A Lecture on

POSTCOLONIALISM
R. INDULAL
DEPT OF ENGLISH
S.D.COLLEGE
ALAPPUZHA

BACKGROUND

Politics of post-1968 generation

England
Hungary, Suez
US Cuba, Vietnam
France
Indochina, Algeria

Renaming Commonwealth Literature

An amalgamation of Commonwealth, Black
and Third World Studies politicised the apolitical
commonwealth studies

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Politics of Reading postism

Four theorists Frantz Fanon,

Edward Said, Homi Bhabha,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Fanon Black Skin, White Masks

studied the effects of colonialism
on Black people using the
techniques of psychoanalysis

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Fanon opposed the notion of

negritude a typically African
culture promoted by Cesaire and
the Senegalese poet Leopold
Senghor.
For Fanon, this was an ideology
essentially trapped within
European dialectic.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

The Wretched of the Earth

Europeans justified their rule of
natives by creating a Manichean
society Europeans representing
civilization, morality, cleanliness,
law and order; natives, the
opposite.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Said, Orientalism, and Comparative

Literature
Orientalism as a discourse Europe
used to produce and manage the
Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically,
and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Said uses Gramscis notion that

the subject is a product of
historical processes that deposit
traces without leaving an inventory
and it is imperative for us to build
that inventory Orientalism is one
such inventory.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Said writes:
European culture gained in
strength and identity by setting off
against the Orient as a sort of
surrogate and even underground
self.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Spivak and the Subaltern

European documents about sati
remains silent on the position of
Indian women.

Indian spirituality as a European

construct Partha Chatterjee The
Nation and Its Fragments.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Bhabha mimicry and hybridity

Mimicry of the colonizer by the

colonized is subversive: it
collapses the difference between
them and us, a distinction
maintained by colonialism

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Bhabha celebrates postcolonial

hybridity as a positive value that
helps them to criticise the West
both as insiders and outsiders.

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Finally, the characteristic that

distinguishes postcolonial writing is
the writers sense of a double
readership: an internal community
(colonized) and an outside
readership (colonizer)

BACKGROUND (THEORY)

Many references can be read by the

natives, not by the western reader
Native (colonized) reader becomes
more authoritative
Western reader is denied moorings,
identification and colonization of
meaning.

READING COLONIAL TEXTS

Kipling wrote
East is east and west is west, and the
twain shall never meet

E.M. Forster A Passage to India

The mystery of the caves
Dr Aziz as an ape

READING THE POSTCOLONIAL

Rushdie Midnights Children

Salim as unreliable narrator, not
available for identification.

Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss

REJECTIONS

The Postcolonial writer rejected

European forms, language.
Formulated a language of their
own.
Drama of Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa
Thiongo use African myth, songs,
legends

REJECTIONS

Postcolonial fiction rejected the

realist and romantic plot
Favoured a loose, modern or
postmodern form

Critique

Postcolonial has been criticised as

a colonial project
Written by writers for a western
audience
Predicated on colonizing west

Thank You