Post-colonialism

1. Postcolonial Studies,
Feminism, Poststructuralism
Literature in English III
Mariel Amez

2. POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM
• new writing in English?
• world fiction?
• international or transcultural writing?
• Commonwealth literature?
Postcolonial literature?

3. POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM
Postcolonial studies/ theory:
Reading
vs
Postcolonial literature: Writing

4. • Colonial literature: concerned with
colonial perceptions and experience,
written by metropolitans, creoles and
indigenes during colonial times
• Colonialist literature: concerned with
colonial expansion, written by and for
colonizing Europeans about non-
European lands dominated by them.
POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM

5. Colonialist literatureColonialist literature
Eurocentric discourse that assumed
the normality and preeminence of
everything "occidental," correlatively
with its representations of the
"oriental" as an exotic and inferior
other.

6. Postcolonial literaturePostcolonial literature
Counter-narrative in which the
colonial cultures fight their way back
into a world history written by
Europeans.

7. Colonialist and PostcolonialColonialist and Postcolonial
literatureliterature
did not simply articulate colonial or
nationalist preoccupations;
also contributed to the making,
definition, and clarification of those
same preoccupations

8. Colonialist vs PostcolonialColonialist vs Postcolonial
literatureliterature
A valid dichotomy?
An overgeneralisation?
A rewriting of hegemony and
domination?

9. Otherness Difference
• Marginalised
• Disempowered
• Robbed of their voice and identity
BUT
• Self cannot exist without the other
• Self and other are mirror images connected by
their reflection

10. Chapter 1 “Imperialism and Textuality” in
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature. Migrant
Metaphors.

11. How was the colonized other
characterized?
• in need of civilization
• savages lacking the power and ability to
think and rule
• useless, lazy, avoiding to do work through
pretence
Agency, diversity, resistance, voices
screened out

12. Representations of white men
• hard and careful workers
• sensible, rational
• careful builders
• intellectuals
• profit-makers
• colonial officers part of an elite

13. Purposes of Othering
• construct superiority of the West
• justify the dispossession of natives
• represent the degradation of other human
beings as natural
• foster nationalism

14. “Mainstream realist novels could be
of imperial domination even if they
were not about it”.
• a commodity (images of riches and trade)
• a new beginning (transportation; exile)
• “The forbidden”: fascination or fear
Mainly
• took for granted the integrity, superiority,
and strength of the West
• showed acceptance of the Empire

15. Which “forms of self-validation” of
the Empire in the 19th century are
mentioned?
• ideologies of moral, cultural, and racial
supremacy
• responsible, kind, gentle and morally
uplifting ruling
• selfless, serious, above blame, good
government and peace under the law
• inevitable and historically important: a new
history

16. Chapter 2 “Colonialist Concerns”
(provided on paper) from Boehmer,
Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature. Migrant Metaphors.

17. What is the attitude towards other
cultures in colonialist texts?
• sources of contamination: infectious and
bewitching
• create vulnerability: closeness to savage
passions; apprehension at racial mixing
• interpreting reality in a European way
• empty of indigenous cultures
• objects of study
• accepting British rule as part of the order
of things

18. What is the “colonial gaze”?
gaze
to look at someone or something for a
long time, giving it all your attention, often
without realizing you are doing so
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

19. What is the “colonial gaze”?
gaze
• psychological relationship of power
• gazer: superior to object of gaze
Schroeder, J.E. Consuming Representation: A Visual
Approach to Consumer Research. Representing
Consumers: Voices Views and Vision. Routledge
Publishers, 1998.

20. What is the “colonial gaze”?
normative gaze
• Eurocentric racial identity: lens to view
and construct other races
West, Cornel

21. What is the “colonial gaze”?
Commanding perspective assumed by
the European in the text
• high vantage point
• knowledgeable position
• bird’s-eye description
• represents authority

22. How is the white hero characterised
in colonialist texts?
• youth and virility
• model of Christian honour and patriotism
• emissary of progress
• restraint
• moral earnestness
• rationality
• technological skill
• ability to rule

23. How are women characterised in
colonialist texts?
• seductive distraction or harmful presence
• unmanning and polluting
• black: contamination and degeneration of
excessive pleasure

24. How is the colonised characterised
in colonialist texts?
• fossilised survival of earlier evolutionary
stages
• irrational, barbaric, primitive, animal-like or
childlike, violent or difficult to control, evil and
harmful
• passive, soft, lazy, weak, inscrutable,
seductive, feminine
• lack of character and individual will: crowd
imagery
• certain nobility due to military skill

25. How are the colonised countries
characterised in colonialist texts?
• vast and shapeless
• savage and degraded
• sources of threat, trauma and mystery
• treacherous, dark, still
• “the engulfing female”
• places where white men defined their
masculinity and where they bonded

26. Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961) – Martinique
•Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
•The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
The category "white" depends for its stability on
its negation, "black." Neither exists without the
other, and both come into being at the moment
of imperial conquest.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

27. Frantz Fanon (cont’d)
•Speaking French means accepting the
collective consciousness of the French,
which identifies blackness with evil and sin.
•To escape this association the black man
thinks of himself as a universal subject
equally participating in society.
•The black man is necessarily alienated
from himself.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

28. Edward Said (1935-2003) – Jerusalem
• Orientalism (1978)
• Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Politics of Dispossession (1994)
Examines the ways through which the ‘Orient’
was, and continues to be constructed through
the lens of Europeans, in part defining
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the
Orient
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

29. Edward Said (cont’d)
•The European invention of the fiction of the
Orient and the Orientals has served to create not
only knowledge but also the very reality they
appear to describe
•This knowledge tradition has functioned to serve
hegemonic, imperialist ends
•The Occident / Orient distinction has operated on
oppositional terms ensuring that the Orient has
been constructed as a negative, inferior inversion
of Western culture
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

30. Edward Said (cont’d)
By constructing the ‘Orient’ as culturally static,
eternally uniform and incapable of self-
definition, the ‘Occident’ as its established
opposite is infused with a secure sense of its
own cultural and intellectual superiority. The
West consequently viewed itself as dynamic,
innovative and expanding, which ultimately
secured a sense of imperial conceit and self-
justification for colonial rule.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

31. Binary oppositions
The West: dynamic, rational, peaceful, liberal,
logical, capable of holding real values - “male”
The Orient: static, irrational, warlike, passion-
ridden, “immoral” – “female”
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

32. Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) – India
• Nation and Narration (1990)
• The Location of Culture (1993)
• Cosmopolitanism (2002)
Encourages a rigorous rethinking of
nationalism, representation, and resistance
that above all stresses the "ambivalence" or
"hybridity" that characterizes the site of
colonial contestation.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

33. Homi K. Bhabha (cont’d.)
•Criticises the supposedly homogenous,
innate, and historically continuous traditions
that falsely define and ensure the subordinate
status of Third World nations.
•Argues that cultures can be understood to
interact, transgress, and transform each other
in a much more complex manner than the
traditional binary oppositions can allow.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

34. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(b. 1942) – India
• In Other Worlds (1988)
• Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993)
• A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (cont’d)
Criticises European literary and philosophical
texts for providing ideological support for
European colonialism and develops a feminist
perspective .
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (cont’d)
•Postcolonial theory focuses too much on past forms of
colonial domination - inadequate to criticise the impact
of contemporary global economic domination
•By speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural
identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their
subordinate position in society. The academic
assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to
an ethnocentric extension of Western logos.
Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

37. Postcolonial literature
• Writing from the Empire (before
political independence)
 white settlers
 creoles
 indigenous peoples

38. Postcolonial literature
• Writing after Independence
 cancelling colonial stereotypes
 becoming subjects
 rewriting history
 establishing identity

39. Postcolonial literature
• Genres
• Themes or Motifs
• Strategies

40. Postcolonial literature:
Strategies
• Appropriation
• Indigenous myth
• Language

41. FeminismFeminism
• First waveFirst wave: equality, rights, liberation and
emancipation.
• Second waveSecond wave: sex is our biological and
natural being; gender is the social and
cultural interpretation of that being.
• Third waveThird wave: no natural ‘sex’ underlying our
gender; sex is textual – always in
production and open to question.

42. Feminist literary criticismFeminist literary criticism
• starts in late 1960’s
• not a unitary theory or procedure
• includes adaptations of psychoanalytic,
Marxist, and poststructuralist theories.

43. Shared AssumptionsShared Assumptions
• Western civilization is pervasively
patriarchalpatriarchal
• sex is determined by anatomy; gendergender is a
cultural constructcultural construct generated by patriarchal
biases of civilization
• patriarchal ideology pervades writings
traditionally considered great literaturegreat literature,
written mainly by men for menby men for men
• standard selection and critical treatment
gender-biasedgender-biased

44. Anglo-American Feminist Crit.Anglo-American Feminist Crit.
• do justicejustice to female points of view, concerns,
and values
• enlargeenlarge, reorder, even displace, the literary
canoncanon
• no fundamental difference:no fundamental difference: an undervaluing
of female writing
• analysis of the representationrepresentation of men and
women by male and female authors
• E.g. Gilbert & Gubar (1979): The Madwoman
in the Attic:

45. French Feminist Crit.French Feminist Crit.
• theorytheory of the role of gender in writing
• fundamental distinctiondistinction based on social
and economic factors
• Western languages male-engendered,
male-constituted, and male-dominated:
phallogocentrismphallogocentrism
• écriture féminineécriture féminine (Cixous)

46. Post-structuralismPost-structuralism
• late 1960’s
• critiques structuralism
• complements structuralism: alternative
modes of inquiry, explanation and
interpretation.
• Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, etc.

47. Post-structuralismPost-structuralism
• signifier and signified are not only
oppositional but pluralplural
• incommensurateincommensurate qualities of language
• no text can mean what itno text can mean what it seems to sayseems to say
• challengeschallenges (even undermines) traditionaltraditional
conceptionsconceptions of meaning, knowledge, truth,
and the subject or "self" (humanism)

48. DeconstructionDeconstruction
• language operates in subtle and often
contradictory ways: no certaintiesno certainties
• destabilisationdestabilisation of hierarchical oppositions
• the signified is always a signifier in
another system: infinite deferral ofinfinite deferral of
meaningmeaning

49. DeconstructionDeconstruction
différancedifférance:: (French différer)
•to deferdefer, postpone, delay and also
•to differdiffer, be different from
The text is an endless sequence of
signifiers which can have no ultimate or
determinate meaning

50. DeconstructionDeconstruction
• aporia:aporia: tension between what a text
manifestly means to say and what it is
nonetheless constrained to mean
• tracestraces: indications of an absence that
define a presence
• reading under erasureerasure

51. DeconstructionDeconstruction
• a way of highlighting things that texts do to
themselves and each other
• questioning prioritiesquestioning priorities set up as natural or
self-evident
• demonstrating binary oppositions are
unstableunstable, reversible, and mutually
dependent
• showing how texts subvertsubvert, exceed, even
overturn their author's stated purposes

52. Literature in English III
Mariel Amez