PC 16 Literature of the Empire

Handout 4 Empire Writes Back

Models of Hybridity and Syncreticity
Though much of the theoretical basis of post-colonialism is derived from European theoretical system,
post-colonial theorists stop short of blindly adopting these models.
In fact, western models undergo, alterity, as it gets adopted into a different cultural context. In others
words, it gets appropriated to suit a different discourse.

- For instance, to European epistemology history, past, ancestry form a crucial point of reference.
Post-colonial writers like Les Murray (Australian), Salman Rushdie, G V Desani, in their works set
out to disrupt the European notion of history and ordering of time

Received history is tampered with, rewritten, and realigned from the point of view of the victims of
its destructive progress... perspective changes to that of the Other [33]

E.g. Raja Raos Kanthapura (1938), Patrick Whites Voss (1957), Rudy Weibes Temptation of Big
Bear (1973)

Preferable Models:-

1. The one proposed by Homi Bhabha wherein he has noted the collusion between narrative mode,
history, and realist mimetic reading of the text.
The case of V S Naipauls A House for Mr. Biswas- a socially and historically mimetic reading of this text
would undermine the colonial disruptions to the English surface of the text, by placing it within the
English tradition.

2. Derek Walcott in his essay Muse of History, critiques the West-Indian writers obsession with
destroying the historical past and calls for a historyless world.


3. West Indian poet and historian E K Brathwaite proposes a model where he beseeches to uphold the
African connection over the European while at the same time underscores the multicultural and
syncretic nature of west-Indian reality.

4. Guyanese novelist, Wilson Harris, calls for freedom from the destructive dialectic of( European) history
using imagination. He sees imaginative escape as the ancient and only refuge of oppressed people from
the politics of dominance and subservience. The case of character Anancy, from Akan folklore.

Mixing past, present, future and imperial and colonial cultures within his own fiction, Harris
deliberately strives after a new language and a new way of seeing the world. This view rejects the
apparently inescapable polarities of language and deploys the destructive energies of European culture
in the service of a future community in which division and categorization are no longer basis of
perception. [34]

Hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry and
which valued the pure over its threatening opposite, the composite. It replaces temporal lineality
with a spatial plurality.




Case of Canada:

A nationalist stance Model of the mosaic pitted against European domination

Culturally monolithic


Post-colonial theory thus,
- Attempt to transmute time and space- the present struggling out of the past to construct the future.
- Accept difference on equal terms
- Underscores cross-culturality
- Practices comparative methodology and prefers a hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world.
- Place is crucial to all theoretical models of post-colonialism- space is privileged over time in epistemology
- Binaries like ruler-ruled, governor-governed are inverted and dominance recognized and challenged
- Localized language decentres the British norm
- double vision which prevents a monolithic view of culture