What is Post

Colonialism?
“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us
and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but
English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to
refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of
science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit
vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population”.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835)

Definition
 The term ‘‘Postcolonialism’’ refers broadly to the ways in which race,
ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are represented in the
modern era, after many colonized countries gained their
independence. However, some critics use the term to refer to all
culture and cultural products influenced by imperialism from the
moment of colonization until the twenty-first century.
 Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions between
European nations and the peoples they colonized, including internal
colonization.
 Historical Background
 At its peak in the late nineteenth century the British Empire
consisted of ‘‘more than a quarter of all the territory on the
surface of the earth: one in four people was a subject of Queen
Victoria.’’
 During the twentieth century, countries such as India, Jamaica,
Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Australia won
independence from their European colonizers.
 The literature and art produced in these countries after
independence became the subject of “Postcolonial Studies”.
 This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been
developing ever since. Edward Said’s critique of Western
representations of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book,
Orientalism, is a seminal text for postcolonial studies and has
spawned a host of theories on the subject.
 Other significant works:
 Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall
Apart (1958), Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1992),
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Jamaica Kincaid’s
A Small Place (1988), Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits
(1982), J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace
(1990)
Motives Behind Imperialism
 1. Economic
 Though liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo were skeptical of imperialism’s
economic benefits, arguing that it only benefited a small group but never the nation as a whole.
 Marxists, especially Lenin and Bukharin, saw imperialism as a late stage of capitalism.
 2. Securing the homeland:
 A second and related motive has been (and still is) the security of the home state.
 3. Survival of the Fittest:
 A third motive is related to various versions of social Darwinism. Figures such as Machiavelli,
Bacon, Hitler, and Mussolini saw imperialism as part of the natural struggle for survival through
domination.
 4. “White man’s Burden”:
 The final motive, propounded by figures such as Rudyard Kipling (in poems such as “The White
Man’s Burden”) and questioned by writers such as Conrad, rests on moral grounds: imperialism
is a means of bringing to a subject people the blessings of a superior civilization, and liberating
them from their benighted ignorance. Clearly, much of this rationale rests on Western
Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress.
 Landmarks
 The year 1950 saw the publication of seminal texts of postcolonialism:
 Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme
 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
 In 1958 Chinua Achebe published his novel Things Fall Apart.
 Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth followed in 1961.
 Edward Said’s landmark work Orientalism appeared in 1978.
 More recent work includes:
 The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
 Gayatri Spivak’s The Post-Colonial Critic (1990)
 as well as important work by Abdul Jan Mohamed, and Homi Bhabha.
 These critics used the term postcolonial in a comprehensive sense, “to
cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment
of colonization to the present day,” on account of the “continuity of
preoccupations” between the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Aims of the Approach

• Writing back: To reexamine the history of colonialism

from the perspective of the colonized.

Postcolonial • Analyzing the discourses of power: To determine the

economic, political, and cultural impact of

criticism has colonialism on both the colonized peoples and the

colonizing powers.

a number • To analyze the process of decolonization.

• Analyzing the subversive discourses: To participate in

of aims: the goals of political liberation, which includes equal

access to material resources, the contestation of
forms of domination, and the articulation of political
and cultural identities.
Issues: How to React, Postcolonial Discourse
 1. Early voices of anti-imperialism stressed the need to develop or return to
indigenous literary traditions so as to exorcize their cultural heritage of the
specters of imperial domination.
 2. Other voices advocated an adaptation of Western ideals toward their own
political and cultural ends.
 The fundamental framework of postcolonial thought has been furnished by the Marxist
critique of colonialism and imperialism, which has been adapted to their localized
contexts by thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Gayatri Spivak.
 The Postcolonial discourse (Oppositional and subversive):
 This struggle of postcolonial discourse extends over the domains of gender, race,
ethnicity, and class.
 Postcolonial discourse potentially embraces, and is intimately linked with, a broad
range of dialogues within the colonizing powers, currently addressing various forms of
“internal colonization” as treated by minority studies of various kinds such as African-
American, Native American, Latin American, and women’s studies.
Projects in Literary Studies: Revaluation of
Literary Canon

 One point of convergence of various postcolonial projects has been

the questioning and revaluation of the literary and cultural canon in
Western institutions, through what is loosely called “multiculturalism.”
 This reaction against the Western mainstream tradition was fostered
largely by the rise of French literary theory (post-structuralism), and
later by Cultural Materialism which insisted that the text was an
indirect expression and often a justification of the prevailing power
structure. This structure was inevitably a hierarchy in which the
voices of minorities (including other races), women, and the working
classes were suppressed. These voices now had to be heard.
 E.g. “I have never found one . . . who could deny that a single shelf
of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of
India and Arabia.” Macaulay 1834
Literature Constituting the Discourse of
Power
 constructions of Europe’s self-image (constitutive otherness),
resting on the Enlightenment project of rationality, progress,
civilization, and moral agency, were premised on the positing Serving the
Episteme of Power
of various forms of alterity or “otherness,” founded on
polarized images such as superstitiousness, backwardness,
barbarism, moral incapacity, and intellectual
impoverishment. Ontology and
Epistemology

 Discourses of colonization (also see Said’s Orientalism):

 1. Academic function
 2. Ontological and Epistemological functions
 3. serving the episteme of power: power/knowledge
Academic
 It is in profound recognition of this integral relationship
between the literary canon and cultural values that writers
such as the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o have written essays
with such titles as “On the Abolition of the English
Department” (1968)
East as the Laboratory of the West

• Islam: heresy, pagan

Medieval • Muslims: rich, vicious, monstrous, devil

worshipers, lustful

Europe • East the center of learning

• Main source: travel books, then books
speaking to books

• Backwardness
Renaissance • Muslims: poor, uncivilized, superstitious,

and the Age of

irrational, bestial, static
• Arabic chair at Oxford.

Enlightenment • The sun has departed the east toward west

 The • Resurgence of the exotic, rustic, and
the bizarre, a taste for excess and the
Romantic sublime
• Repressed desires projected on the
Period east

• Entrance of the western population

Victorian • The project complete: “the people are
universally and wholly corrupt, they are
Period as depraved as they are blind, and as
wretched as they are blind”
 Edward Said
 Edward Wadie Said born in Jerusalem to Palestinian parents. He was born on
November 1st, 1935 in Jerusalem which at the time of his birth was the British
mandate of Palestine.
 As a boy Said’s home was split between Jerusalem and Cairo. Said spent most of his
working life working at Columbia University as Professor of English and Comparative
Literature he reached the rank of University Professor in 1992. He also taught at
Harvard, Yale and John Hopkins. Said devoted the first thirty years of his life to
education, and it wasn’t until 1967 that he took interest in the politics of his
homeland.
 Said has written around twenty books, these writings have been translated into 26
different languages.
 In 1999 Edward Said won the New Yorker Prize for non fiction for his book Out of
Place.
Important Themes
I. Orientalism and Imperialism
Orientalism

 Orientalism means the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and
cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars.

 Orientalism by Edward Said is a cononical text of cultural studies in

which he challenges the concept of orientalism or the difference
between east and west.
 Occidental : connected with Western part of the world, especially
Europe and America
 Oriental : connected with or typical of Eastern part of the world.
Where is the Orient?

 For western Europe, (primarily Britain and France) as well as America

the ‘orient’ is the Whole of the rest of the world, the ‘other.’ this is a
huge area encompassing, the middle east, Asia and China. Said
could not understand how one generalization could be used to
refer to more than half of the globe.

 The orient was often see as the weak, the feminine and the
defenselessl a place in need of protection and control from a more
intelligent more powerful western world.
 “The white man’s burden”
Division of the World

 Orient  Occident
 East  West
 Theirs  Ours
Generalization: defining the self
with the “other”
Orient Occident
 Lazy  Active
 Irrational  Rational
 Uncivilized  Civilized
 Crude  Sophisticated

• The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting
image, idea, personality, experience.
 Orientalism:

 1. Academic function
 2. Ontological and Epistemological functions
 3. serving the episteme of power: power/knowledge
 Imperialism

 The Western part of the world, (i.e. Britain, France, etc.) claim land and property from
the Eastern part (i.e. Australia, India, Africa, etc.)

 To quote Edward Said, “As I shall be using the term, ‘imperialism’ means the practice,
the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant
territory; ‘colonialism’, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the
implanting of settlements on distant territory.”
Dealing with the Orient by imperialism:

 dealing with it by making statements about it,

 authorizing views of it,
 describing it,
 teaching it,
 settling it,
 ruling over it

In short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having

authority (imperialism) over the Orient.
 Important Themes: II. Race
 Racial discrimination is a theme that runs throughout
postcolonial discourse, as white Europeans consistently
emphasized their superiority over darker-skinned people.
 E.G. This was most evident in South Africa, whose policy of
apartheid was institutionalized in national laws. These laws
included the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act.
 The Groups Areas Act limited black access to areas reserved for
whites. The only blacks permitted in these areas were workers,
who first had to apply for state permission.
 The Population Registration Act categorized Africans into racial
groups, which were based upon a person’s appearance,
education, and manners. All Africans had to carry identity
papers containing a photograph, fingerprints, and work history.
Strict penalties were meted out if a person could not produce a
passbook.
Important Themes: III. Language

 Language In occupied countries, colonizers often controlled their

subjects through imposing their language upon them and forbidding
them to speak their own. Educational systems enforced this imposed
restriction. Postcolonial writers address the issue of language in various
ways:
 Hybrid languages that underscores the fractured nature of the colonized
mind.
 Native language: Others, such as wa Thiong’o, turned away from English to
write exclusively in Gikuyu. wa Thiong’o argues that continued use of English
only helps Africans to forget their own precolonial past.
 Fragmented language: Silko in Ceremony, intersperses a conventional
Anglophone narrative with Indian folk legends to create a novel that
underscores how Native Americans have to create a coherent whole out of
disparate ways of seeing, describing, and being in the world.
 Important Themes: IV. Identity
 In their desire to reclaim a past that had been taken from
them, postcolonial writers often address the question of
identity, either implicitly or explicitly in their work. However,
doing so often requires using the language of the
colonizers, which in itself complicates the drive to become
the person they thought they were or should have
become.
 Hybridity: The inability to return to a past now gone forever
is a consequence of the notion of hybridity. Hybridity refers
to the admixture of practices and signs from the colonizing
and colonized cultures; it is a central fact of the
postcolonial experience and is evident in almost all
postcolonial texts.
 Colonizers are as much a part of the colonized as the
colonized are of the colonizers. This cross-fertilization of cultures
can be positive as well as dangerous, and writers often show
an ambivalent attitude towards the phenomenon.
Style: Point of View
 Postcolonial literature challenges status quo Western points of
view through using narrators who represent previously
silenced or oppressed people. Since much literature from
colonized countries was written from the colonizers’—usually
male—point of view, it’s not surprising that much postcolonial
literature employs narrators who themselves are doubly
oppressed, being both colonized by ‘‘outsiders’’ and being
women.
Style: Narration
 Many postcolonial works adopt a postmodern approach to
storytelling. Postmodern narration, in this sense, refers to the use of
different points of view, multiple narrators, and blending of styles
and genres to describe events and action.
 With its hyper self-reflexivity, its often fractured and disjointed
relaying of action, and its play on language, postmodern narration
makes sense for postcolonial writers, many of whom are attempting
to subvert colonial representations of their world and traditions.
Style: Foregrounding the Setting
 Setting refers to time, place, and culture in which the
action of a story takes place. Features include
geographic location, characters’ physical and mental
environments, cultural attitudes, or the historical time of
the action.
 The setting for postcolonial literature varies from country
to country, writer to writer, although a good many of
the novels are set after the countries have declared
their independence from Great Britain. Kincaid’s A
Small Place, for example, chronicles life after Antigua
won the right to self-governance.