Paper :- 203 : Postcolonial Studies Sem 3

1. Maharaja krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar university
department of english
Key speakers of postcolonialism
Presented by :
Chandani Pandya
pandyachandani11@gmail.com
Sem :- 3 (Batch: 2020-22)
Roll no. – 05
Paper :- 203 : Postcolonial Studies

2. Index
1. What is Colonialism ?
2. What is Postcolonialism ?
3. Importance of this term
4. Thinkers
5. Foundational Works
6. Examples

3. Colonialism
 The word colonialism comes from the Roman word “Colonia” which means
“Farm” or “Settlement” and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but
still retained their citizenship.
 According the Oxford English Dictionary….
 A settlement in a new country…A body of
people who settle in a new locality, forming a
community subjects to connected with their
parent state; the community so formed,
consisting of the original settlers and their
descendants and successors, as long as the
connection with parent state in kept up.

4.  Colonialism and Imperialism are used interchangeably.
 It creates the most complex and traumatic relationships in human
society.
 Colonialism can be defined as conquest and control of other people’s
lands and goods.
 Effect of colonialism:
 WORLD
 Us-Other mentality
 Dehumanization of colonized peoples
 NATION
 Value shifts
 Loss of identity
 Challenges to faith, language, politics
 PERSON
 Dehumanization of self
 Inability to support/protect self/family
 Self-doubt

5.  Postcolonialism :
 Postcolonialism is an academic discipline and
theoretical structure that analyzes, explains,
and responds to the cultural legacy of
colonialism and imperialism.
 It speaks about the human consequences of
external control and economic exploitation of
native people and their lands.
 New perspective to look.
 Reject the dominant western way of seeing and
superiority of western culture.

6.  The reality through is that world of inequality and much of different
falls across the broad division between people of the waste and those of
the non-waste.
 Postcolonialism is about changing world.
 A world that has been changed by struggle.
 It disturb the order of the world.
 It is all about language and power and identity crisis.
 It threatens privilege and power re-forces to acknowledge the
superiority of the western culture. Its radical agenda is to demand
equality and well being for all human beings on this earth.

7. • Postcolonialism address the politics of knowledge.
The postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives
from:
1) The colonizer’s generation of cultural knowledge about the
colonized people.
2) How that Western cultural knowledge was applied to
subjugate anon-European people. Non western lost their
language, identity and culture.
“The Third World” is seen as world define entirely by its
relations to colonialization.

8.  Frantz fanon
 The psychiatrist and philosopher
 Imposition of a subjugating colonial identity – are harmful
to the mental health of the native peoples who were
subjugated into colonies.
 Dehumanization is achieved with physical and mental
violence, by which the colonist means to inculcate a servile
mentality upon the natives.

9.  Gayatri chakravorty spivak :
 In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term Subaltern, the
philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautioned
against assigning an over-broad connotation; that:
“…subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for The
Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie…. In
postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to
the cultural imperialism is subaltern-a space of difference. Now,
who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is
oppressed. It’s not subaltern… Many people want to claim
subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most
dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against
minority on the university campus; they don’t need the word
‘subaltern’…They should see what the mechanics of the
discrimination are…”
(-Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers
Conference in south Africa (1992)

10.  Homi k. bhabha
 Born : 1949 Mumbai
 Nationality : American, Indian
 Professor of English and American Literature and Language,
and the Director of the Humanities Centre at Harvard
University.
 Nation and narration.

11.  In The Location of Culture (1994), the theoretician Homi K.
Bhabha argued that viewing the human world as composed
of separate and unequal cultures, rather than as an integral
Human world, perpetuates the belief in the existence of
imaginary peoples and places- “Christendom” and “The
Islamic World”, “The First World”, “The Second World”
and “The Third World”.

12. Thus, Postcolonialism establishes intellectual spaces for
subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own
voice, and thus produce cultural discourses of
philosophy, language, society and economy, balancing
the imbalanced us- and- them binary power-
relationship between the colonist and the colonial
subjects.
Thank you…

13. Bohehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonialism” Waugh, Patricia.
Litery Theory and Criticism. Oxford University press,
n.d. 341-355,
Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Grove press,
2008.
Ross, Stephen. Conrad and Empire. University of
Missouri Press, 2004.
Massachusetts: Media Education Foundation, 2002.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York:
(Bohehmer)
 References :