Lecture 1: Post-Colonialism and Post-colonial Literature

 

Objectives 

ü  This course aims to introduce the key concepts in postcolonial studies and the profound global effects of colonialism.

ü  Familiarize the students with postcolonial theory and invite them to write an argumentative essay reflecting issues such as decolonization, Indigenous culture, social representation of nation, and narration.

Key Learning outcome of the course: on achievement of this lecture, students/learners will be able to

Ø  explain the key concepts in postcolonial studies such as orientalism, mimicry, and hybridity.

Ø  Discuss the profound global effects of colonialism and relate history, language, location, and culture to the post-colonial theory.

Ø  Develop arguments and interpret literary text produced in previously colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

 Defining Postcolonialism:

The terms colonization and colonialism, according to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ultimately derive from the Latin “Colonia” meaning “farm” or “settlement”. It is often referred to Romans who inhabited other people’s lands with the reservation of their own citizenship. The reader would immediately recognize that the native people, the people of the land are not involved. It is the colonizers who are given priority over the people who populated the colonies before the colonizers even set foot on the colonies. It indicates a range of global cultural developments which occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War. It generally concurred that colonialism is a form of control or domination by individuals or groups over the territory of other individuals or groups.   Precisely what postcolonial is remains a fraught question. The “post” in Postcolonial can imply an end, actual or imminent, to apartheid, partition, and occupation. It hints at withdrawal, liberation, and reunification.  One way to orient postcolonialism would be to place it between Marxism and existentialism because many of its practitioners fuse

Political radicalism with a fundamental re-conception of the self, humanism, or revolutionary psychology.

Where does Post-colonial literature come from?

Post-colonial literature comes from Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and India. Many post-colonial writers write in English and focus on common themes such as the struggle for independence, emigration, national identity, allegiance, and childhood.

What is Post-colonial Criticism?

Postcolonial criticism is a critical approach that deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries. It may also deal with literature written in or by citizens of colonizing countries that take colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. Theories of ‘postcoloniality’ concern themselves with a wide range of metaphysical, ethical, methodological, and political problems. Issues addressed from this perspective include the nature of cultural identity, gender, investigations into concepts of nationality, race and ethnicity, otherness and resistance, the constitution of subjectivity under conditions of imperialism, and questions of language and power.

     The postcolonial theory became part of the critical toolbox in the 1970s, and many practitioners credit Edward Said’s book Orientalism as being the founding work. One of the earliest writers who brought attention to such issues was Frantz Fanon (1925–61), who sought to articulate the oppressed consciousness of the colonized subject. He argued that imperialism initiated a process of ‘internalization’ in which those subjected to it experienced economic, political, and social inferiority in a manner that affected their sense of their own identity.

     Typically, the proponents of the theory examine how writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonizers. 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. A tremendous variety of Postcolonial literature is dominant and omnipresent as its alternative understandings:   Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, (1958), depicts many different aspects such as identity crisis, dehumanism, hybridity, Otherness, exile, Eurocentricism or universalism, and the reversal or displacement of development.

       Postcolonialism impinges upon questions of nationalism and belongingness. One thinks here of Edward Said and Palestine and his seminal text Orientalism (1994). As a specific form of othering, Orientalism is another example of Eurocentrism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident."  Orient is a creation of the West whose purpose was and is to establish cultural and political supremacy over the Orient. Its role is hegemonic. Said’s Orientalism deals with the structuring of the Orient as the “Other.” As far as literature is concerned it refers to the discourse by the West about the East.  

    In his analysis of the relationship between the West and the East, Said directed attention to the pejorative stereotypes that the British, other Europeans, and, later, Americans created of the peoples unlike themselves to justify their military and/ or economic imperialism. Their view of the “other” world-“Orientalism”-is all too often colored by their own cultural, political, and religious orientations, leading them to describe those unlike themselves as being inferior, deceitful, backward, and even irrational.  The self, on the other hand, is depicted as good, civilized, upright, and moral. Said argues that the East is given all the negative characteristics that the West does not want to see in itself. Orientalism examines inter-cultural relations between the West and the Middle and Far East. Central to Orientalism is the mentality that the Westerner knows the colonized better than the colonized know themselves. This amounts to a sort of theft of another person’s identity.  

Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory:

The post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing countries which deal with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on how literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people in literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1982) may be a good illustration. This essay started a debate about using an alien language to render native realities and culture which continues even today. This was a very important essay because it deals with the after-effects of colonialism in the sphere of language literature and culture of a subject population. Language, as we know, is not just a medium of communication. It is a mental construct that carries within its structures a whole set of beliefs, practices, and memories or in short a whole culture. It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions, and so forth of colonized countries. This page addresses some of the complexities of the post-colonial situation, in terms of the writing and reading situation of the colonized people, and of the colonizing people.

      In the wake of the work of such figures as Fanon, writers have raised questions about the definitions of culture and humanity (see, for example, Bhabha 1990). Likewise, notions, such as those of ‘hybridity’ and diaspora, have been developed in order to emphasize the notion of an implicit cultural diversity underlying the identities of so-called ‘Third World’ or post-colonial cultures (see, for example, the writings of Stuart Hall or Homi Bhabha).

    Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) is often analyzed through a postcolonial lens for its portrayal of colonialism, race, and the exploitation of Africa by European powers. Some of its major themes can briefly be summed up as follows:  Eurocentricism and Exoticism (Africa as a primitive and savage place, a backdrop for European action rather than land with its own complex cultures); Colonial Critique and Ambiguity, Silencing of African Voices, (Achebe calls Conrad "a bloody racist" for this reason, highlighting the problematic nature of a novel that frames Africa as a space of darkness and chaos); Metaphor of Darkness and Its Implications (the colonial ideologies that justified the exploitation of African lands and peoples under the pretext of “civilizing” them);  Colonial Guilt and Complicity (Heart of Darkness an implicit critique of European colonialism. The novel exposes the horrors and moral bankruptcy of the imperial project, particularly through the character of Kurtz, whose experiences in Africa lead to his psychological breakdown. Through Marlow’s conflicted narration, Conrad might be pointing to the deep-seated hypocrisy and destructiveness of colonialism, even if he remains complicit in the racist frameworks that supported it).

Said believes that two “visions” emerge from the book Heart of Darkness.  The first view is that colonialism is still occurring in the world today.  The former colonial powers have retained authority in regions formerly known as colonies.  As Said states, “Westerners may have physically led their old colonies in Africa and Asia, but they retained them not only as markets but as locales on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually. ‘Show me the Zulu Tolstoy’, as one American intellectual has recently put it” (Said, 374).  The second “vision” that emerges from Heart of Darkness is that of colonialism being of a specific time and place and like all other forms of government or rule would eventually come to an end. Said describes this vision below,

Conrad does not give us the sense that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism: the natives he wrote about in Africa, Asia, or America were incapable of independence, and because he seemed to imagine that European tutelage was a given, he could not foresee what would take place when it came to an end.  But come to an end it would, if only because—like all human effort, like speech itself- it would have its moment, then it would have to pass (Said, 375).

The literature(s) of the colonized:       

Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. Othering is the practice of viewing those who are different from oneself as inferior things, divides people, and justifies hierarchies. Sometimes the dominant culture sees the “other” as evil or else demonic other. In other instances, the “Other” is deemed to have a natural beauty, to be referred to as the exotic other. There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance: otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other, every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define. The Western concept of otherness according to Bhabha is too Manichean in terms of a good versus evil model. It is based on the Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding opposites): if the West is ordered, rational, masculine, and good, then the Orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, and evil.

Bhabha’s Concept of Mimicry

 Bhabha’s concept of mimicry has also been quite influential with respect to how the colonized mimics the colonizer. Mimicry is the obligation of the colonized to mirror back the image which the colonizer provides producing neither identity nor difference for the colonized.  The 'Other' is admitted into the system but is simultaneously the subject of colonial authority.  Mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite.  Bhabha looks at mimicry as a double vision which explains that indigenous people are constructed by language to fit society but remain subject to authority. In order to succeed that mimicry must be perfect but also be somehow different from what it is the colonizer does in order that the difference in status between colonizer/colonized be preserved. This is an impossible task for the colonized to fulfill, which reveals itself as a certain resistance to absolute compliance or an undecidable sort of Derridean difference that has the potential of deconstructing recognition. Adolf Hitler makes a similar argument in Mein Kampf with respect to how well Jews supposedly only imitate German culture, because, in Hitler’s view, they are merely parasitical and have no originality or genius.

            There is an innate difference between being English and being Anglicized; the replica (colonized) is incapable of fully becoming or representing the original.  Representations of identity are based on metonymy which acts as nothing more than a camouflage.  Lacan states, “mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically” (Bhabha 85).  In his work, Bhabha explores how mimicry involves the colonized subject imitating the culture, language, and behavior of the colonizer. However, this imitation is never exact; it produces a sense of ambivalence that both disrupts and undermines colonial authority.

The main outstanding aspects of the concept of mimicry are:

1.    "Almost the same, but not quite": According to Bhabha, mimicry is not a perfect replication of the colonizer's ways but a form of incomplete copying. The colonized individual adopts elements of the colonizer’s culture but remains distinctly different. This partial imitation is subversive because it exposes the gaps in colonial power, showing that the colonized subject cannot fully become the colonizer.

2.    Ambivalence: Bhabha argues that mimicry is marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, the colonizer encourages the colonized to imitate Western customs and practices as a way to “civilize” them. On the other hand, this imitation is seen as threatening because it highlights the instability of colonial dominance. The colonizer fears that the colonized might become too similar, eroding the distinction that justifies their rule.

Hybridity

Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity is central to his postcolonial theory and refers to the creation of new cultural forms that arise from the interaction between colonizers and the colonized. Rather than seeing colonized cultures as being wholly dominated or erased by colonial rule, Bhabha emphasizes that the encounter between different cultures leads to a blending and mutual transformation, creating hybrid identities and cultural practices.

Key Aspects of Hybridity:

1.    Cultural Mixing: Hybridity is the mixing of different cultural elements—languages, traditions, beliefs—resulting from colonial encounters. It challenges the idea of fixed, pure, or essential cultural identities, showing that cultures are fluid and dynamic, especially in contexts of colonialism. For example, the colonized people may adopt aspects of the colonizer’s language or religion, but they also adapt and reinterpret them in ways that reflect their own cultural histories and values.

2.    Ambivalence and Subversion: Like mimicry, hybridity is marked by ambivalence. While the colonizer imposes their culture, laws, and customs on the colonized, the resulting hybrid forms are not simple reproductions of colonial culture. Instead, they are transformed in ways that undermine colonial power. The hybrid culture both incorporates elements of the colonizer’s culture and subverts it by blending it with indigenous practices, creating something new that destabilizes the colonizer’s authority.

3.    Third Space: Bhabha introduces the idea of the Third Space to explain where hybridity takes place. The Third Space is a metaphorical space where cultural interaction and negotiation occur, producing hybrid identities and meanings. It is a site of resistance, where the binary oppositions of colonizer/colonized or West/non-West break down. In the Third Space, hybrid identities are formed that do not conform to either side of the colonial divide, offering the potential for new ways of thinking and being that transcend colonial hierarchies.  

4.    Challenging Fixed Identities: Hybridity disrupts the colonial binaries that maintain the dominance of the colonizer, such as civilized/uncivilized or modern/traditional. By creating hybrid forms that defy easy classification, it shows that identity is not a static or singular concept. This fluidity threatens the colonizer’s claims to superiority, as the hybrid subject occupies a space that cannot be neatly controlled or defined by colonial authority.

Bhabha believes language creates an internal dissonance through a naturalized reflection of performative cultural articulation.  The method by which the dominant group maintains a Euro-centric sphere of authority is through the manipulation of language.  Bhabha states, through language "resistance is a condition produced by the dominant discourse itself... colonial discourse is not all-powerful.  Identity is always in constant flux making no unified self.  Without the Other, there is no authority, so through hybridization, an Other is formed which the Euro-centric world may rule over.  The Indigenous Other can not escape the boundaries of colonial discourse.  Postcolonialists believe, “skin colour has become the privileged marker of races which are thought of either ‘black’ or ‘white’ but never big-eared’ and ‘small-eared’.  

Example of Hybridity:

A concrete example of hybridity can be seen in the adoption and transformation of the English language by colonized peoples. While English is the language of the colonizer, writers from formerly colonized nations like India, Nigeria, and the Caribbean use English in literature to express their own cultural experiences, reshaping it with local idioms, rhythms, and themes. This hybrid form of English both acknowledges the legacy of colonialism and asserts the agency of the colonized to redefine it on their own terms.

    Another figure in post-colonial studies is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who has been investigating discursive representations in relation to actual subjects in non-Western societies and the complexities and contradictions that occur when the two intersect. Spivak’s essays detail the ways in which imperialism has constructed narratives of history, geography, gender, and identity. Spivak has been criticized because of her various used approaches including feminist, Marxist, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theories. However, Spivak does not fully commit herself to one group or another. “My position is generally a reactive one. I am viewed by Marxists as too codic, by feminists as too male-identified, and by Indigenous theorists as too committed to Western Theory. I am uneasily pleased about this.”

SPIVAK’S KEY TERMS

ü  Strategic Essentialism 

 Essentialism is the belief that language has an essential meaning; that there is a concrete, stable, unchanging, meaning for a term such as “British” or “Canadian”. Spivak believes that words take on their meanings through usage and discursive power; that language is arbitrary, and therefore disagrees strongly with the term essentialism. Spivak stresses that “... we must of course remind ourselves, our positivist feminist colleagues in charge of creating the discipline of women’s studies, and our anxious students, that essentialism is a trap.” She underlines this because of the limited thinking that comes with essentialism; it is the basis for exclusion and exploitation.

    Nevertheless, Spivak also states that it is impossible to be completely non-essentialist; therefore essentialism is something to which the individual is committed even when rhetorically rejecting it. It is with this in mind that Spivak introduces strategic essentialism. A strategy is different from a theory - it is not general but directed, combative, and particular to a situation. Although Spivak rejects essentialism, she also recognizes the importance of using it from time to time to obtain her goals. An example of this is that in order to make an argument regarding the “East”, Spivak must first acknowledge that there is a stable meaning for the “West”. If Spivak denies that there is an essential “West”, then there is no way that she will have any basis for argument.

ü  Subaltern - Another perfect example of the way Spivak uses strategic essentialism to aid in her theories, is her concept of the subaltern. “Subaltern” refers to the people who have been as equally instrumental in history as the Europeans, but have been under-represented. Subaltern can be broken up into sub, meaning under, and altern, meaning alternative or marginalized. Spivak’s main concern is with the people of India, and repressed females in Asia. Spivak’s main argument concerning the subaltern is that there is no way the subaltern can ever be heard. She addresses this problem in one of her most influential essays, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

      The answer, according to Spivak, is no. As soon as the subaltern tries to acquire a voice, they must move into the dominant discourse to be understood. Therefore, they must remove themselves from the subaltern position, which also means that they are no longer speaking from that position. Since there is no way to get out of this cycle, Spivak has concluded that the subaltern is a silent position. 

     In her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Spivak provided a commentary on how the practice of Sati (or Suttee) is often not documented in literature. This essay took an intersectional approach, considering both postcolonial and feminist theories by examining the presentation and representation of women in previously colonized countries.

ü  Sati refers to the practice in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting on her dead husband's funeral pyre.

ü  An intersectional approach takes into account people's overlapping identities to understand the interconnected systems of oppression they face.

Spivak attributed this lack of documentation to the fact that Western and male authors controlled the documentation of cultural practices. The lack of voice held by the subaltern is a form of cultural imperialism, which threatens to erase the history and cultures of certain peoples who are considered 'less' than the majority.

       The title of Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is somewhat misleading. While it certainly explores whether subalterns can speak, it is more interested in whether they can be heard. Spivak argues that there are a number of factors preventing this. The most important is that more powerful people—academics, religious leaders, or people who are otherwise privileged in society—always speak for them. When they do this, the elite rob subalterns of their own voice. If subalterns could both speak and have a forum in which to be heard (the “speak” of the essay’s title), Spivak hopes these people would achieve an effective political voice.  

Conclusion

   In this lecture, you learned that post-colonial criticism helps us see the connections among all the domains of our experience - the psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic - in ways that show us just how inseparable these categories are in our lived experience of ourselves and our world. In addition, post-colonial theory offers us a framework for examining the similarities among all critical theories that deal with human oppression, such as Marxism, feminism, and African American theory. Post-colonial criticism defines formerly colonized peoples as any population that has been subjected to the political domination of another population; hence post-colonial critics draw examples from the literary works of African Americans as well as from the literature of aboriginal Australians or the formerly colonized population of India. Postcolonial theorists examine how Western cultures, the colonizers, created the colonial subject, the subaltern, through various discursive practices, and examine also how subaltern cultures both participated in and worked to resist colonization, through various overt or covert, direct or subversive, means.

   Postcolonial theory is thus centrally concerned with examining the mechanisms through which the colonizing powers persuaded the colonized people to accept a foreign culture as ‘better’ than their own indigenous methods of government and social organization.  

  Among the most important kinds of power/knowledge brought by the colonizers was the construction of the concept of ‘race,’ and more specifically the racial binary opposition of ‘white’ and ‘other’ – be that other ‘black,’ ‘yellow,’ ‘brown,’ ‘red,’ or whatever other color became the signifier for the ‘otherness’ of the colonized people. In the case of the United States, the ‘native’ population (once the Native Americans had been colonized or killed) was itself defined as white, a fact which deprived the colonizing British of a dominant form of power/knowledge that worked successfully with non-white colonies to produce their native inhabitants as inferior.

Summary

    In this lecture, we explained that most post-colonial critics analyze the ways in which a literary text, whatever its subject matter, is colonialist or anti-colonialist; that is, the ways in which the text reinforces or resists 128 colonialism‘s oppressive ideology. For example, in the simplest terms, a text can reinforce colonialist ideology through positive portrayals of the colonizers, negative portrayals of the colonized, or the uncritical representation of the benefits of colonialism for the colonized. Analogously, texts can resist colonialist ideology by depicting the misdeeds of the colonizers, the suffering of the colonized, or the detrimental effects of colonialism on the colonized. Post-colonial criticism pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse, it also offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the ―imaginative geography‖ of Orientalist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between ‗West and East‘, ‗civilised and uncivilized ‘, ‗First and Third Worlds‘. In this respect, post-colonial criticism is in a way activist and adversarial in its basic aims. It is a theory that has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial peoples-their wealth, labor, and culture in the development of modern European nation-states. Postcolonialism is said to share some issues and problems with poststructuralism. The theory of poststructuralism basically aims to overthrow the theory of structuralism and its notion of binary oppositions. That is exactly what we encounter when dealing with the postcolonial topic of center and periphery. For without the margin, there is no center. The postcolonial theory is working with these only to show that the opposition should be erased and that there should not be any margin – center division anymore.

Typical Questions

• How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
• What does the text reveal about the problematics of post-colonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity?
• What person(s) or groups does the work identify as "other" or stranger? How are such persons/groups described and treated?
• What does the text reveal about the politics and/or psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?
• What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference - the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity - in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which we live?
• How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters, themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?
• Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different post-colonial populations?
• How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized peoples? (Tyson 378-379)

Some key concepts to know

·         Diaspora refers to how people have moved from their homelands to different locations around the world. Despite being located in different areas of the world, these peoples share a collective memory of their ancestral home, which shapes part of their personal identity. However, this ancestral home is not a literal place that one can visit.

·         Double consciousness is a concept coined by American academic and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963). This concept suggests that a black person will perceive themselves in two ways; from their own perspective and through the eyes of white people. In the context of postcolonial studies, double consciousness argues that colonized peoples and people of color across the world perceive themselves through these two different lenses.

References

Abrams, M.H. (1953). The Mirror and the Lamp. London: Oxford UP

Ako, Edwards. (2004). “From Commonwealth to Postcolonial Literature”. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Vol. 6, Issue 2

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1998). Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London and New York, Routledge