Postcoloinalism

Postcolonial Novels

Postcolonial Theory

Heart of Darkness

Cambridge

Abeng

Disgrace

Americanah

Homi Bhabha

Edward Said

Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak

Frantz Fanon: "On National Culture"

Identity

Subaltern

Mimicry: the way in which hybridity expresses itself. A behavior, when the colonized people act in accordance with the behaviors of the colonizers. Neither pure obedience nor pure disobedience. #

Hybridity: a mixture of two (or more) cultural identities #

Orientalism: the West creates an identity for the East through writing about them. This identity is not necessarily accurate, and it is oppresses the East # # #

1st person narrative

3rd person omniscient narrator; free-indirect discourse

Rape

Racial Hierarchy #

The Hungry Tide

Changing time

Importance of History

Is discussed in

Is represented in

"The subaltern cannot speak" (Spivak, 104) Since the subaltern cannot speak, they must be characterized by the superior group.

Has no voice in:

Politics #

History

Sati/suttee

Very passive and oppressed # #

"White men saving brown women from brown men" (92-3) #

Native vs. Visitor

Colonizers vs. Colonized

Mary Louise Pratt: "Through Imperial Eyes"

Imperialism

The English Book

English Book: physical, literary embodiment of the colonizer's power over the colonized #

Ambivalence: in culture, a contradiction between 2 (or more) groups--mainly "us" vs. "them," which is inherently contradictory

"Creole Self-Fashioning": a more conscious idea of hybridity, gives the colonized people more agency than they may truly have

"Autoethnography": natives writing about themselves through the framework of European culture #

"Contact-Zone": culture doesn't just flow one way, there is an exchange between the colonizer and the colonized. This exchange makes it seem like the parties are on level ground, but they are not. #

Belatedness: something being a product of "colonial difference"

Assimilation #

Christiania as subaltern #

Female as subaltern # #

Ifamelu

Orient: "The East"

Occident: "The West"

National Culture: gained after a fight for liberation from the colonizer, when the colonized are able to come together politically and culturally after their fight for independence. #

"Colonized Intellectual": a colonized person who has been educated by the colonizer, but uses his/her education to fight against the colonizer. #

The idea that a group of people must have liberation from another group of people before they can build their own culture.

Cultural Identity #

Culture is the expression of a nation #

Imperialism: a politically powerful group asserting their dominance over other groups for their own territorial gain

Nation

Politics #

Moral dilemma in Lusibari with refugees/hospital funding

David Lurie's attitude towards women

Africa as a place of darkness

is similar to the idea of

There is no "right" way to go about colonization; annotations (in a Russian) in the novel's English book disrupt the authority that the book might have

Authorship and content don't really matter, Marlow focuses on the care that was taken of the book

Represents evidence of civilization in a place that seems like it couldn't sustain civilization

Characters

David Lurie

Lucy Lurie

Bev Shaw

Melanie Isaacs

Soraya

Agency # # # #

Representation #

Doesn't feel like she fits in anywhere, lack of true representation (in America and Nigeria)

Attempts to somewhat fit in with the cultures of wherever she is

Kurtz

Has given up some of his European culture (to survive)

Has no real voice in the novel

"like a vapor exhaled by the earth" (75)

Sati: the practice of widow sacrifice

Suttee: the English misconstruction of Sati (outlawed it without understanding the cultural significance behind it)

"The women wanted to die" (92-3) #

Creates and instills power dynamic

No voice

Brown women doubly oppressed

Passive

Widow sacrifice

No subjectivity

These two sentences legitimize each other

Englishness assumes a kind of purity

Emily as a narrator is very shielded in the ways she thinks about the world and the culture that she sees around her. #

Emily creates an identity for the Caribbean

Argues that one must resist and critique Derrida's view that one the third world discourse can only be understood if it assimilates to our discourse

Cambridge as a narrator was an attempt to insert unheard voices into the postcolonial setting

Claire attempts to find her own ethnic identity

Brings into question the definitiveness of beginnings and ends

Latent Orientalism: Assumed to be based on knowledge; stays the same throughout time

Manifest Orientalism: can change over time; based on views of the Oriental society

Kanai thinks he knows what's best for the Sundarbans

Tiger attacks are really personal for natives, while Piya feels bad for the tiger when people torture and kill it out of revenge #

Do tigers have agency?

Both examples of epistemic violence

Ifamelu's blog #

Side note: I had a node for race connected to everything on this map... however I removed it because the links were even more confusing than they are now. I would like to include that race has played an important role throughout the semester, in the theorists work and the novels we have read. Race and racial hierarchy are intrinsic to all of these works. #

Victimization

Coming-of-age sorry

Colonialism is a product of imperialism. The idea of something being "postcolonial" creates the assumption that the colonial era is over and that imperialism has ended.