Postcolonialism Lecture Notes

Postcolonialism

Voyaging In – Postcolonialism and Migration

• Post-World War II, many writers and artists from the declining British Empire migrated to the UK, attracted by publishers and a wider audience.
• However, there were few attempts to include them in post-war British literary history.
• Prior to 1948, London was a hub for students, writers, and intellectuals from the colonies who had migrated after 1910, including:
  • Katherine Mansfield (New Zealander).
  • Jean Rhys (White Creole Dominican).
• These individuals were drawn to an idealized 'idea' of England, fostered by colonial education, and their work both resisted and assimilated the dominant discourse, questioning and subverting it.

1960s – Commonwealth Literature

• New writings in English from previously colonial areas emerged but were often seen as mimicking or derivative.
• Domestic ideas of national character were encouraged through exclusion, defining British identity in contrast to perceived 'others' at home and abroad.
• F.R. Leavis's concept of a "great tradition" was exported to the colonies, but its hybridized return challenged established premises.
• There was a failure to recognize how British literature's map had always depended on its long and mixed colonial past.

Authors and Their Perspectives

• Authors born of English parents in former colonies:
  • Lawrence Durrell (India, 1912-1990).
  • Doris Lessing (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe – 1919-2013).
  • Fleur Adcock (New Zealand – 1934).
• Authors coming from former colonies:
  • Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan, 1954).
  • Timothy Mo (Hong Kong, 1950).
  • Hanif Kureishi (Pakistan, 1954).
  • V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad – 1932).
  • Salman Rushdie (India, 1947).
• V.S. Naipaul:
  • Stated, "the language was mine" but "the tradition was not," reflecting an intimate yet separate relationship with British culture.
  • His novel The Mimic Men (1967) is set in the Caribbean and London, confronting colonial deceptions of language, dislocation, and the disillusionment of early immigrants.
  • Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for The Mimic Men.

Literature - Jean Rhys

• Jean Rhys (1890-1979) – Voyage in the Dark (1934), Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
  • Rhys served as a formative model for strategies adopted by others in challenging Western dominance and "writing back to the empire."
• Wide Sargasso Sea:
  • Is a re-writing of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason, giving her a voice.
• Derek Walcott:
  • Stated, "Once the meridian of European civilization has been crossed, according to the theory, we have entered a mirror where there can only be simulations of self-discovery.”
• These writers:
  • Were seen as a novelty because they viewed history, exile, migration, and emergent national identities in a new light.
  • Were often marginalized in the established canon and considered worthy only for their exotic themes, vernacular forms of English, and realistic portrayals of immigrant communities.
• Influx of immigrants:
  • Large numbers of immigrants from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa led to a "visible colonization of Britain in reverse."
  • This created fear and threatened the myth of England as a green and pleasant land.

Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea Quotes

• "But how can she know the best thing for me to do, this ignorant, obstinate, old negro woman, who is not certain if there is such a place as England?" (II.5.1.32)
• "For a moment Antoinette looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It's possible, it's even probably in this damned place." (II.6.3.10)
• "It was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I've heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all." (II.4.1.61)
• "Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that's obeah too." (II.6.6.31)
• "I scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll's voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice." (II.8.25)
• "There is no looking-glass here and I don't know what I am like now […] The girl I saw was myself not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us – hard, cold, and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?" (III.3.2)

Wide Sargasso Sea: Setting & Perceptions

• The garden:
  • The garden is initially described as beautiful, like the Garden of Eden in the Bible, but it has become overgrown and wild.
  • There's a mix of dead and living smells, with orchids that are either out of reach or not to be touched.
  • The wildness of the garden is presented as menacing.
• The landscape:
  • The landscape is overwhelming and intense, with too much color and imposing geographical features (mountains, hills).
• England:
  • The character in the story has fixed ideas about England and Europe based on romantic novels, sketches, pictures, songs, waltzes, or musical notes encountered.

Salman Rushdie - Shame

• Rushdie:
  • Discussed the metropolis as an imaginary construct in Midnight’s Children (1981), which won him the Booker Prize.
  • Regards both the colonized homeland and the past as imaginary constructs.
• Shame (1983):
  • "The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exists, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centering to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate.” (Rushdie, Shame, 29)
• Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” (1992):
  • Addresses writing about India from exile in London.
  • Argues that physical alienation prevents reclaiming what was lost, leading to the creation of "fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind."

Shame - Islamic Fundamentalism and Myths

• Islamic fundamentalism:
  • Rushdie suggests that so-called Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan is imposed from above by autocratic regimes that find it useful to use the language of faith to maintain control, as people respect this language and are reluctant to oppose it.
  • This dynamic allows religions to support dictators by surrounding them with powerful words that people are unwilling to discredit or mock.
• Justifying myth:
  • Eventually, people grow tired of this imposition and lose faith in the faith, particularly as a basis for the state. When the dictator falls, the justifying myth of the nation is unmade, leaving options such as disintegration or a new dictatorship.
• New myth:
  • However, Rushdie suggests a third option: the substitution of a new myth for the old one, recommending "liberty; equality; fraternity."

Postcolonialism in Literature

• Central themes:
  • The painful formation of Caribbean and Black-British identity through confrontation with the myths of the mother country is shown in novels.
• Western grand narratives:
  • The West began to question the centrality of its own grand narratives with the advent of Postmodernity.

Postcolonial Theory

• Independence:
  • From the 1950s onwards, nations gained independence from colonizing powers.
• Cultural production:
  • Forms of cultural production that oppose colonialism are identified as anti-colonial.
• Eurocentrism:
  • Postcolonial theory is still sometimes Eurocentric because it singles out the colonial experience as the most important aspect of the countries involved.

Edward Said

• Key works:
  • Orientalism (1978)
  • Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Focus:
  • Influence of peripheral cultures on the colonial center.
  • Relationship between culture and empire in literature.
  • This relationship becomes less secure in modernism and truly unstable in postmodernism.
• Orientalism:
  • Outlines the ways in which the West objectified and constructed the Orient in its discursive practices in the arts and social sciences.
• Culture and Imperialism:
  • Argues that cultural forms, such as the novel, are important not only in registering but also in supporting and reinforcing “imperial attitudes, references and experiences” (xii).
• Said's Recognition:
  • Grows an awareness of the delusions in ruling over others, registered by modernists in their preoccupation with decline, invasion, internal collapse, and nostalgic fascination with closed systems, patterned geometric structures, and mythic fragmentation.

Edward Said - Imaginative Geography

• European imaginative geography:
  • Said describes the essential motifs of European imaginative geography as drawing a line between Europe and Asia, where Europe is portrayed as powerful and articulate, while Asia is depicted as defeated and distant.
• Genuine creator:
  • This division is not just a matter of power but of creation, where the West sees itself as a life-giving creator animating the silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries.
• Rationality:
  • Rationality is seen as undermined by Eastern excesses, which are considered mysteriously attractive opposites to normal values.
• Lenses of perception:
  • Said argues that the Orient is experienced through lenses that shape language, perception, and the form of encounters between East and West.
• Familiar Status:
  • He notes that something patently foreign and distant acquires a status of being more rather than less familiar.
• New median category:
  • A new median category emerges, allowing one to see new things as versions of previously known things.
• Control:
  • This category is not about receiving new information but about controlling what seems to threaten an established view of things. If the mind encounters a radically new form of life, the response is conservative and defensive.
• Threat:
  • The threat is muted as familiar values are imposed.

Homi Bhabha

• Hybridity:
  • Bhabha discusses the creation of transcultural forms within colonial zones, involving integration, cross-pollination, and mingling of cultural signs and practices from colonizing and colonized cultures.
  • These cultures are not monolithic and lack essential, unchanging features.
• Cultural Identity:
  • Bhabha analyzes how cultural identity emerges in a contradictory and ambivalent space, undermining theories of cultural purity.
• Subversion:
  • Hybridity subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures.
• Deconstruction:
  • The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the entry of formerly excluded subjects into the mainstream discourse.

Homi Bhabha Quotes

• Mimicry:
  • “then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, 266)
  • “Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents” (Bhabha, 267)
• Gaze:
  • “gaze of otherness” (Bhabha, 268)
• Signifiers:
  • “inappropriate signifiers of colonial discourse – the difference between being English and being Anglicized; the identity between stereotypes which, through repetition, also become different; the discriminatory identities constructed across traditional cultural norms and classifications” (Bhabha, 269)

Other Theorists

• Gayatri Spivak:
  • In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she argues that no subaltern identity can exist entirely outside the colonizer's discourse, as the subaltern's perspective is inseparable from the dominant discourse that provides the language and concepts they use.
• Salman Rushdie:
  • His article “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” (1982) inspired Bill Ashcroft to appropriate the phrase “write back against the empire,” leading to a book edited by Ashcroft and two colleagues in 1989.
• Chinua Achebe (1930-2013):
  • This Nigerian writer critiques the denigration and dismissal of colonized people’s cultures, histories, and religions.
  • Achebe criticizes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as “bloody racist” in his essay “An Image of Africa” (1975).

Chinua Achebe on Africa and the West

• Western psychology:
  • Achebe argues that there is a need in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, portraying it as a place of negations, both remote and vaguely familiar, against which Europe's own state of spiritual grace can be manifested.
• Heart of Darkness:
  • Achebe critiques the book for projecting Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and civilization, where human intelligence and refinement are mocked by triumphant bestiality.
• Comparison of Rivers:
  • Achebe contrasts the River Thames (tranquil, resting, and having served humanity) with the River Congo, which he emphasizes isn't an Emeritus, has rendered no service, and enjoys no old-age pension.
• Two rivers:
  • Achebe suggests that these rivers are portrayed as very different, but the worry of the author is the lurking hint of kinship and common ancestry.
• Conrad:
  • Achebe says Conrad didn't originate the image of Africa, as it was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination. Conrad merely brought his own gifts to bear on it.