Post-Colonial Criticism

Article 3: Postcolonial Literature

The publication of Edward Said's (an Egyptian writer and critic) Orientalism in 1978 sparks post-Collonial Literature.

Said was one of the first writers of non-European descent living in a former colonial nation to examine the impact of European empire.

such as European colonization of Africa and Asia and its attendant oppression and racism and the simultaneous tendency of Europeans to romanticise "the East".

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Postcolonial literature is sometimes inaccurately classified as writing from the "Third World."


The vast majority of postcolonial writers hail from the British Commonwealth. Writers from India, Africa, Australia, Canada, and the West Indies all fall under the aegis of postcolonial literature.

Major themes - struggles of indigenous peoples in the face of poverty and social and financial instability and cultural upheaval.

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Consideration when studying a postcolonial work

  1. What does it mean to be a postcolonial writer of European descent as opposed to those of native descent?
  1. How should we view the fact that postcolonial literature takes the form of traditional European literature rather than some indigenous storytelling tradition?
  1. What is the difference in experience between an Indian writer compared with a writer from Kenya, South Africa, or Canada and how does that influence the content of their work?
  1. What does it mean that most postcolonial literature is written in the language of the European former colonizer?
  1. What is the difference in experience and opportunity between women and men in a postcolonial nation?

Article 4: What is Postcolonial Literature?

Article 1: An Introduction to Post-Colonialism, Post-colonial Theory
and Post-colonial Literature

Post-Colonial Theory

Postcolonial literature is writing about the effects of imperialism from the time of colonization until now.

Article 2: Postcolonialism

Focusing on issues

It includes novels, poetry, and drama written during and after the British Raj in India and also in other formerly colonized countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica, Pakistan, and Singapore.

Issue of power

Issue of dominance

Key concerns of postcolonial literature

Issue of control

Issue in freedom

Issue in empowerment

Feminist critics explore

How different groups of people are represented

Whose voices are heard

Attitudes and values

Postcolonialism: Definition & Purpose

An academic discipline that analyses the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. It considers questions of national and ethnic identity, otherness, race and language during and after the colonial periods.

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To explore the consequences of colonisation from the starting point.

Connect indigenous people with their lands and places.

Show the worth of local cultures that were neglected during colonialism.

Tell the history of colonization from the viewpoint of those who were colonized.

Characteristics of postcolonial literature

Typically, the proponents of the theory examine the ways in which writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them the colonizers.

Descriptions that challenge the wrong ideas spread by the colonizers.

Postcolonial literary theory- based around concepts of otherness ad resistance

Postcolonial theory is a literary theory or critical approach that deals with literature produced
in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries.

Postcolonial literature often uses the language of the colonizers, but with a purposeful twist or variation to make it their own

Edward Said in Orientalism (1978)

The East is conceived as being everything that the West is not, e.g. The West is knowledgeable and the East is ignorant;

Western views of the East are the result of Western fantasies and assumptions.

Common stereotypes in Western colonial discourse:

Changing colonial forms of art to include local styles and themes

Racial stereotypes. Assumptions were often made about particular races, e.g. the violent Arab, the lazy Indian, etc.

Gender stereotypes. The Eastern male was portrayed as effeminate, and the Eastern female was stereotyped as sexually promiscuous.

Robert Cohen

diaspora: communities of people living in one country who acknowledge that 'the old country' has some claim on their loyalties and emotions.

They also examine ways in which the literature of the colonial powers is
used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized as inferior.

To oppose colonial representations and values.

Postcolonial criticism

Absence

there is a key absence which Canonical texts are seen as great literature. However it can be crucially silent on matters concerned with colonialism and imperialism.

The Literature of the Colonized

Living with Colonialism

Postcolonial criticism can comment on texts written by authors living within, or having experience of, countries that have been colonies.

Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness.

Migrant Writing

refer to the study of modern texts about countries that are
now independent but still hugely influenced by the colonial experience.

Also know as 'dispersed or diaspora writing'

Ethnicity and Race

refer more broadly to the study of literatures grouped by
their authors’ ethnicity and race.

Otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other ,
every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values

They are seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding opposites.

Colonizers also can hold the 'otherness' as they are coming from different culture and past from their own region

This colonization has given more inspiration on the people of the land to write and has its given inspiration more of the thought of the colonizers than the colonized.

Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, where there are opposition between the colonist and the people of the land pov.

Hence, it serves as a sense of unity of their culture while infusing that on the others.

There may be production that the colonized have to produce with the infusion of the colonist' influence or conception.

Highly related to hybridity: the integration of cultural signs and
practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures

Culture as a strategy of
survival is both transnational and translational.

The Literature of the Colonists

Every colony had an
emerging literature which was an imitation of but differed from the central British tradition.

The colonizers largely inhabited countries which absorbed the peoples of a number of other
heritages and cultures

Differences between colonial literature and post-colonial literature.

Colonialist literature (literature written by colonizers in the colonized country, on the model of the "home" country and often for the
home country as an audience)

While the post-colonial literature is about the continuation of past colonizers with relation to resistance and otherness on the specific local or land.

Major Post-Colonial Theorists

Homi K. Bhabba "The Commitment to Theory"

Edward W. Said Orientalism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”