They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook,
especially its general inability to emphasize across boundaries of cultural and ethnic
difference.
• They examine the representation of other
cultures in literature as a way of achieving this end.
• They show how such literature is often silent on matters concerned with colonisation and
imperialism. (J. Eyre, Mansfield Park)
• They foreground quesions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in relevant
literary works.
• They celebrate hybridity and cultural polyvalency, that is, the situation whereby individuals and
groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture.
The Tempest
CALIBAN:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (I.ii.366–368)
