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 believed 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 respond 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 the 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 hersef/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.
• Imaginary Homelands.
• 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.
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
You horrid slave, you can’t be trained to be good, and you’re
capable of anything evil! I pitied you, worked hard to teach you to speak, and taught you some new thing practically every hour. When you didn’t know what you were saying, and were babbling like an animal, I helped you find words to make your point understandable.
But you had bad blood in you, no matter how much you learned,
and good people couldn’t stand to be near you. So you got what you deserved, and were locked up in this cave, which is more fitting for the likes of you than a prison would be (Act 1, Scene 2)
•Prospero first relied on Caliban to teach him about life on to island, but never saw him as an equal. Prospero enslaved Caliban as punishment for attempting to rape Miranda, but even before, that Prospero looked down on him for not knowing English (or any language).
• I’ll show you where to get fresh water. I’ll pick berries for you. I’ll fish for you and get you plenty of firewood. The tyrant I’m
serving now can go to hell! I won’t get any more wood for him.
I’m serving you now, you wonderful man.
( Act 2, Scene 2, 166-170).
• Before Prospero came to the island, Caliban was living alone, unaware of society.
Caliban is enslaved by Prospero and feels unhappy. He offers his service and loyalty to Stephano. In the time that he is painfully enslaved by Prospero, has Caliban
internalized the idea that he must be a slave to someone for the rest of his life? Is he out of options?
Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest (1969)
• African poet Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest, a postcolonial
adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, explores the relationship between Prospero the colonizer and his colonial subjects Caliban and Ariel from the perspective of the colonized.
• While The Tempest mirrors the rationale of colonization
unconsciously, Cesaire overtly voices his politic views in A Tempest.
• His conception of Negritude is still the essence of this play. Focusing on the colonizer/colonized relationship, this paper tries to illustrate that in drawing his images of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, Cesaire shows in the play his attitude toward colonization and delivers his idea of Negritude through Caliban and Ariel.
• Therefore, A Tempest is Cesaire’s call for freedom and his ponderings on feasible ways laying ahead, which are interwoven in Caliban and Ariel’s struggle for freedom.
• Colonization exploits not only land but also minds of the colonized, which Cesaire thinks should be responsible for the blacks’ inferiority complex.
• He makes this clear in his characterization of Prospero, the colonizer of Caliban’s island. Unlike Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which
Prospero is a virtuous mage with uplifting characteristics that endows him the power to control nature.
• Cesaire’s Prospero presents above all as exploitative usurper of the island and Caliban and Ariel’s self-determination. He takes the island away from Caliban in spite of Caliban’s hospitality and friendliness, as Caliban accuses:
“Once you’ve squeezed the juice from the orange, you toss the rind away”! “…you threw me out of your house and made me live in a filthy cave. The ghetto!” (13)
• Caliban: “you’ve stolen everything from me, even my identity!” (15)
Prospero he has never treated Caliban as a human being. While in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban, an offspring of a witch and an incubus and thus hardly a human being, is called “savage”, “slave” and a “vile race”, the names Cesair’s Prospero gives to Caliban are more insulting: “ugly ape”, “a dumb animal, a beast”, “villain”
and “nothing but an animal”. This is how Western civilization looks at Africa: “the barbarian world”, which should not be given any dignity. Prospero insults Caliban’s mother (“a ghoul”). He shows no respect to the island (he “is anti-Nature” and
“pollutes it”) and the native language (“I don’t like it”).
• He teaches Caliban his language so that Caliban can understand his orders. He convicts Caliban of rape by putting “those dirty thoughts” (p13) in Caliban’s head that is innocent of Prospero’s values. Cesaire makes this voice heard most clearly through Caliban’s final long speech as an eloquent accusation against colonization:
Prospero… you’re an old hand at deception…
you ended up by imposing on me an image of myself:
underdeveloped … undercompetent that’s how you made me see myself!
And I hate that image…and it’s false! (p64)
• It is this false image that Cesaire wants to “decolonize” and resume his own identity and make it a pride. That is why Cesaire transforms Caliban from Shakespeare's ignorant savage to a colonized native with some black consciousness.
ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe (1619)
• ‘’I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (though mixed with my other afflicting thoughts), to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as completely as any lord of a manor in England.’’ (101)
• ‘’I fancied myself able to manage one, two or three savages, if I had them, so as to make them entirely slaves to me, to do whatever I should direct them, and to prevent their being able at any time to do me any hurt.’’
(197)
• ‘’I began to speak to him and teach him to speak
to me; and first, I made him know his name
should be Friday, which was the day I saved his
life; I called him so for the memory of the time; I
likewise taught him to say ‘’Master’’, and then
let him know that was to be my name; I likewise
taught him to say ‘’yes’’ and ‘’no’’ and to know
the meaning of them.’’ (203)
Telephone Conversation
The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey--I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather See for yourself?"
• A conversation between a white lady and an African man which casts a harsh light on the racism and prejudice which grips
society.
• The man is searching for a house and the land lady has named a considerable price, and the area where it is located is an impartial and not racially prejudiced. Also the man could enjoy his privacy as the land lady does not live under the same roof.
• The African man is ready to accept the offer, but maybe there has been a similar incident in his past, for he stops and admits to her that he is black, saying he prefers not to waste the time travelling there if she’s going to refuse him on that bounds.
• She disregards all formalities and asks him to explain how dark he is. The man first thinks he has misheard but then realizes that that is not true as she repeats her question with a varying emphasis.
• Feeling as if he has just been reduced to the status of a machine, similar to the telephone in front of him, and asked to choose
which button he is, the man is so disgusted that he can literally smell the stench coming from her deceptive words and see red everywhere around him.
• Ironically he is the one who is ashamed by the tense and awkward silence which follows, and asks for clarification thinking
sarcastically that the lady was really helpful by giving him options to choose from.
• He suddenly understands what she is trying to ask, and repeats her question to her stating if she would like him to compare himself with chocolate, dark or light? She dispassionately answers and his thoughts change as he describes himself as a West African Sepia as it says in his passport. The lady remains quite for a while, not wanting to admit to her ignorance, but then she gives in to curiosity and asks what that is. He replies that it is similar to brunette and she immediately clarifies that that’s dark.
• Now the man has had enough of her insensitiveness. He disregards all constraints of formality and mocks her outright, saying that he isn’t all black, the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands are completely white, but he is foolish enough to sit on his bottom so it has been rubbed black due to friction. But as he senses that she is about to slam the receiver on him, he struggles one last time to make her reconsider, pleading her to at least see for herself; only to have the phone slammed on him.
• The basis of the woman rejecting to lease her house to the man is because of the prejudiced notion that African Americans are a
savage and wild people. This idea is completely discredited by the ironical fact that throughout the poem the man retains better
manners and vocabulary than the woman, using words such as
“spectroscopic” and “rancid”, whereas she does not know what West African Sepia is and is inconsiderate in her inquiries. Using irony in this manner, Soyinka proves how absurd it is to judge the intellect or character of a man depending on the color of his skin only.
• The poem deals with a foul subject, that of racism and prejudice, in a lighthearted, almost comical manner.
• A most important device which Soyinka has used to highlight this sense of racism, which was previously widespread in western
society, is that of the telephone.
• Had the person been speaking face to face with the lady, this
whole conversation would never have taken place. She would have either refused outright, or would have found a more subtle way of doing so. The whole back and forth about ‘how dark’ the man is wouldn’t have occurred.
• Thus the telephone is used to make the issue of racism clear and prove how nonsensical it really is.
• Written in an independent style and delivered in a passively sarcastic tone, this poem is a potent comment on society.
Hybridity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
• ‘’My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care- Englishman I am (thoguh not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.
Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and no, that makes me restless ans easily bored’’. (3)
