post colonialism

colonial literature

writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience, written either by colonialists or by indigenes during colonial times

postcolonial literature

writing concerned with areas or regions that were former colonies, especially regions characterized by anti-colonial efforts and the establishment of a new independent state. Postcolonial literature also critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relation

postcolonial theory; aims

Examines the global impact of colonialism

Aims to:

1. Describe the mechanisms of colonial power

2. Recover excluded or marginalized voices

3. Theorize the complexities of colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial identity

post colonialism; representation

• The nature of representation: attentive to the ways in which the West constructs the non-West as ‘Other’

• Role of language

• Identity as doubled or hybrid

postcolonial literary criticism

• Reject the claims to universalism on the part of canonical Western literature

• Expose colonial and imperial concerns in Western literature

• Examine representations of 1) colonial countries by Westerners and criticize them for their bias and limitations; 2) colonials and their society by postcolonial writers, celebrating diversity, hybridity and difference (esp. critics such as Homi Bhabha)

• Examine states of marginality and Otherness as sources of potential change

postcolonial critic

Franz Fanon: a need for national identity and national consciousness

orientalism

Said: to analyse eurocentric orientalism, a way of constructing and identifying the Orient as “other” and inferior to the West.

orientalism

a mode of discourse (ie knowledge systems, books, narratives, institutions, scholarship, bureaucracies) that perpetuates particular ideas about the Orient: both as a contrasting image of the West and a realm of the exotic.

definitions of orientalist

• The Orient as “a European invention”.

• Definition of Orientalism: 1) an academic label 2) a style of thought based on the “ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident” 3) a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient on the part of the West, with the view to ”dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”.

• Europe saw the Orient as a surrogate and even underground self.

occident v orient / power

• The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power and domination.

• Orientalism reveals more about European power over the Orient rather than a true statement about the Orient itself.

• Orientalism depends upon positional superiority.

Said: methods

1. Strategic location (the author’s position vis a vis the Oriental material he writes about)

2. Strategic formation (the relationship between texts and how these texts acquire referential power and in culture).

Cessaire

• Discusses the relationship between colonization and civilization

• Presents the brutality of colonialism, inverting the association between colonizers as enlightened and colonized as savages

“a civilization which justifies colonization … is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased” (39).

• Against capitalist society and against pseudo-humanism that does not protect the rights of all men.