Postcolonialism:
Postcolonial literary theory is a critical approach to literature that examines
the impact of colonialism on the cultures, histories and economies of once
colonized countries like Asia, Africa and South America. Postcolonial theory seeks
to promote new ways of looking at the colonial past, and to advocate for anti-
colonial resistance.
Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category in the 1990s. Edward
Said’s 1978 book ‘Orientalism’ is often considered a foundation work of
postcolonial theory. The book explores the way western experts or literary writers
represented the colonized countries reveals Eurocentric prejudices. Their
stereotypical representation of the natives or colonized people as other, savage,
irrational, primitive and inferior etc. justifies Western colonialism. Said’s approach
has provided the methodology to critique any form of cultural prejudice and
misrepresentation made by colonial writers.
Some other works that are considered to be the core to postcolonial theory
includes Frantz Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Maks, Homi K Bhabha’s ‘The
Location of Culture’, and Spivak’s essay ‘Can the subaltern Speak?’ (1988).
Postcolonial theory focuses particularly on the way in which literature
written by the colonizers distort the experience and realities of colonized nations.
Therefore, the need to represent the ‘self’ and write its own history has become a
dominant motive in postcolonial literature. One such critic Frantz Fanon
emphasized on the importance of national literature and national culture in his
book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (1963). Fanon argued that the first step for
‘colonized’ people in finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their past and
write its own history.
Gayatri Spivak in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ raises issues about
the voice of the subaltern. The subaltern refers to third world women and men who
are marginalized by the colonizers. The subalterns are being represented by the
colonizers and cannot speak for themselves. One of the central aims of postcolonial
criticism is to focus on the experiences and perspectives of the subalterns.
Homi Bhabha’s theory of ‘hybridity’ occupies a central place in postcolonial
discourse. Bhabha used the term ‘hybridity’ to describe the creation of new
identities and cultural forms that emerge from the intermingling of colonizer and
colonized cultures. Postcolonial cultures and identities are analyzed in terms of
Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’.
Postcolonial Literary criticism
1) Postcolonial literary criticism focuses on the consequences of colonialism on
the plot, characters, and motivations in literature.
2) The task of postcolonial criticism is to locate the modes of representation or
narratives where European constructed the natives in their Eurocentric
prejudice.
3) The postcolonial literary critics unpack literary figures, themes and
representations that have enforced imperialist ideology, colonial dominance
and western hegemony.
4) Postcolonial criticism focuses on racialism, identity, hybridity and mimicry.
5) They locate the Eurocentric prejudices and stereotypical representation of
natives or colonized subject as ‘other’, savage, primitive, uncultured etc.
6) Postcolonial critics reinterpret literature produced by colonizers. Re-
interpretation involves paying attention to colonial narratives. Thus, Chinua
Achebe’s famous reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel ‘Heat of Darkness’,
argued that Conrad had absolutely no interest in Africans, and reduced them
to animal and dehumanized images. In a similar way Edward Said’s reading
Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’, Sara Suleri reading Kipling’s ‘Kim’, Homi
Bhabha reading Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ are some of the key texts that
illustrates the process of postcolonial readings of colonial literary texts.
