MLR 09: POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

I. General definition of postcolonial criticism:

“a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned
with literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other
countries. (…) Postcolonial literature and its theorists investigate what happens when two cultures
clash and when one of them, with its accessory ideology, empowers and deems itself superior
to the other.”
source: Benjamin K. Walker, Cultural Studies: Postcolonialism, African-American Criticism
and Queer Theory

II. Origin:
• the process of colonization and subsequent processes of decolonization (late 40s, 1950s)
• anti-colonial nationalist movements in India, Egypt, Algeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the
Caribbean
• ideas of complete independence
• the publication of Franz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Chinua Achebe’s
novel Things Fall Apart (1958)

III. Major tenets:

• issues of exclusion, denigration, and resistance under systems of colonial control
• the social, political, and economic effects of European colonization are visible till today –
neocolonialism
• geopolitical dominance and the ideological and mental colonization
• investigation of the response of the colonized to changes in language, education, racial
and economic issues, ethics, writing

IV. Two waves of postcolonialism:

1) the first wave – the period between, roughly, the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s: literary
models of analysis central, and most of the key figures trained literary critics, many of them
operating in the comparative literature field (Franz Fanon, W.E.B Do Bois, Amilcar Cabral,
and Aime Cesaire)
2) the second wave – more multi-disciplinary; materialist inspired postcolonial criticism
that is more self-consciously interventionist in its approach to current social and political
debates (Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Guyatri C. Spivak)

V. Two major groups of theories:

1) critics from European or American cultural, literary, and scholarly background: Frederic
Jameson, Georg M. Gugelberger
2) critics from non-European and non-Western backgrounds: Franz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said
VI. Major representatives, critics, and their works:
• Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1994)
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985)
• George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960)
• Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Studies (1989)
“the Holy Trinity” of postcolonial criticism: Edward W. Said, Gayatri C. Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha

VII. Major concepts:

1) double consciousness of the colonized (W.E.B. De Bois)
• “always looking at one’s self through the eyes” of a racist white society,
and “measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt”
• a result – a split identity; being caught between cultures, psychological refugee in both –
an unreconcilable two-ness of the self
• “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity”
• “one ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder”
2) the lactification/whitification complex (Franz Fanon)
• an “arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment”
• the desire of blacks to wear white masks – the product of colonial brainwashing:
of a systematic attempt to lower blacks’ self-expectations, and to force them to see
themselves in the distorting mirror of the white (wo)man’s world
3) unhomeliness (Homi K. Bhabha)
• neither culture is your own
• condition of being a psychological refugee, homelessness in both cultures
• language as a colonizing tool
4) the colonized: psychic warping and the collapse of the ego (Franz Fanon)
• loss of cultural identity, adoption of the dominant culture’s values
and development of arsenal of complexes
5) ambivalence and hybridization (Homi K. Bhabha)
• split identity – a hybrid identity deriving from the ambiguous relation between
the cultures of the colonizers and the colonized
• hybridization (new cultural forms resulting from multiculturalism) and mimicry
 • third space – an ambiguous area, a liminal space that develops when two or more
individuals/cultures interact, colliding cultures, which give rise to something different,
something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning
and representation
6) mimicry (Homi K. Bhabha)
• a condition when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture
of the colonizers, but the reproduction is never exact: “the same, but different”
• “the copying of the colonizing culture… contains both a mockery and a certain ‘menace’
(unsettling to the colonizers, a ‘blurred copy’, potentially disruptive to the authority”
• “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable other, as a subject
of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”
• examples: The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul, Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez
7) orientalism (Edward Said)
• the creation of non-European stereotypes that suggested that Orientals are indolent,
violent, irrational, thoughtless, sexually immoral, unreliable, effeminate, unable to rule
themselves and demented
• used to affirm power and domination of Western colonizers
8) othering (Edward Said)
• the human tendency to believe that the group (race, religion, ethnicity, culture, gender,
country, sexual orientation, species, etc.) that they are a part of is inherently the ‘right’
way to be human
• a belief that anyone who is not a part of the dominant group is a threat, an enemy,
or a liability that must be converted to conform to the norms and standards of their group,
subjugated permanently, or eradicated completely
9) the subaltern (Antonio Gramsci)
• describing ungeneralizable fringe groups of society who lack access to citizenship
• G.C. Spivak extended it to embrace groups more downgraded than non-elite social
classes (e.g. peasants, refugees, economic migrants, asylum seekers)
• thus: any person or group of inferior rank and station, whether because of race, class,
gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion

VIII. Methodology: questions:

• What happens in the text when two cultures clash, especially if one culture sees itself
as superior?
• What values and worldviews are cherished by cultures represented in the text?
• Who in the text is the Other?
• Are there any forms of resistance to the colonial control?
• Look at how the privileged culture’s hegemony affects the colonized culture.
• How do the colonized people view themselves?
• How does the language reflect each culture and cultural hybridity?
 • Can language be used as a form of oppression/liberation?
• How is the colonized culture silenced/suppressed?
• Are there any forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
• How do gender/class/race function in the text?

IX. Practice:
• reinterpretation of canonical writers
• reclaiming national literatures of the colonized cultures
• decolonization of minds through criticism of eurocentrism and promotion
of the postcolonial literature, art, and postcolonial knowledge
• examples of a post-colonial rereading od the canon:
- Greenblatt’s essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest
- Achebe’s rejection of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (“An Image of Africa: Racism
in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness)