Postcolonialism Lecture Notes

Flashcards on Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism

Study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies.

Migration after World War II

Large number of writers and artists from a declining empire migrated to the UK to find publishers and a wider audience.

Pre-1948 London

Home to students, writers, and intellectuals from the colonies who migrated after 1910, drawn to an idea of England, resisting, assimilating, and subverting dominant discourse.

Commonwealth Literature (1960s)

New writings in English from previously colonial areas, initially seen as mimicking or derivative.

National Character Exclusion

British identity defined in contradiction to perceived 'others,' both at home and abroad.

F.R. Leavis’s “Great Tradition”

Exported to the colonies, leading to a hybridized return that challenges established premises.

V.S. Naipaul

Writer from Trinidad, intimate with yet separate from British culture, explored colonial deceptions, dislocation, and disillusion in his works like 'The Mimic Men'.

Jean Rhys

Formative model in challenging Western orthodoxies and writing back to the empire, known for 'Wide Sargasso Sea,' a re-writing of 'Jane Eyre'.

Walcott Quote

“Once the meridian of European civilization has been crossed… we have entered a mirror where there can only be simulations of self-discovery.”

Reverse Colonization

Large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa led to fear and threatened the myth of England as a green and pleasant land.

Salman Rushdie

Discussed the metropolis as an imaginary construct, regards the homeland as an imaginary constructs, writing about India from exile in London.

Rushdie's Shame (1983)

A novel set in a fictional country occupying the same space as Pakistan, exploring themes of cultural and political identity.

Postcolonial Theory

Forms of cultural production oppositional to colonialism (anti-colonial), with differences between those that contest and those complicit with colonial ideologies.

Edward Said

Postcolonial critic known for 'Orientalism' and 'Culture and Imperialism,' exploring the influence of peripheral cultures on the colonial center and the relationship between culture and empire.

Orientalism (Said)

Outlines ways in which the West objectified and constructed the Orient in its discursive practices.

Homi Bhabha

Discusses hybridity – the creation of transcultural forms within colonial zones, integrating cultural signs and practices from colonizing and colonized cultures.

Bhabha on Cultural Identity

Cultural identity emerges in a contradictory and ambivalent space, making cultural purity theories unsustainable.

Gayatri Spivak

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” - no subaltern identity can be entirely outside the discourse of the colonizer.

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian writer who writes against the denigration and dismissal of colonized people’s cultures, criticizing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as “bloody racist” in his essay “An Image of Africa”.

Achebe on 'Heart of Darkness'

Projects the image of Africa as the 'other world,' the antithesis of Europe.