1. Post Colonial Studies
Khushbu Lakhupota
MA Semester 3
Batch 2020-2022
Paper 203 The Post Colonial Studies
17 October, 2021 Sunday
Department of English, MKBU
khushbu22jan93@gmail.com
2. What is Postcolonial Studies?
● The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and modes of
discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain,
France, and other European imperial powers.
● Several central and recurrent issues:
● The rejection of the master-narrative of Western imperialism—in which
the colonial other is not only subordinated and marginalized, but in effect
deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by a counter-narrative
in which the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history
written by Europeans.
3. ● An abiding concern with the formation, within Western discursive practices, of the
colonial and postcolonial "subject," as well as of the categories by means of which
this subject conceives itself and perceives the world within which it lives and acts.
● A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish Eurocentric norms of
literary and artistic values, and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and
postcolonial writers.
● In the United States and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to
include in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innovative novels,
poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in the English language as the Africans
Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek
Walcott, and the authors from the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and Salman
Rushdie.
4. What postcolonial critics do?
1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western
literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general
inability to empathise across boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of
achieving this end.
3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on
matters concerned with colonisation and imperialism.
5. 4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine
their treatment in relevant literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity and 'cultural polyvalency', that is, the situation
whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one
culture (for instance, that of the coloniser, through a colonial school system,
and that of the colonised, through local and oral traditions).
6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures,
whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived 'Otherness' are seen as
sources of energy and potential change.
6. Significance of Studying Post-Colonial Literature
● The term ‘Postcolonialism’ widely refers to the representation of race,
ethnicity, culture and human identity in the modern era, mostly after
many colonised countries got their independence.
● It is the literature and the art produced in the countries such as India,
Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Senegal and Australia after their independence,
called as Postcolonial literature.
● Edward Said’s prominent book ‘Orientalism’ is an assessment of
Western representation of the Eastern culture under the label
‘Postcolonial Studies’.
7. Postcolonial Authors
● The four names appear again and again as
thinkers who have shaped postcolonial
theory are Frantz Fanon, Edward Said,
Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak.
● Though all these writers had different lands,
nationalities and social backgrounds, they
could all create their own distinction in
producing wonderful works of literature of
which many would certainly come under the
label ‘Postcolonial literature.’
8. Postcolonialism Literature in English
● One of the most influential novels of
Postcolonialism is ‘Things Fall Apart’ (1958) by
Chinua Achebe, exploring the interaction between
traditional African society and British colonizers.
● In this novel the character Okonkwo, struggles to
understand and cope up with the changes got
from Christianity and British control.
● His novel examines various situations occurred
after the post independence fictional West African
village.
● Achebe conveyed through his novels how the
British legacies continue to weaken possibility of
uniting the country. Achebe got the Man Booker
International Prize in 2007 for his literary merit.
9. The Central Ideas in Postcolonial Literature
● Postcolonial has many common motifs and themes like ‘cultural
dominance,’ ‘racism,’ ‘quest for identity,’ ‘inequality’ along with some
peculiar presentation styles.
● In postcolonial context, language played crucial role in control and
subjugation of colonized people.
● Colonizers often imposed their language upon their subjects in order to
control them. So most postcolonial writers address the issues in many ways
by mixing the local language with imposed language, the result is a hybrid
one that underscores the broken nature of the colonized mind.
10. Postcolonialism and Its Reflections
● The colonial countries started writing and depicting the experiences of
colonization and many changes brought by independence upon individuals
and their respective nations.
● Some filmmakers also attempted to depict colonial and postcolonial
predicaments in their films. Satyajit Ray, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, Shyam
Benegal are few among the filmmakers who contributed to Postcolonialism.
● In fact, as the Postcolonial literature deals with framing identities, the politics
of rewriting, translations, relation between nation and nationalism. It is a most
dominant form of literature and it has a great appeal.
11. The Concept of Transnation
All these subjects, all these citizens moving around the borders of the
state, the nation has always tried to identify a certain identity for itself.
Now in young nations such as Australia, this becomes almost an
obsession. As it grows people are obsessed with the idea of Australian
national identity and probably an India too. The idea of national identity
is something that people are can escape really whether they are drawn to
it or not. But this picture shows the actual multiplicity of a nation of the
different strands that go to make it. It could be put in another way that a
nation is a big tossed salad. As we know a tossed salad doesn't have an
identity, a single strand running through it, but it's made of many
different factors, features, ethnicities, peoples and this we call the
transnation.
12. Waiting For The Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians is a Greek poem by Constantine P. Cavafy in his
Collected poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. The
poem was written in November 1898 and first published in 1904. It depicts a
day in an unnamed city state where everything has come to a halt because the
population is awaiting the arrival of "the barbarians", whom they plan to
welcome. Waiting for Barbarians ends with the Empire's government officials
abandoning the town as winter approaches, in fear that the barbarian
invasion.
13. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
14. Here in the above poem it brilliantly captures as perhaps only poetry can do the complex
role that borders have. The barbarians, the others those who are just beyond our borders,
they're the ones who because of their difference help us to understand who we are. They are
a kind of solution because they demonstrate who we are not and that gives us some kind of
purchase on the idea of self then particular on the myth of National self. This poem shows
us that borders are unfortunately very important. They're important to the state. They're
very important in helping people understand or think that they understand who they're by
defining who they are not.
It's a line drawn internally, the network of institutional mechanisms through which a
certain social and political order is maintained. Once we realise that borders are not
structures but practices, we see this bordering practices extending within the nation, state
and these include rules, laws, restrictions, surveillance and more subtle forms of pressure.
15. Works Cited
● Abrams, Meyer H., and Geoffrey G. Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
2015.
● Ashcroft, Bill. "YouTube." YouTube, iSPELL, 22 Nov. 2020,
youtu.be/LdxRt_LhmQk.
● Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural
Theory. Beginnings, 2017.
● Cavafy, C. P. "Waiting for the Barbarians by C. P. Cavafy." Poetry Foundation,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians.
● Nripen, Laboni. "Significance of Studying Post-Colonial Literature." Owlcation,
29 June 2018, owlcation.com/humanities/SIGNIFICANCE-OF-STUDYIG-POST-
COLONIAL-LITERATURE-AND-ITS-SIGNIFICANCE.
