Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning

experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

10
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

More Cultural Studies:

Postcolonialism and
Multiculturalism

It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—

subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn
our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.
HOMI BHABHA, “THE POSTCOLONIAL AND THE POSTMODERN”

W e have already seen how new historicism uses knowledge and informa-
tion from many fields, some of which have not traditionally been associ-
ated with literary studies. Critics working from a postcolonial or American
multicultural perspective share that interest in going beyond the study of litera-
ture as literature, and they too have been influenced by anthropology, sociology,
Marxism, feminism, popular culture studies, and other nonliterary disciplines that
examine distinct groups of people in an attempt to explain how a culture is cre-
ated, maintained, and weakened. In addition to sharing the interests of other dis-
ciplines, they also adopt and adapt their methodologies, finding in the
approaches of psychoanalysis or deconstruction the means of examining texts as
part of a larger body of study—that of the culture itself.

POSTCOLONIALISM

To understand postcolonialism and its connection to literature requires looking

first at its predecessor, colonialism, and then its successor, neocolonialism.
204
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 205
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

It hardly needs to be pointed out by now that because postcolonialism is a rela-

tively new field of study, there is not total agreement about its principles and pur-
poses. In this case, even its spelling (post-colonialism versus postcolonialism) is disputed.
What follows, therefore, are generalizations that may not apply to everyone
involved with postcolonial theory and the criticism of postcolonial literature.

Historical Background
Interest in postcolonialism dates back to the 1950s when Alfred Sauvy coined
the term Third World to refer to developing nations, such as those in Africa or
South America. They differ from what has come to be known as the First World
countries—those in most of Europe and North America—which are character-
ized by industrialization, democracy, relative affluence, and similar cultural
assumptions and beliefs. The white populations of countries once belonging to
the British Empire (Australia, Canada, New Zealand) occupy a status of their
own as they fulfill the definition of a First World country, but have more
recently been linked with the colonizing power than some others, such as the
United States. At the bottom of this hierarchy are the native populations who,
although in some cases they compose the majority, are ruled by their white con-
querors. Postcolonialism is interested in all but the First World; however,
because many members of the First World have historically been the oppressors,
they too are involved in the discussion.
Colonialism is, simply, the subjection of one population to another. It is
most clearly seen in physical conquest, but in its more subtle forms, it involves
political, economic, and cultural domination. The British rule in India, for exam-
ple, involved not only the use of force to subdue the latter but also the imposi-
tion of British institutions and tastes. When people are colonized, their traditions
and practices are supplanted by imitations of those of the colonizer. Parts of the
indigenous culture as elemental as food, clothing, and recreation tend to disap-
pear, because they are either hidden or replaced, thereby removing that culture
from history. The term colonialism is sometimes used to challenge the meaning
attributed to it by the colonizers, who use the term to refer to the positive, civi-
lizing effects of their efforts. In this challenging usage, colonialism takes on Marxist
overtones to reflect the perceptions of local peoples who have experienced (or
who have known the legacy of ) the burdens imposed by the colonizers: foreign
social, business, and legal practices; exploitation of natural resources; and military
occupation.
Although the term postcolonial was not in use until the late 1980s, theories
surrounding its concerns have been published since the 1960s. Over the years,
the study of postcolonialism has primarily attracted the interest of literary scholars
and critics. However, because it is concerned with what happens to a culture
from the beginning of colonization to the present, it is also making inroads in
fields as diverse as political science, sociology, and psychology. Postcolonialism
theories offer topics of interest to members of these fields because the formal
termination of colonial rule does not wipe out its legacy, and the culture that is
left is a mixture of the colonized one and that of the colonizer, often marked by
 206 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

contrasts and antagonisms, resentment and blended practice. The two are no lon-
ger recognizable as having separate cultures. Consequently, issues abound regard-
ing the development of national identity, identification of cultural histories and
knowledge, the precolonial nature of the colonized, and the colonized’s resis-
tance to the power base that has subjugated them.
Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, was an important influence on
what would become known as postcolonialism. In his analysis, Said called atten-
tion to the pejorative stereotypes that the British, other Europeans, and Americans
create of the peoples unlike themselves, thereby making it easier to justify military
or economic conquest. Their view of the “other” world—“orientalism”—is inev-
itably colored by their own cultural, political, and religious backgrounds, leading
them to depict those unlike themselves as inferior and objectionable—for example,
as lazy, deceitful, and irrational. The self, by contrast, is defined as good, upright,
and moral. The Eastern nations are given all the negative characteristics that the
West does not want to see in itself. For example, the first reports of the Oklahoma
City bombing in 1995 attributed the deed to Middle Eastern terrorists, because it
was impossible to think that an American would have done such a thing. In Ori-
entalism, Said called upon the literary establishment to raise questions about coloni-
zation, imperialism, and constructions of the “other.” Over the ensuing decades,
postcolonial theorists have probed those issues by examining such subjects as lan-
guage, feminism, oppression, cultural identity, race, and education. The intent is to
study what happens when one culture is dominated by another.
Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins point out the error of understanding
postcolonialism simply as a “temporal concept,” a period of time following the
end of foreign governance. Instead, they say, it is a complex mixture of contest-
ing discourses, social hierarchies, and power structures. In fact, it seems that the
post part of postcolonialism may be an overstatement of the way things really are,
for today a new kind of colonialism is taking place. Weaker powers are no lon-
ger as likely to be taken by military conquest, but they are no less economically
and culturally dominated. Major international corporations, drawn by the avail-
ability of cheap labor and cooperative local governments, practice what is known
as neocolonialism, which has much the same effect as traditional imperialism.
Under neocolonialism’s aegis, the customs and traditional “ways” of the subju-
gated peoples are weakened, changed, and sometimes destroyed.
Knowing exactly which works fall into the category of postcolonial litera-
ture was a simpler matter before the 1980s, when it was called Commonwealth
literature. At that time, it was generally assumed that the term referred to the
literature of cultures colonized by the British Empire, such as Australia, New
Zealand, Canada, and parts of Africa, all of which were dominated by white
Europeans who imposed their own cultural traditions at the expense of the
native population’s traditions. The problem with the label Commonwealth literature
is its grounding in British culture. This term seems to indicate that the literatures
of native cultures still belong to “the mother country.” Such a position also
ignores the literature of white settlers in colonized lands. Some readers still
argue that white writers in Canada, New Zealand, or Australia should not be
included, because they practice British traditions, share the same language, and
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 207
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

belong to the same race. They have not been oppressed. They have not had to
hide their traditions. Others argue, however, that although the settlers were the
colonizers, they (or their descendants) do not and did not belong to Britain in
the same way that native-born citizens do. Their home is in the colonized coun-
try. Consequently, the literature of white settlers is not dissimilar in its sense of
double consciousness (double vision) as defined by W. E. B. DuBois (see “Amer-
ican Multiculturalism” later in this chapter). That is, their literature views the
world through the contrasting perspectives of both the colonizer and the colo-
nized. It reflects the sense of belonging to neither, of being culturally displaced, a
quality Homi Bhabha refers to as unhomeliness. The broadest view of postco-
lonial literature is that it is the literature written in English by people in formerly
colonized countries, some of it authored by the colonizers and their descendants,
but more of it by those they colonized.
The term postcolonial has since replaced the label Commonwealth literature,
although the uncertainty regarding what literatures it includes continues. At the
least, it seems to broaden the field of interest by opening it to countries colo-
nized by Western powers other than Great Britain, such as Spain, France, Russia,
Portugal, and more. Currently the literature of any country that concerns itself
with the legacy of colonial rule qualifies, including, to name only a few, that of
African countries, India, Sri Lanka, and most recently the Middle East. Some
readers assume that postcolonial literature refers to texts produced after the colo-
nized countries became independent, but others take it to mean the texts pro-
duced from the time of colonization to the present.
The subject matter of postcolonial literature is marked by its concern for
ambiguity or loss of identity. Written by culturally displaced people, it investigates
the clash of cultures in which one deems itself to be superior and imposes its own
practices on the less powerful one. Its writers examine their histories, question how
they should respond to the changes they see around them, and wonder what their
society will become. They recognize in themselves the old culture and the new,
elements of the native one and the imposed one. The result is writing that is criti-
cal of the conquerors and promotional about its own ideologies.
Postcolonial literary criticism, which began to attract widespread notice in
the early 1990s, looks at the works of postcolonial writers but is not limited to
them. Because its practitioners are interested in how the colonized came to accept
the values of the more powerful culture and to resist them too, it looks at canoni-
cal texts as well as postcolonial ones. Attitudes toward the “other” are evident in
works that may not, on the surface, seem to deal with colonialism at all. Helen
Tiffin argues in “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse” that because a
precolonial past cannot be regained and contemporary identity cannot be free of
that past, the real job of postcolonial criticism is “to investigate the means by
which Europe imposed and maintained … colonial domination of so much of
the rest of the world.” She suggests that the way to do so is to use “canonical
counter-discourse,” a process in which one examines “a character or characters,
or the basic assumptions of a British canonical text, and unveils [colonialist]
assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes.” By extension, the
whole colonialist discourse in which that text participates is revealed.
 208 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

In looking at Jane Eyre, for example, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
discover a strong racial theme in the novel. By bringing Bertha Mason, Rochester’s
Creole wife (from the West Indies), to the center of the narrative, they make
the allusions and images that refer to slavery and the slave trade, heretofore
mostly ignored, important keys to prevailing social attitudes. Whereas tradi-
tional criticism has in large part overlooked Bertha, who lives as a madwoman
locked in the attic, and has left the assumptions about her unexamined, Bennett
and Royle uncover the ideology implicit in the unquestioned acceptance of
her invisibility, imprisonment, and displacement from her homeland. Before
their analysis, she was seen as a threat because of her madness. They make it
possible to view her, instead, as a sufferer who has been driven mad. The
roles of villain and victim are reversed, providing through this new perspective
on a much-read novel additional insight into colonialist and anticolonialist
thinking.

Basic Assumptions
The lack of total agreement about what postcolonialism is or whom it involves
makes it difficult to set down its basic principles and purposes. Further compli-
cating the situation is that different cultures have responded to colonization in
different ways, making it impossible to subscribe to any single way of
approaching postcolonial studies. With those reservations in mind, the follow-
ing assumptions and generalizations are by and large accepted as important to
postcolonial theory.
■ Colonizers not only physically conquer territories but also practice cultural
colonization by replacing the practices and beliefs of the native culture
with their own values, governance, laws, and belief. The consequence is loss
or modification of much of the precolonial culture.
■ When their own culture is forbidden or devalued, natives come to see
themselves as inferior to the conquerors. They abandon (or hide) their own
cultural practices to adopt (imitate) those of the assumedly “superior” one.
■ Colonial subjects practice mimicry—imitation of dress, language, behavior,
even gestures—instead of resistance. In Black Skin, White Masks, published in
1952, Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist, reasoned that the inferiority complex
created in black people who have accepted the culture of another country as
their own will cause them to imitate the codes of their colonizers. As the
colonized become better educated and able to live as their white counter-
parts, they become increasingly imitative. Homi Bhabha points out that the
mimicry is never exact, however. It “is at once resemblance and menace.”
The colonizer both wants and fears that the colonized will be like him
because the imitation honors and, at the same time, undermines the
“authoritative discourse” of colonialism.
■ European colonizers believed that their ideals and experiences were univer-
sal. As a concept, universalism is evident in the characters and themes in
European (and, later, American) literature.
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 209
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

■ The European colonizers assumed the superiority of their own culture and
the inferiority of the conquered ones. They thought of themselves as civi-
lized, even advanced, and of the colonists as backward, even savage. Using
their own culture as the standard for what any culture should be, a practice
known as Eurocentrism, the powerful justified the imposition of their own
culture on those they deemed to be of lesser status, the subalterns.
■ The practice of othering, viewing those who are different from oneself as
inferior beings, divides people and justifies hierarchies. Sometimes the dom-
inant culture sees the “other” as evil, in which case it is known as the
demonic other.
■ On other occasions, the “other” is deemed to have a natural beauty, to be
the exotic other.
■ Colonizers also become the colonized. In this two-way process, the
Europeans too were affected by their contact with other cultures.
■ The effects of past colonialism are still evident today, and a new form of
colonialism is currently effected by international corporations operating in
developing nations.
■ The interaction of cultures creates blended ones, mixtures of the native and
colonial, a process called hybridity or syncretism. Characterized by ten-
sions and change, this process is dynamic, interactive, and creative. As
Bhabha explained in an interview with Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham,
“For me, hybridization is a discursive, enunciatory, cultural, subjective pro-
cess having to do with the struggle around authority, authorization,
deauthorization, and the revision of authority. It’s a social process. It’s not
about persons of diverse cultural tastes and fashions.”

Reading as a Postcolonialist
To understand the discussion that follows, you should read the excerpt from Jill Ker
Conway’s autobiography, The Road from Coorain, which begins on page 257.
A postcolonial analysis begins with the assumption that examining the rela-
tionship between a text and its context will illuminate not only the given work
but also the culture that produced and consumed it. In the end, you may not
agree with everything you find in either of them, but you will emerge with a
deeper understanding of how and why a text is meaningful. In turn, the process
gives greater validity to your judgments about a body of literature and the com-
munity associated with it. The postcolonial reader will generally be alert and sen-
sitive to the presence of the following elements that recur in the literature.

Presentation of Colonialism The central question of postcolonial criticism

addresses the stance of the text toward the mixed colonial culture that it depicts
or that produced it. What attitudes does the text reflect regarding the colonizers
and the colonized? A wide range of viewpoints is possible, for the historical
development of a culture, the relationships between its cultural groups, and the
 210 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

daily stresses of mixing people of different backgrounds make for a complex sit-
uation. The understanding of such matters will likely be expressed in fairly subtle
ways, and there may be no single unconflicted attitude, because questions of
how the conquered and the conqueror can live comfortably with each other,
even after years of trying, are not easily answered.
Colonialism is certainly one of the principal themes of Jill Ker Conway’s
autobiographical remembrance of growing up in Australia. In The Road from
Coorain, she not only identifies the colonialist mentalities she met (and was led
to share) but also traces the means by which they were inculcated and main-
tained. She tells the story of her awakening to the fact that she has unconsciously
absorbed colonial attitudes from her family and other families living similar kinds
of lives in the outback. Her recognition of the elitism and estrangement from
native life on that continent takes her by surprise as she moves from Coorain,
the remote sheep farm in the bush, to Sydney after the death of her father,
later to graduate school in America, and finally to her appointment as the first
female president of Smith College. The awareness of the duality of her cultural
roots is accompanied by the corresponding surprise of finding that being female
set her apart in a similar way. Just as she was subtly informed at home and school
and in society that Australia was inferior to Great Britain, so she was also con-
fronted with implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumptions that she was less capa-
ble than the males in her world. Ironically, it was because she was female that she
was allowed to pursue higher education, for, unlike her brothers, she was not
expected to return to Coorain to run the sheep farm.
You can begin to examine the attitudes toward colonialism that exist in a
work by asking the following questions:
■ Is the work critical of colonialism, approving of it, or ambivalent about its
value?
■ Does the narrator speak as an observer or a participant in the story’s cultural
setting?
■ What traditions and practices serve to maintain the cultural hierarchy in the
work?

Treatment of Characters It is in the portrayals of colonizers and the colonized

that the larger picture becomes evident. The reader can begin by asking whether
the depictions are positive or negative. Whose deeds are celebrated and whose
reproved? The assumptions about characters, both spoken and unspoken, will
indicate whether the work supports or resists the ideology and practices of
colonialism.
Conway’s depictions of the characters she knew as a girl are not simple.
Some of the colorful personalities she met came to the sheep farm to work;
others were landowning farmers like her parents. She remembers them with
fondness, but she also recognizes that from the beginning, the class distinctions
were clear and became more firmly drawn after her move to Sydney. It was the
families with close English connections who stood high in the hierarchy; it was
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 211
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

those with the most English behavior who were most admired. At Abbotsleigh,
for example, the school in which Conway was enrolled after her brief exposure
to public education, the headmistress, Miss Everett, represented the “European
cultural ideal,” and the girls were expected to emulate her straight back, British
accent, and athletic carriage. Looking back, Conway recognizes that something
was lost by what she refers to as her “colonization.” She speculates that had she
remained in a public school, she might “have been obliged to come to terms
with the Australian class system.” She adds, “It would have been invaluable
knowledge, and my vision of Australia would have been the better for it. It
was to take me another fifteen years to see the world from my own Australian
perspective, rather than from the British definition taught to my kind of
colonial.” Though her criticism is not bitter and her depictions of Miss Everett
and others at Abbotsleigh are affectionately drawn, her awareness of the limita-
tions imposed by the colonial mentality is clear.
Insight into the attitudes of the characters can come from asking the follow-
ing questions:
■ What descriptive terms characterize the depiction of the characters who are
the colonizers?
■ What descriptive terms characterize the depiction of the colonized
characters?
■ What is the relationship between the colonized and the colonizers in the
narrative?

Validity of the Narrative It is important to establish whether the events are

exaggerated. Is political and cultural domination presented explicitly or allegori-
cally? Is the whole story being told? Are some elements contrary to what actually
happened? Are the rationalizations believable? Knowing something about the
author, including his or her background, opinions, and purposes, can sometimes
be helpful in this regard.
Because The Road from Coorain is autobiographical, and the writer has valid-
ity in the eyes of the reader, the narrative is straightforward and rings true. The
writer does not indulge in exaggeration or even satire, except for an occasional
comic look at human foibles. If you are interested in testing the validity of a
narrative, the questions posed in the previous paragraph can be applied to any
piece of postcolonial literature.

Expressions of Nativism (Nationalism) Out of a desire to resurrect the pre-

colonial culture, some postcolonial writers consciously use elements of native
culture and expunge elements of the imposed one. It is one way to rediscover
native identity and declare its worth. Several problems lie in this approach, how-
ever. When writers publish works written in their own language, for instance,
they usually meet a limited reading audience because too few people are likely
to be proficient at comprehending it. Some people also argue that the attempt is
inherently flawed, because all cultures change; even without the intervention of
 212 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

an outside oppressor, what once was, even if one could find it out, would no
longer be. Finally, postcolonial cultures are hybrid ones, and any attempt to go
back to a “pure” culture is unrealistic.
Conway, writing as a native-born Australian but not as a member of the
indigenous population, makes no attempt to disavow her British heritage.
Instead, she writes from the postcolonial perspective of a hybrid culture that
combines both the native one and the dominating one. Sometimes the contrasts
she experienced make for illogical or amusing situations. For example, the
requirement at Abbotsleigh that the girls wear uniforms designed for an English
climate leaves them in summer in “starched green linen dresses with cream col-
lars, the same [green flannel] blazer, beige socks, a cream panama hat, and the
same brown gloves.” She continues, “Woe betide the student caught shedding
the blazer or the gloves in public, even when the thermometer was over
100 degrees…. No one paused to think that gloves and blazers had a function
in damp English springs which they lacked entirely in our blazing summers.”
Such irrational practices left the girls, as Conway says, “only partially at home
in our environment.” She is referring to the sense of unhomeliness, of being
caught between two cultures and not entirely at home in either of them.
Another way of describing her situation is to say that she is experiencing double
consciousness, for she has an awareness of being part of both the colonized and
the colonizing cultures and thus of being the recipient of all the conflicts and
contrasts that exist between them.
The following are some questions that can help the reader examine the ele-
ments of nativism in a story:
■ Does the story refer only to native elements of the culture, or does it depict
a hybrid culture?
■ Which characters experience unhomeliness?
■ Where do you find instances of double consciousness?

Recurring Subjects and Themes Some postcolonial texts look to the past,
rehearsing the pains of othering and the humiliations of mimicry. They retell
the stories of the initial colonization and trace changes in the native culture.
Others record the sense of double consciousness and unhomeliness experienced
by those who belong to both past and present and to neither. Still other texts
look to the future, reaching for a definition of the new hybrid identity (both
personal and communal) and an ideology that will serve its needs. In all cases,
postcolonial texts reveal the complexity of cultural identity in a colonized
world.
As already noted, The Road from Coorain is the story of Conway’s double
consciousness and unhomeliness as it evolves into a personal identity. It also
points to the practice of mimicry as one of the chief ways by which the colonizer’s
presence was maintained. Nowhere is that more evident than at Abbotsleigh,
where Eurocentrism reigned. The school made it clear by social rules, curricu-
lum, and the example of its leaders that England was the standard by which all
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 213
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

people and practices were to be measured. In the formality of the dinner table
(where the girls, wearing green velvet dresses, were seated in descending order
of age and class), in the absence of references to Australian art and literature in
their classes, and in virtually all practices at Abbotsleigh, it was British culture
that was imitated and admired. For example, Conway notes that in the study of
literature, she and her classmates “might have been in Sussex,” because their
reading consisted of Shakespeare and Shelley, not of the writers of their own
country. Australia, then, was defined by default, by what it was not. The girls
were left to conclude that because its countryside did not look like the
Cotswolds and the Lake Country, it must be ugly; and because its paintings
were not mentioned, there must not be any. History pointed out that people
of any importance lived somewhere else. The teachers dutifully corrected the
girls’ speech so that it would conform to standard British pronunciation,
unmarred by Australian patterns. In short, “The best standards were derived
from Great Britain, and should be emulated unquestioningly.” And just in
case the message was not clear, geography lessons featured maps with the hold-
ings of the British Empire colored bright red. Obviously, the closest an Austra-
lian could come to being judged superior was by mimicry, by being British,
even if only partly so.
The subjects and themes of postcolonial literature can be found by asking
the following questions:
■ Does the narrative look to the past, examine the present, or hypothesize a
possible future?
■ Where is imitation of the cultural standard depicted, and what is the effect of
mimicry on those who are expected to practice it?
■ How do specific characters struggle to develop a personal identity by rec-
onciling the two cultures in which they live?

Context Every work has a context, and studying context lies at the heart of
postcolonial literary study. Whereas interpreters of a culture sometimes derive
insights about it by reading its literature, a postcolonialist critic will look to
almost every aspect of a culture to illuminate a text. Significant elements may
be social or material; they may be drawn from the culture that produced the
text or the culture of its interpreters. For the reader interested in deepening his
or her understanding of a work, the process means examining the interaction of
the two, which can be a time-consuming business if for no other reason than
that it is difficult to know when one has done enough. The complex relationship
between text and context, each a product and creator of the other, is called
negotiation.
The context of Conway’s story and the context of its telling are not the
same. That is, it is told from the distance of another country, personal indepen-
dence, and intellectual growth. She has written it from the perspective of one
who has moved far enough away from a place and a personal history to achieve
insight that is not often found while immersed in them. It is interesting to
 214 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

speculate, for example, whether Conway would have been moved to write
about growing up entrenched in colonialist mentality if she had not left it
behind. Then, too, the changing social attitudes of the 1960s and later must
have influenced her, as they did others, to question the traditional ways of eval-
uating what is good and what should be, a process that is important to her story.
The times and her changing place have allowed her to see her past with greater
clarity, and her remembrances shed light on the times, past and present.
The text and its contexts can be examined by asking the following
questions:
■ Are the context of the story and the context of its telling the same or
different? If different, how do they affect each other?
■ Where do you observe negotiation—that is, the impact of the context on
the text and of the text on its context?
■ What significant public events in the writer’s life can be said to have
contributed to his or her views?

Minor Characters As in the analysis of Jane Eyre mentioned earlier, previously

unnoticed assumptions in a work can sometimes be detected by paying attention
to the characters who do not hold center stage. By noting their treatment and
the language used to describe them, attitudes about colonizers and colonized
peoples that have gone unnoticed, especially in canonical works, may become
evident.
Conway’s classmates at the public school she briefly attended are never men-
tioned by name, and perhaps they were never even known as individuals. In the
full scope of the autobiography, they play bit parts. Nevertheless, her brief encounter
with them speaks volumes about the class structure of postwar Australia. For exam-
ple, the superior attitude that she naturally assumed toward them, on the basis of the
stereotypes and judgments given to her by her family and their friends, is symptom-
atic of the elitism common to her class. The jeering schoolmates are well aware of
the social gulf between them, and they reflect an authentic Australian culture that is
scorned by those who have assumed the colonizers’ consciousness of class.
Minor characters can become significant when a reader asks the following
questions:
■ Which minor characters typify major cultural attitudes?
■ How does the principal character view specific minor characters?
■ Where do minor characters embody cultural conflict?

Political Statement and Innuendo The question here is whether and how a
work promotes resistance to colonialism. Does the text make ideological state-
ments or support a particular course of political, economic, or social action? Does
it take up the case for or against a particular group of people? Or does it attempt
to present the complexity of the situation without taking a stand on it?
 MORE CULTURAL STUDIES 215
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

When Jill Ker Conway promotes resistance to colonialism, she does so qui-
etly. Her book is not driven by a desire to rally crowds to march in the streets for
a particular cause. Instead, it is a thoughtful recollection of how she came to
recognize her own girlhood acceptance of a limited point of view that created
in her, as an Australian, a sense of always being less than someone else. It was a
sense of self that was derived both from her colonialist background and from
growing up female. Although she names no villains or conspirators, there is no
mistaking her criticism of institutionalized social practices designed to ensure an
inferior status for certain groups. It is clear that she regrets the negative sense of
self that was imposed on both children and adults by comparing Australia with
the revered Great Britain. Her escape from such smallness of vision came with
her move to the United States for graduate study and her subsequent marriage to
a Canadian. Her cultural identity has continued to grow—in one sense, making
for greater complexity of definition, but in another making for deeper under-
standing of what it means to reject the colonial mentality as one works out an
individual identity. In the end, her own liberation from colonialist boundaries
and definitions and her assumption of an identity that has been enriched by
numerous cultures make her a model of what citizens of a shrinking world are
likely to become. In that way, her autobiography provides a quiet but powerful
ideological statement.
The political stance of a literary work may be obvious or subtle. The reader
can identify it by asking the following questions:
■ Does the text make overt political statements? Does it openly promote a
particular social or economic agenda?
■ Does it admire characters who stand for a stated cause?
■ Does it criticize those who represent a specific ideology?

Similarities Homi Bhabha notes the possibilities for studying world literature
not in terms of national traditions but in terms of postcolonial themes that cut
across national boundaries. The reader would look, for example, at whether
native populations from different countries have commonalities as a result of
their experience of having been colonized. This study could take a number of
different forms, depending on which groups the reader chose to study.
Conway could easily be the subject of such a study, as she is not the
only writer to address the issues named here. Undoubtedly, interesting com-
parisons could be made between her remembrances and those of others who
grew up as natives in a homeland not entirely their own. Did they experi-
ence the same sense of double consciousness? Did they have the same knowl-
edge of hybridity? Were they, too, expected to practice mimicry? For
example, what correspondences and differences are to be found between
The Road from Coorain and V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, the
story of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated African town and
finds himself dangerously caught up in the clash of an old regime and the
new one?
 216 CHAPTER 10
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

To make such comparisons requires a wide acquaintance with postcolonial

literature. For the reader interested in following Bhabha’s suggestion, it may be
necessary to consult bibliographies of postcolonial literature to find potentially
comparable works.

U.S. MULTICULTURALISM

Since the 1960s, U.S. society has undergone radical changes in how it con-
ceives of social structures. School desegregation, new laws barring discrimina-
tion, and the demise of old laws that promoted discrimination have opened
the door to opportunity for people who had traditionally been shut out.
Within such marginalized groups, the renaissance of valued traditions that differ
from those of the dominant group has served to enhance self-esteem and reas-
sert distinct identities. In turn, the richness of cultures that had heretofore been
ignored or reviled has come to the attention not only of those who belong to
them but of a wider public as well. The arts, crafts, rituals, and religion of
American Indians, Hispanics, African Americans, and other historically over-
looked groups are now generating increasing interest in the many strands that
make up U.S. society, allowing people to be less confined by a single way of
seeing their lives. Of all such groups, African American culture, burdened with
problems from the moment of its introduction to the New World, has proba-
bly received more attention than any others. For that reason, it will be
discussed here as a model of how cultural studies of other marginalized groups
can be made.

African American Literature

Although literature produced by African Americans dates from their earliest
presence in North America, notice by the mainstream was a long time coming
to those writers who explored their own traditions and forms. Jupiter
Hammon and Phyllis Wheatley, the first black man and woman to be pub-
lished in colonial America, both practiced the literary traditions of white
culture. Beginning in 1760, Hammon, the slave of several generations of the
Lloyd family of Queen’s Village, Long Island, published poems and prose that
reflected his resignation to a life of obedience to his earthly master and to
God. Wheatley, purchased as a young girl in 1761 by John Wheatley of Boston,
was taught to read and write and quickly began to compose poems. Eventually
she became the best-known American poet in England. Writing in the
neoclassical style of Alexander Pope, she composed verses that reflected her
privileged status, not a slave mentality. Expressing love for the Wheatleys,
who provided her with an education and tended to her health, and also decry-
ing the cruelty of the slavers who brought Africans to this country, she was
clearly a conflicted being. Her situation has led some, but not all, contempo-
rary scholars to reject as genuine her expressions of gratitude for the grace of