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POSTCOLONIALISM : : - Coggle Diagram

- - - - examine the ways in which writers from
        colonised countries attempt to articulate and celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim
        them from the colonisers.
      - aims to oppose colonial representations and values; however,
        whether it fulfils these aims is a hotly debated issue
      - The realities and stereotypes of colonialism
  - - - Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) - the West represented the
        ‘Orient’/East as a mythic place of exoticism, moral laxity and sexual degeneration.
        
        East is opposite to the Western such as in term of knowledge & civilization
        
        Racial stereotypes. Assumptions were often made about particular races, e.g. the
        violent Arab, the lazy Indian, the inscrutable Chinaman, etc.
        
        Gender stereotypes. The Eastern male was portrayed as effeminate, and the Eastern
        female was stereotyped as sexually promiscuous.
- - - - Literary theory or critical approach dealing with literature produced in countries that were or are now colonies of another country. It may also cover literature written in or by citizens of colonising countries about colonies or their peoples.
      - Based: concepts of otherness and resistance
      - Theorists investigate how writers from colonised countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities in order to reclaim them from colonisers.
      - Edward Said’s book Orientalism as being the founding work.
      - Examine how the literature of colonial powers is used to justify colonialism by perpetuating images of the colonised as inferior.
      - focuses particularly on the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority
      - also deal with the
        way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes,
        traditions and so forth of colonized countries
    - - Problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness
        
        Otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other, every different from and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the colonising culture while rejecting its power to define.
        
        Colonized peoples are immensely diverse in their nature and customs, and since they are both created and evolving, they are also distinct from one another and from their own pasts, and should not be totalized or essentialized.
      - PCT was also built around the concept of resistance, whether as subversion, opposition, or mimicry
        
        The concept of resistance holds or can convey ideals like human freedom, liberty, identity, individuality, and so on that may not have been held, or held in the same manner, in the colonial culture's perspective of humanity.
      - There are complications and perplexities around how a colonial country might reclaim or rebuild its identity in a language that is now but was not its own language, and genres that are now but were not the genres of the colonised.
        
        Others may find it difficult to identify or regard the work as literature as a result.
      - The development (which may be wholly a Western idea) of hybrid and recovered cultures in colonial nations is uneven and varied, and may challenge concepts of order.
        
        The term 'hybrid' employed above alludes to the notion of hybridity, which refers to the integration (or mixing) of cultural signals and practises from colonising and colonised civilizations.
        
        "Integration" may be an overly ordered term to describe the range of stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, through which individuals adapt to the needs and possibilities of harsh or intrusive cultural impositions.
      - According to Homi Bhabha's piece in Greenblatt and Gun's Redrawing the Boundaries, culture as a survival strategy is both transnational and translational.
        
        It is transnational because modern postcolonial discourses are founded in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they be the intermediate passage of slaver and indenture, or the trip out of the civilising mission.
    - - Homi K. Bhabba "The Commitment to Theory"
      - Edward W. Said Orientalism
      - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
    - - Every colony had an emergent literature that imitated but differentiated from the core British tradition, defined in local terms the myths and experiences of a new culture, and portrayed that new culture as separate from, and even antagonistic to, the culture of the "home," or colonial, country.
      - Colonizers primarily inhabited countries that absorbed peoples of a variety of other heritages and civilizations (through immigration, migration, forced blending of distinct local cultures, etc.), and in doing so frequently modified to use the myths, symbols, and meanings of multiple traditions.
      - Colonial literature is an endeavour to copy, perpetuate, equalise, and write in accordance with British norms; postcolonial literature is typically (but not always) self-consciously a literature of otherness and resistance, and is created out of a distinct local experience.
  - - - the integration (or, mingling) of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures
      - The mixing of cultures; ex. double consciousness – one goes to an American
    - - dispersion of Jews outside of Israel from the sixth century B.C., when they were
        exiled to Babylonia, until the present time.
      - A dispersion of a people from their original homeland. b. The community
        formed by such a people:
- - - - "Postcolonial literature attempts to counteract their resulting alienation from their surroundings by restoring a connection between indigenous people and places through description, narration, and dramatization,"
    - - "Colonizers often depicted their colonial subjects as existing "outside of history" in unchanging, timeless societies, unable to progress or develop without their intervention and assistance,"
    - - "Postcolonial writers use detailed description of indigenous poeple, places, and practices to counteract or "resist" the streotypes, inaccuracies, and generalizations which the colinizers circulated in educational, legal, political, and social texts and settings,"
- - - - Examine the impact of
        European empire in a scholarly way
      - Issues
        
        Interest in literary criticism about how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism was portrayed in the
        writings and artistic works of residents of former colonies.
        
        Linked phenomena of
        European colonization of Africa and Asia and its attendant oppression and racism
        
        Simultaneous tendency of Europeans to romanticise "the East".
        
        Postcolonial literature is sometimes inaccurately classified as writing from the "Third World"
    - - Issues
        
        The educational systems and social structures tend to remains as the old European-dominated systems
        
        "a person of non-European descent in a country recently ruled by a
        non-native elite minority is another major theme"
        
        Semi-autobiographical works of fiction portray their authors' very real struggles as they try to balance their lives between the Europeanized 20th Century schools and cities
    - - Postcolonial writings can also use traits, tools, and techniques from other genres to tell stories
        
        Hence, it is "uncommon to have a satirical novel or a magical realist novel"