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Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the
human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands.
The name postcolonialism is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods, and may be thought of
as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism. The ambiguous term
colonialism may refer either to a system of government or to an ideology or world view underlying that system—in general
postcolonialism represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after
colonialism. The term postcolonial studies may be preferred for this reason.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions.
On a simple level, it may seek through anthropological study to build a better understanding of colonial life from the point of view of
the colonized people, based on the assumption that the colonial rulers areunreliable narrators.
On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political powerrelationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism,
including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with
contemporary history and critical theory, and may also draw examples from history, political science, philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, and human geography.
Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature and
Christian thought.
Contents
Purpose and basic concepts
Colonialist discourse
Postcolonial identity
Difficulty of definition
Notable theoreticians
Frantz Fanon
Edward Said
Gayatri Spivak
Homi K. Bhabha
R. Siva Kumar
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Derek Gregory
Amar Acheraiou
Postcolonial literary study
Application of postcolonial theory
The Middle East
Africa
Asia
Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)
Criticism of postcolonial theory
Undermining of universal values
Fixation on national identity
Literature of postcolonialism
Postcolonial works of fiction
See also
References
Further reading
External links
Postcolonialism is aimed at destabilizing these theories (intellectual and linguistic, social and economic) by means of which
colonialists "perceive", "understand", and "know" the world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern
peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society and
economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-thembinary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.
Colonialist discourse
Colonialism was presented as "the extension of civilization", which ideologically
justified the self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over
the non-Western world. This concept was espoused by Joseph-Ernest Renan in La
Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), whereby imperial stewardship was thought
to affect the intellectual and moral reformation of the coloured peoples of the lesser
cultures of the world. That such a divinely established, natural harmony among the
human races of the world would be possible, because everyone has an assigned
cultural identity, a social place, and an economic role within an imperial colony.
Thus:
Postcolonial identity
Decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that is based on cultural interactions between different identities (cultural,
national, and ethnic as well as gender and class based) which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society. In
postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyzes the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the
subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the colonizer; how such cultural resistance complicated the
establishment of a colonial society; how the colonizers developed their postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively
employs the Us-and-Them binary social relation to view the non-W
estern world as inhabited by The Other.
The neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity relegating the decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, to an
imaginary place, such as "theThird World", an over-inclusive term that usually comprises continents and seas, i.e. Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and Oceania. The postcolonial critique analyzes the self-justifying discourse of neocolonialism and the functions
(philosophic and political) of its over-inclusive terms, to establish the factual and cultural inaccuracy of homogeneous concepts, such
as "the Arabs" and "the First World", "Christendom" and "the Ummah", actually comprise heterogeneous peoples, cultures, and
[5]
geography, and that accurate descriptions of the world's peoples, places, and things require nuanced and accurate terms.
Difficulty of definition
As a contemporary-history term, postcolonialism occasionally is applied temporally, to denote the immediate time after colonialism,
which is a problematic application of the term, because the immediate, historical, political time is not included in the categories of
critical identity-discourse, which deals with over-inclusive terms of cultural representation, which are abrogated and replaced by
postcolonial criticism. As such, the terms postcolonial and postcolonialism denote aspects of the subject matter, which indicate that
the decolonized world is an intellectual space "of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and of
liminalities".[6]
In Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996), Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarified the denotational functions,
among which:
The term post-colonialism is also applied to denote the Mother Country's neocolonial control of the decolonized country, effected by
the legalistic continuation of the economic, cultural, and linguistic power relationships that controlled the colonial politics of
knowledge (the generation, production, and distribution of knowledge) about the colonized peoples of the non–Western world.[6][8]
The cultural and religious assumptions of colonialist logic remain active practices in contemporary society, and are the basis of the
[9]
Mother Country's neocolonial attitude towards her former colonial subjects—an economical source of labour and raw materials.
Notable theoreticians
Frantz Fanon
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon analyzed and medically described the nature of
colonialism as essentially destructive. Its societal effects—the imposition of a subjugating colonial identity—are harmful to the
mental health of the native peoples who were subjugated into colonies. Fanon wrote the ideological essence of colonialism is the
systematic denial of "all attributes of humanity" of the colonized people. Such dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental
violence, by which the colonist means to inculcate a servile mentality upon the natives. For Fanon the natives must violently resist
colonial subjugation.[10] Hence, Fanon describes violent resistance to colonialism as a mentally cathartic practice, which purges
colonial servility from the native psyche, and restores self-respect to the subjugated. Thus, Fanon actively supported and participated
in the Algerian Revolution (1954–62) for independence from France as a member and representative of the Front de Libération
Nationale.[11]
As postcolonial praxis, Fanon's mental-health analyses of colonialism and imperialism, and the supporting economic theories, were
partly derived from the essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), wherein Vladimir Lenin described colonial
imperialism as a degenerate form of capitalism, which requires greater degrees of human exploitation to ensure continually consistent
profit for investment.[12]
Edward Said
Cultural critic Edward Said is considered by E. San Juan, Jr. as "the originator and inspiring patron-saint of postcolonial theory and
discourse" due to his theory of Orientalism explained in his 1978 book of the same name.[13] To describe the us-and-them "binary
social relation" with which Western Europe intellectually divided the world—into the "Occident" and the "Orient"— Said developed
the denotations and connotations of the term Orientalism (an art-history term for Western depictions and the study of the Orient).
Said's concept (which he also termed "Orientalism") is that the cultural representations generated with the us-and-them binary
relation are social constructs, which are mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each other, because each exists on
account of and for the other.[14]
Notably, "the West" created the cultural concept of "the East", which according to Said allowed the Europeans to suppress the peoples
of the Middle East, of the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia, from expressing and representing themselves as discrete peoples and
cultures. Orientalism thus conflated and reduced the non–Western world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as "the East".
Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the us-and-them Orientalist paradigm allowed European scholars to
represent the Oriental World as inferior and backward, irrational and wild, as opposed to a Western Europe that was superior and
progressive, rational and civil—the opposite of the Oriental Other. In "Edward Said: The Exile as Interpreter" (1993), about Said's
Orientalism (1978), A. Madhavan said that "Said's passionate thesis in that book, now an 'almost canonical study', represented
Orientalism as a 'style of thought' based on the antinomy of East and West in their world-views, and also as a 'corporate institution'
for dealing with the Orient."[15]
In concordance with the philosopher Michel Foucault, Said established that power and knowledge are the inseparable components of
the intellectual binary relationship with which Occidentals claim "knowledge of the Orient". That the applied power of such cultural
knowledge allowed Europeans to rename, re-define, and thereby control Oriental peoples, places, and things, into imperial
colonies.[8] The power–knowledge binary relation is conceptually essential to identify and understand colonialism in general, and
European colonialism in particular. Hence,
To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and
culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by them,
or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's grander interpretive activity
.
With this described binary logic, the West generally constructs the Orient subconsciously as its alter ego. Therefore, descriptions of
the Orient by the Occident lack material attributes, grounded within land. This inventive, or imaginative interpretation subscribes
female characteristics to the Orient and plays into fantasies that are inherent within the West's alter ego. It should be understood that
this process draws creativity, amounting an entire domain and discourse.
In Orientalism, Said mentions the production of "philology [the study of the history of languages], lexicography [dictionary making],
history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing and lyric poetry" (p. 6). Therefore, there is an entire industry that
exploits the Orient for its own subjective purposes that lack a native and intimate understanding. Such industries become
institutionalized and eventually become a resource for manifest Orientalism, or a compilation of misinformation about the Orient.
The ideology of Empire was hardly ever a brute jingoism; rather, it made subtle use of reason, and recruited science
and history to serve its ends. -Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient (p. 6)
These subjective fields of academia now synthesize the political resources and think-tanks that are so common in the West today.
Orientalism is self-perpetuating to the extent that it becomes normalized within common discourse, making people say things that are
[18]:49–52
latent, impulsive, or not fully conscious of its own self.
Gayatri Spivak
In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term subaltern, the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
cautioned against assigning an over-broad connotation. She argues:
[…] subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for The Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the
pie. […] In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a
space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern.
[…] Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by
being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern' […] They
should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of
the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves
subaltern.
— Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South
Africa (1992) [19]
Spivak also introduced the terms essentialism and strategic essentialism to describe the social functions of postcolonialism. The term
essentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to reviving subaltern voices in ways that might (over) simplify the cultural
identity of heterogeneous social groups and, thereby, create stereotyped representations of the different identities of the people who
compose a given social group. The term strategic essentialism denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the praxis of
discourse among peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can occasionally be applied—by the so-described people—to facilitate the
subaltern's communication in being heeded, heard, and understood, because a strategic essentialism (a fixed and established subaltern
identity) is more readily grasped, and accepted, by the popular majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important
distinction, between the terms, is that strategic essentialism does not ignore the diversity of identities (cultural and ethnic) in a social
group, but that, in its practical function, strategic essentialism temporarily minimizes inter-group diversity to pragmatically support
the essential group-identity.[5]
Spivak developed and applied Foucault's term epistemic violence to describe
the destruction of non–Western ways of perceiving the world and the resultant
dominance of the Western ways of perceiving the world. Conceptually,
epistemic violence specifically relates to women, whereby the "Subaltern
[woman] must always be caught in translation, never [allowed to be] truly
expressing herself", because the colonial power's destruction of her culture
pushed to the social margins her non–Western ways of perceiving,
understanding, and knowing the world.[5]
Moreover, Spivak further cautioned against ignoring subaltern peoples as "cultural Others", and said that the West could progress—
beyond the colonial perspective—by means of introspective self-criticism of the basic ideals and investigative methods that establish
a culturally superior West studying the culturally inferior non–Western peoples.[5][21] Hence, the integration of the subaltern voice to
the intellectual spaces of social studies is problematic, because of the unrealistic opposition to the idea of studying "Others"; Spivak
rejected such an anti-intellectual stance by social scientists, and about them said that "to refuse to represent a cultural Other is salving
your conscience […] allowing you not to do any homework."[21] Moreover, postcolonial studies also reject the colonial cultural
depiction of subaltern peoples as hollow mimics of the European colonists and their Western ways; and rejects the depiction of
subaltern peoples as the passive recipient-vessels of the imperial and colonial power of the Mother Country
. Consequent to Foucault’s
philosophic model of the binary relationship of power and knowledge, scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective, proposed that
anti-colonial resistance always counters every exercise of colonial power
.
Homi K. Bhabha
In The Location of Culture (1994), the theoretician Homi K. Bhabha argued that viewing the human world as composed of separate
and unequal cultures, rather than as an integral human world, perpetuates the belief in the existence of imaginary peoples and places
—"Christendom" and "The Islamic World", "The First World", "The Second World", and "The Third World". To counter such
linguistic and sociologic reductionism, postcolonial praxis establishes the philosophic value of hybrid intellectual spaces, wherein
ambiguity abrogates truth and authenticity; thereby, hybridity is the philosophic condition that most substantively challenges the
ideological validity of colonialism.[22]
R. Siva Kumar
In 1997, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of India's Independence, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism was
an important exhibition curated byR. Siva Kumar at the National Gallery of Modern Art.[23]
In his catalogue essay, Kumar introduced the term Contextual Modernism, which later emerged as a postcolonial critical tool in the
understanding of Indian art, specifically the works of Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramkinkar Baij and Benode Behari
Mukherjee.[24]
Santiniketan artists did not believe that to be indigenous one has to be historicist either in theme or in style, and
similarly to be modern one has to adopt a particular trans-national formal language or technique. Modernism was to
them neither a style nor a form of internationalism. It was critical re-engagement with the foundational aspects of art
necessitated by changes in one’s unique historical position.[25]
In the postcolonial history of art, this marked the departure from Eurocentric unilateral idea of Modernism to alternative context
sensitive Modernisms.
The brief survey of the individual works of the core Santiniketan artists and the thought perspectives they open up
makes clear that though there were various contact points in the work they were not bound by a continuity of style but
buy a community of ideas. Which they not only shared but also interpreted and carried forward. Thus they do not
represent a school but a movement.
Several terms including Paul Gilroy’s counter culture of modernity and Tani E. Barlow's Colonial modernity have been used to
describe the kind of alternative modernity that emerged in non-European contexts. Professor Gall argues that ‘Contextual
Modernism’ is a more suited term because “the colonial in colonial modernity does not accommodate the refusal of many in
colonized situations to internalize inferiority. Santiniketan’s artist teachers’ refusal of subordination incorporated a counter vision of
modernity, which sought to correct the racial and cultural essentialism that drove and characterized imperial Western modernity and
modernism. Those European modernities, projected through a triumphant British colonial power, provoked nationalist responses,
[26]
equally problematic when they incorporated similar essentialisms.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty
In Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty charted the subaltern history of the Indian struggle for independence, and
countered Eurocentric, Western scholarship about non-Western peoples and cultures, by proposing that Western Europe simply be
.[27] [28]
considered as culturally equal to the other cultures of the world, that is, as "one region among many" in human geography
Derek Gregory
Derek Gregory argues the long trajectory through history of British and American colonization is an ongoing process still happening
today. In The Colonial Present, Gregory traces connections between the geopolitics of events happening in modern-day Afghanistan,
Palestine, and Iraq and links it back to the us-and-them binary relation between the Western and Eastern world. Building upon the
ideas of the other and Said's work on orientalism, Gregory critiques the economic policy, military apparatus, and transnational
corporations as vehicles driving present day colonialism. Emphasizing ideas of discussing ideas around colonialism in the present
tense, Gregory utilizes modern events such as the September 11 attacks to tell spatial stories around the colonial behavior happening
due to the War on Terror.[29]
Amar Acheraiou
Acheraiou argues that colonialism was a capitalist venture moved by appropriation and plundering of foreign lands and was
supported by military force and a discourse that legitimized violence in the name of progress and a universal civilizing mission. This
discourse is complex and multi-faceted. It was elaborated in the 19th century by colonial ideologues such as
Joseph-Ernest Renan and
Arthur de Gobineau, but its roots reach far back in history. In Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern
Literature and the Legacy of Classical Writers, Amar Acheraiou discusses the history of colonialist discourse and traces its spirit to
ancient Greece, including Europe’s claim to racial supremacy and right to rule over non-Europeans harboured by Renan and other
19th century colonial ideologues. He argues that modern colonial representations of the colonized as “inferior”, “stagnant” and
“degenerate” were borrowed from Greek and Latin authors like Lysias (440-380 BC), Isocrates (436-338 BC), Plato (427-327 BC),
Aristotle (384—322 BC), Cicero (106-43 BC), and Sallust (86-34 BC), who all considered their racial others – the Persians,
Scythians, Egyptians as “backward”, “inferior”, and “effeminate”.[30] Among these ancient writers Aristotle is the one who
articulated more thoroughly these ancient racial assumptions, which served as a source of inspiration for modern colonists. In The
Politics, he established a racial classification and ranked the Greeks superior to the rest. He considered them as an ideal race to rule
over Asian and other ‘barbarian’ peoples, for they knew how to blend the spirit of the European “war-like races” with Asiatic
“intelligence” and “competence”.[31]
Ancient Rome was a source of admiration in Europe since the enlightenment. In France, Voltaire (1694-1778) was one of the most
fervent admirers of Rome. He regarded highly the Roman republican values of rationality, democracy, order and justice. In early-
eighteenth century Britain, it was poets and politicians like Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Glover (1712 –1785) who were
vocal advocates of these ancient republican values.
It was in the mid-eighteenth century that ancient Greece became a source of admiration among the French and British. This
enthusiasm gained prominence in the late-eighteenth century. It was spurred by German Hellenist scholars and English romantic
poets: Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), and Goethe (1749-1832), Lord Byron
(1788-1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821). These scholars
and poets regarded ancient Greece as the matrix of W .[30][32]
estern civilization and a model of beauty and democracy
In the nineteenth century when Europe began to expand across the globe and establish colonies, ancient Greece and Rome were used
as a source of empowerment and justification to Western civilizing mission. At this period, many French and British imperial
ideologues identified strongly with the ancient empires and invoked ancient Greece and Rome to justify the colonial civilizing
project. They urged European colonizers to emulate these “ideal” classical conquerors, whom they regarded as “universal
instructors”. For Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), an ardent and influential advocate of la “Grande France,” the classical empires
were model conquerors to imitate. He advised the French colonists in Algeria to follow the ancient imperial example. In 1841, he
stated: ‘what matters most when we want to set up and develop a colony is to make sure that those who arrive in it are as less
estranged as possible, that these newcomers meet a perfect image of their homeland….the thousand colonies that the Greeks founded
on the Mediterranean coasts were all exact copies of the Greek cities on which they had been modelled. The Romans established in
almost all parts of the globe known to them municipalities which were no more than miniature Romes. Among modern colonizers,
the English did the same. Who can prevent us from emulating these European peoples?’.[33] The Greeks and Romans were deemed
exemplary conquerors and “heuristic teachers”,[30] whose lessons were invaluable for modern colonists ideologues. John-Robert
Seeley (1834-1895), a history professor at Cambridge and proponent of imperialism stated in a rhetoric which echoed that of Renan
that the role of the British Empire was ‘similar to that of Rome, in which we hold the position of not merely of ruling but of an
educating and civilizing race.”[34]
The incorporation of ancient concepts and racial and cultural assumptions into modern imperial ideology bolstered colonial claims to
supremacy and right to colonize non-Europeans. Because of these numerous ramifications between ancient representations and
modern colonial rhetoric, 19th century’s colonialist discourse acquires a “multi-layered” or “palimpsestic” structure.[30] It forms a
“historical, ideological and narcissistic continuum,” in which modern theories of domination feed upon and blend with “ancient
myths of supremacy and grandeur”.[30]
To perpetuate and facilitate control of the colonial enterprise, some colonized people, especially from among the subaltern peoples of
the British Empire, were sent to attend university in the Imperial Motherland; they were to become the native-born, but Europeanised,
ruling class of colonial satraps. Yet, after decolonization, their bicultural educations originated postcolonial criticism of empire and
colonialism, and of the representations of the colonist and the colonized. In the late twentieth century, after the dissolution of the
USSR (1991), the constituent soviet socialist republics became the literary subjects of postcolonial criticism, wherein the writers
dealt with the legacies (cultural, social, economic) of the Russification of their peoples, countries, and cultures in service to Greater
Russia.[38]
Postcolonial literary study is in two categories: (i) that of the postcolonial nations, and (ii) that of the nations who continue forging a
postcolonial national identity. The first category of literature presents and analyzes the internal challenges inherent to determining an
ethnic identity in a decolonized nation. The second category of literature presents and analyzes the degeneration of civic and
nationalist unities consequent to ethnic parochialism, usually manifested as the demagoguery of "protecting the nation", a variant of
the Us-and-Them binary social relation. Civic and national unity degenerate when a patriarchal régime unilaterally defines what is
and what is not "the national culture" of the decolonized country; the nation-state collapses, either into communal movements,
espousing grand political goals for the postcolonial nation; or into ethnically mixed communal movements, espousing political
separatism, as occurred in decolonized Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; thus the postcolonial
extremes against which Frantz Fanon warned in 1961.
Regarding sociolinguistic interpretations of literary texts through postcolonial lenses we may refer to Jaydeep Sarangi's book, "Indian
Novels in English: A Sociolinguistic Study"(2005)
In the essay “Who Am I?: The Identity Crisis in the Middle East” (2006), P.R.
Kumaraswamy said:
Independence and the end of colonialism did not end social fragmentation and
war (civil and international) in the Middle East. [40] In The Search for Arab
"The Middle East" is the Western name for
Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (2004), Larbi Sadiki said that the countries of South-western Asia.
the problems of national identity in the Middle East are a consequence of the
Orientalist indifference of the European empires when they demarcated the
political borders of their colonies, which ignored the local history and the geographic and tribal boundaries observed by the natives,
in the course of establishing the Western version of the Middle East.
In the event, "in places like Iraq and Jordan, leaders of the new sovereign states were brought in from the outside, [and] tailored to
suit colonial interests and commitments. Likewise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed over to those [Europeanised colonial
subjects] who could protect and safeguard imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase." [41] Moreover, "with notable exceptions
like Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, most [countries] . . . [have] had to [re]invent, their historical roots" after decolonization, and, "like
its colonial predecessor, postcolonial identity owes its existence to force."[42]
Africa
In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa (1874–1914) proved to be the tail
end of mercantilist colonialism of the European imperial powers, yet, for the
Africans, the consequences were greater than elsewhere in the colonized non–
Western world. To facilitate the colonization the European empires laid railroads
where the rivers and the land proved impassable. The Imperial British railroad effort
proved overambitious in the effort of traversing continental Africa, yet succeeded
only in connecting colonial North Africa (Cairo) with the colonial south of Africa
(Cape Town).
Upon arriving to Africa, the Europeans encountered the native African civilizations
of the Ashanti Empire, the Benin Empire, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Buganda
Colonialism in 1913: the African
Kingdom (Uganda), and the Kingdom of Kongo, all of which were annexed by
colonies of the European empires;
imperial powers under the belief that they required European stewardship, as and the postcolonial, 21st-century
proposed and justified in the essay "The African Character" (1830), by G. W. F. political boundaries of the
Hegel, in keeping with his philosophic opinion that cultures were stages in the decolonized countries. (Click image
course of the historical unfolding of The Absolute.[43] Nigeria was the homeland of for key)
the Hausa people, the Yoruba people and the Igbo people; which last were among
the first people to develop their history in constructing a postcolonial identity. (See:
Things Fall Apart, 1958).
About East Africa, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote Weep Not, Child (1964), the first postcolonial novel about the East
African experience of colonial imperialism; in The River Between (1965), with the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–60) as political
background, he addressed the postcolonial matters of native religious culture, and the consequences of the imposition of Christianity,
a religion culturally foreign to Kenya and to most of Africa; and the essay Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (1986).
In postcolonial countries of Africa, the Africans and the non–Africans live in a world of genders, ethnicities, classes and languages,
of ages, families, professions, religions and nations. There is a suggestion that individualism and postcolonialism are essentially
discontinuous and divergent cultural phenomena.[44]
Asia
French Indochina was divided into five subdivisions: Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina,
Cambodia and Laos. Cochinchina (southern Vietnam) was the first territory under
French Control. Saigon was conquered in 1859. Then, in 1887, the Indochinese
Union (Union indochinoise) was established.
In 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc Ho Chi Minh wrote the first critical text against the
French colonization: Le Procès de la colonization française (French Colonization on
Trial)
Trinh T. Minh-ha has been developing her innovative theories about postcolonialism
in various means of expression, literature, films, and teaching. She is best known for
her film "Reassemblage", made in 1982, in which she tried to deconstruct
anthropology, as a "western male hegemonic ideology". In 1989 she wrote "Woman,
Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism", where she focuses on the
acknowledgement of oral tradition.
Osterhammel's The Dictionary of Human Geography uses the definition of colonialism as "enduring relationship of domination and
mode of dispossession, usually (or at least initially) between an indigenous (or enslaved) majority and a minority of interlopers
(colonizers), who are convinced of their own superiority, pursue their own interests, and exercise power through a mixture of
coercion, persuasion, conflict and collaboration".[47] The definition adopted by The Dictionary of Human Geography suggests that
the Structural adjustment programmes implemented by theWashington Consensus is indeed an act of colonization.
Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki said that such a common sociological problem—that of an indeterminate national identity—
among the countries of the Middle East is an important aspect that must be accounted in order to have an understanding of the
politics of the contemporary Middle East.[41] In the event, Ayubi asks if what 'Bin Abd al–'Ali sociologically described as an
[52]
obsession with national identity might be explained by "the absence of a championing social class?"
Literature of postcolonialism
Foundation works
Chinua Achebe
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie[53]
Ama Ata Aidoo
Mariama Ba
Giannina Braschi
Edwidge Danticat
Buchi Emecheta
Amitav Ghosh
Mohsin Hamid
Jamaica Kincaid
Ben Okri
Arundhati Roy
Salman Rushdie
Ousmane Sembene
Bapsi Sidhwa
Wole Soyinka
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Derek Walcott
Important works
German Edition: trans. Kathrina Menke, Vienna & Berlin: Verlag Turia & Kant, 2010.
Japanese Edition: trans. Kazuko Takemura, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995. by Trinh T. Minh-
ha
The Commonwealth, Comparative Literature and the World: wo T Lectures (1998), by Alamgir Hashmi. Islamabad:
Gulmohar.
Postcolonial Theory and the Arab–Israeli Conflict(2008), Ph. C. Salzman and D. Robinson Divine, Eds. Routledge.
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Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa(1988), A. JanMohamed.
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Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916), by Lenin.
Prospero and Caliban, the Psychology of ColonizationOctave Mannoni and P. Powesland.
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Discourse/Postcolonial Theory(1994), M. Baker, P. Hulme, and M. Iverson,Eds.
Beginning Postcolonialism(2010), by J. McLeod, second edition, Manchester University Press.
The Idea of Latin América" (2005), byWalter Mignolo.
Local Histories/Global designs: Coloniality(1999), by Walter Mignolo.
** "New Orientations:Post Colonial Literature in English" by Jaydeep Sarangi, Authorspress,New Delhi
Infinite Layers/Third World?(1989), by Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Under Western Eyes (1986), by Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
The Invention of Africa(1988), by V. Y. Mudimbe.
Dislocating Cultures (1997), by Uma Narayan.
Contesting Cultures(1997), by Uma Narayan.
"The Postcolonial Ghetto"(2010), by L Paperson.
Delusions and Discoveries(1983), B. Parry.
The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World(2014), by Richard Pine
Prem Poddar and David Johnson, ed. (2008).A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English .
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.ISBN 978-0-7486-3602-0. Retrieved 2016-02-23.
Postcolonial Student: Learning the Ethics of Global Solidarity in an English Classroom
, by Masood Ashraf Raja.
"Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality" (1991), inGlobalizations and Modernities(1999), by Aníbal Quijano.
"Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura de Nuestra América" (Caliban: Notes About the Culture of Our America, 1971), in
Calibán and Other Essays(1989), by Roberto Fernández Retamar
Culture and Imperialism(1993), by Edward Said [54]
Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World(1986), by Kumari Jayawardena.
Can the Subaltern Speak?(1988), by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
The Postcolonial Critic (1990), by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Selected Subaltern Studies(1988), by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak.
Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature(1986), by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
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See also
Ali Shariati
Amina Wadud
Audre Lorde
Burn! (1969), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Cultural cringe
Cross-culturalism
The Dogs of War (1980), directed by John Irvin
Ethnology
Fatima Mernissi
An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"(1975), by Chinua Achebe
Inversion in postcolonial theory
Leila Ahmed
Linguistic imperialism
Lila Abu-Lughod
Kimberle Crenshaw
Kecia Ali
Nation-building
Paulo Freire
Postcolonial anarchism
Postcolonial feminism
Postcolonial theology
Post-Communism
Ranajit Guha
Ranjit Hoskote
Robert J.C. Young
Saba Mahmood
Subaltern
Talal Asad
Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex,"The Atlantic [1]
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Further reading
Gregory, Derek (2009). Dictionary of Human Geography. Hoboken,NJ.: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-5083-7.
Fischer-Tiné, Harald (2011). "Postcolonial Studies". European History Online.
Hart, Jonathan; Goldie, Terrie (1993). "Post-colonial Theory". In Makaryk, Irene Rima; Hutcheon, Linda; Perron,
Paul. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars,erms. T Toronto, Canada: University of
Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-5914-7. Retrieved 14 November 2011.
Kumaraswamy, P. R. (March 2006). "Who amI?: The Identity Crisis in the Middle East".The Middle East Review of
International Affairs. 10 (1, Article 5)
Quayson, Ato (2000). Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?. Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-7456-1712-1. Retrieved 22 November 2011.
Sadiki, Larbi (2004). The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter
-Discourses. India: C. Hurst & Co.
Ltd. ISBN 978-1-85065-494-0.
Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0394428147.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1990)."Can the Subaltern Speak?"(PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January
5, 2012.
External links
Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature
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