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Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
Course: M.A English
Semester: 3
Batch: 2016 – 2018
Roll No: 11
Enrollment No:2069108420170020
Submitted to: S M T S.B Gardi
Department Of English
MK Bhav University.
Email id: kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper No: 11: The Postcolonial
Literature.
Topic: Some key term in
Postcolonialism
My Assignment’s
Postcolonialism:
Postcolonialism is an
academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural
legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of
external control and economic exploitation of native people and their lands. The term "Postcolonialism" refers broadly to the
ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are
represented in the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their
independence. Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs
representing the aftermath of western colonialism; the term can also be used to
describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of
people subordinated under various form of imperialism.
However,
some critics use the term to refer to all culture and cultural
products influenced by imperialism from the moment of colonization until the twenty-first
century. Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions between
European nations and the peoples they colonized. By the middle of the twentieth
century, the vast majority of the world was under the control of European
countries. At its peak in the late nineteenth century, according to The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, the British Empire consisted
of "more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth:
one in four people was a subject of Queen Victoria." During the twentieth
century, countries such as India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Canada,
and Australia won independence from their European colonizers. The literature
and art produced in these countries after independence became the subject of
"Postcolonial Studies," an area of academic concentration, initially
in British universities. This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been
developing ever since. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said's critique of
Western representations of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book, Orientalism,
is a seminal text for postcolonial studies and has spawned a host of theories
on the subject. However, as the currency of the term "postcolonial"
gained wider use, its meaning was expanded. Some consider the United States
itself a postcolonial country because of its former status as a territory of
Great Britain, but it is generally studied for its colonizing rather than its
colonized attributes
Anti Colonialism:
The political struggle of colonized peoples
against the specific ideology and practice of colonialism (see colonization).
Anti-colonialism ANTI-COLONIALISM 11 signifies the point at which the various
forms of opposition become articulated as a resistance to the operations of colonialism
in political, economic and cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to
reject colonial power and restore local control. Paradoxically,
anti-colonialist movements often expressed themselves in the appropriation and
subversion of forms borrowed from the institutions of the colonizer and turned
back on them. Thus the struggle was often articulated in terms of a discourse
of anti-colonial ‘nationalism’ in which the form of the modern European
nation-state was taken over and employed as a sign of resistance (see
nation/nationalism).The sometimes arbitrary arrangements of colonial governance
– such as the structures of public administration and forums for local
political representation – became the spaces within which a discourse of
anti-colonial nationalism was focused and a demand for an independent
postcolonial nation-state was formed (see Anderson 1983; Chatterjee 1986,
1993). Anti-colonialism has taken many forms in different colonial situations;
it is sometimes associated with an ideology of racial liberation, as in the
case of nineteenth-century West African nationalists such as Edward Wilmot
Blyden and James African us Horton (ideologies that might be seen as the
precursors of twentieth-century movements such as negritude). Conversely, it
may accompany a demand for recognition of cultural differences on a broad and
diverse front, as in the Indian National Congress which sought to unite a
variety of ethnic groups with different religious and racial identities in a
single, national independence movement. In the second half of the twentieth
century, anti-colonialism was often articulated in terms of a radical, Marxist
discourse of liberation, and in constructions that sought to reconcile the
internationalist and anti-elitist demands of Marxism with the nationalist
sentiments of the period, in the work and theory of early national
liberationist thinkers such as C.L.R.James, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz
Fanon,(see Fanonism, national liberation).Such anti-colonial, national
liberation movements developed the Marxist idea of a revolutionary cadre to
explain the crucial role of the European (colonial) educated intelligentsia in
the anti-colonial struggle. These movements argued that the peasant/proletarian
needed to be led to a practice of liberation – through various stages of local
and national affiliation – by a bourgeois élite who would eventually, in
Cabral’s dramatic formulation, ‘commit suicide’ by developing a popular and
local social practice in which they would be assimilated.
Apartheid:
An Afrikaans term meaning ‘separation’, used
in South Africa for the policy initiated by the Nationalist Government after
1948 and usually rendered into English in the innocuous sounding phrase,
‘policy of separate development’. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and 1936
by the Land Acts which restricted the amount of land available to black farmers
to 13 per cent. But in 1948 the Apartheid laws were enacted, including the
Population Registration Act, which registered all people by racial group; the
Mixed Amenities Act, which codified racial segregation in public facilities;
the Group Areas Act, which segregated suburbs; the Immorality Act, which
illegalized white–black marriages; and the establishment of the so-called
Bantustans, or native homelands, to which a large proportion of the black
population was restricted. Theoretically, the establishment of the Bantustans
was supposed to provide a solution to the racial tension of South Africa by
providing a series of designated territories or homelands in which the
different races could develop separately within the state. But since the white
minority retained for themselves the bulk of the land, and virtually all of the
economically viable territory, including the agriculturally rich areas and the
areas with mining potential, it was, in practice, a means of institutionalizing
and preserving white supremacy. Since the economy required a large body of
non-white workers to live in close proximity to white areas, for which they
provided cheap labour, the Group Areas Act led to the development of specific
racially segregated townships, using low-cost housing, such as the notorious
Soweto area (South West Townships) south of Johannesburg. Under the same Act, people
of African, Cape Colored or Indian descent were forcibly removed from urban
areas where they had lived for generations. The notorious and still
unreconstructed District Six in central Capetown, bulldozed and cleared of its
mixed race inhabitants under the Act, is an often cited example of this aspect
of apartheid policy. The policy of segregation extended to every aspect of
society, with separate sections in public transport, public seats, beaches, and
many other facilities. Further segregation was maintained by the use of Pass
Laws which required non-whites to carry a pass that identified APARTHEID 14
them, and which, unless it was stamped with a work permit, restricted their
access to white areas. The term apartheid acquired very widespread resonance,
and it became commonly used outside the South African situation to designate a
variety of situations in which racial discrimination was institutionalized by
law. An extreme instance of this is when the post-structuralist philosopher and
cultural critic Jacques Derrida employed the term in an influential essay,
suggesting that it had acquired a resonance as a symbol that made it an
archetypal term of discrimination and prejudice for later twentieth-century
global culture (Derrida 1986).
Colonial Discourse:
COLONIAL DISCOURSE this is a term
brought into currency by Edward Said who saw Foucault’s notion of a discourse
as valuable for describing that system within COLONIAL DISCOURSE 36 which that
range of practices termed ‘colonial’ come into being. Said’s Orientalism, which
examined the ways in which colonial discourse operated as an instrument of
power, initiated what came to be known as colonial discourse theory, that
theory which, in the 1980s,saw colonial discourse as its field of study. The
best known colonial discourse theorist, apart from Said, is Homi Bhabha, whose
analysis posited certain disabling contradictions within colonial
relationships, such as hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry, which revealed the
inherent vulnerability of colonial discourse. Discourse, as Foucault theorizes it,
is a system of statements within which the world can be known. It is the system
by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing
specific knowledge’s, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social
formation it works to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to
represent but also for the subjects who form the community on which it depends.
Consequently, colonial discourse is the complex of signs and practices that
organize social existence and social reproduction within colonial
relationships. Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas of the
centrality of Europe, and thus in assumptions that have become characteristic
of modernity: assumptions about history, language, literature and ‘technology’.
Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that can be made about
colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the
relationship between these two. It is the system of knowledge and beliefs about
the world within which acts of colonization take place. Although it is
generated within the society and cultures of the colonizers, it becomes that
discourse within which the colonized may also come to see themselves. At the
very least, it creates a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonized
because of its clash with other knowledge (and kinds of knowledge) about the
world.Through such distinctions it comes to represent the colonized, whatever
the nature of their social structures and cultural histories, as ‘primitive’
and the colonizers as ‘civilized’. Colonial discourse tends to exclude, of
course, statements about the exploitation of the resources of the colonized,
the political status accruing to colonizing powers, the importance to domestic
politics of the development of an empire, all of which may be compelling
reasons COLONIAL DISCOURSE 37 for maintaining colonial ties. Such is the power
of colonial discourse that individual colonizing subjects are not often
consciously aware of the duplicity of their position, for colonial discourse
constructs the colonizing subject as much as the colonized. Statements that
contradict the discourse cannot be made either without incurring punishment, or
without making the individuals who make those statements appear eccentric and
abnormal.
Commonweal Literature:
COMMONWEALTH
LITERATURE broadly, the literatures of the former British Empire and
Commonwealth, including that of Britain. In practice, however, the term has
generally been used to refer to the literatures (written in English) of colonies,
former colonies (including India) and dependencies of Britain, excluding the
literature of England.(The term has sometimes included COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE
44 literatures written in ‘local’ languages and oral performance; and it has
been used to include the literatures of Wales, Scotland and Ireland.) The rise
of the study of national literatures written in English (outside Britain)
begins with the study of ‘American ‘literature. But those literatures that came
to be collectively studied as literatures of the Commonwealth were beginning to
be considered within their own national contexts from the late 1940s onwards.
However, the concept of ‘Commonwealth Literature’ as a separate disciplinary
area within English studies began in the early 1960s in both the United States
and England. In the United States it was formulated as the study of literatures
written in a ‘world’ language in Joseph Jones Terranglia: The Case for English
as a World Literature (1965), and as Commonwealth literature in A.L. McLeod’s
The Commonwealth Pen (1961), a work dedicated to R.G. Howarth whose comparative
grounding in South African and Australian literatures had proved inspirational
for a number of early Commonwealth Literature scholars. The journal World
Literature Written in English began in 1966 and was appearing regularly by
1971; its precursor, the CBC Newsletter, was published from 1962 to 1966;a
division of the MLA (ethno-centrically entitled ‘World Literatures in English
outside the United States and Britain’) was constituted in the early 1960s. In
England the first international Commonwealth Literature Conference was held in
Leeds in 1964 and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies formed. (The Leeds meeting followed conferences held at Makerere, Uganda,
on the role of English as an overseas language, and at Cambridge, England, on
the teaching of English literature overseas).The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature began in 1965 and the third major journal devoted exclusively to
theory and criticism of commonwealth literatures was published in 1979 (the
journal subsequently became a leading journal in establishing the shift to the
use of the term post-colonial literatures). Contemporary post-colonial studies
represent the intersection of Commonwealth literary studies and what is usually
now referred to as ‘colonial discourse theory’. Commonwealth post-colonial
critics, less engaged by Continental philosophies than colonial discourse
theorists, initially concentrated their energies on rendering creative writing
in English in Commonwealth countries visible within a discipline of literary
studies whose assumptions, bases and power were deeply and almost exclusively
invested in the literatures of England (or at best the United Kingdom). In
fighting for the recognition of post-colonial Commonwealth writing within
academies whose roots and continuing power depended on the persisting cultural
and/or political centrality of the imperium, and in a discipline whose manner
and subject matter were the focal signs and symbols of that power – British
literature and its teaching constantly reified, replayed and reinvested the
colonial relation – nationalist critics were forced to conduct their guerrilla
war within the terms and framework of an English literary critical practice. In
so doing they initially adopted the tenets of Leavisite and/or New Criticism,
reading post-colonial texts within a broadly Euro-modernist tradition, but one
whose increasing and inevitable erosion was ensured by the anti-colonial
pressures of the literary texts themselves. Diaspora:
DIASPORA From the Greek meaning ‘to disperse’
(OED).Diasporas,the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their
homelands into new regions, is a central historical fact of colonization.
Colonialism itself was a radically diasporic movement, involving the temporary
or permanent dispersion and settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire
world. The widespread effects of these migrations (such as that which has been
termed ecological imperialism) continue on a global scale. Many such ‘settled’ regions
were developed historically as plantations or agricultural colonies to grow
foodstuffs for the metropolitan populations, and thus a large-scale demand for
labor was created in many regions where the local population could not supply
the need. The result of this was the development, principally in the Americas,
but also in other places such as South Africa, of an economy based on slavery. Virtually
all the slaves shipped to the plantation colonies in the Americas were taken
from West Africa through the various European coastal trading enclaves. The
widespread slaving practiced by Arabs in East Africa also saw some slaves sold
into British colonies such as India and Mauritius, whilst some enslaving of
Melanesian and Polynesian peoples also occurred in parts of the South Pacific
to serve the sugarcane industry in places like Queensland, where it was known
colloquially as ‘blackbirding’. After the slave trade, and when slavery was
outlawed by the European powers in the first decades of the nineteenth century,
the demand for cheap agricultural labour in colonial plantation economies was
met by the development of a system of indentured labour. This involved
transporting, under indenture agreements, large populations of poor
agricultural labourers from population rich areas, such as India and China, to
areas where they were needed to service plantations.. The development of
diasporic cultures necessarily questions essentialist models, interrogating the
ideology of a unified, ‘nature’ cultural norm, one that underpins the
centre/margin model of colonialist discourse. In countries such as Britain and
France, the population now has substantial minorities of diasporic ex-colonial
peoples. In recent times, the notion of a ‘diasporic identity’ has been adopted
by many writers as a positive affirmation of their hybridity.
Hegemony:
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state
within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by
consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why the ruling class was so
successful in promoting its own interests in society. Fundamentally, hegemony
is the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests
are the interests of all. Domination is thus exerted not by force, nor even
necessarily by active persuasion, but by a more subtle and inclusive power over
the economy, and over state apparatuses such as education and the media,
HEGEMONY 106 by which the ruling class’s interest is presented as the common
interest and thus comes to be taken for granted. The term is useful for
describing the success of imperial power over a colonized people who may far
outnumber any occupying military force, but whose desire for self-determination
has been suppressed by a hegemonic notion of the greater good, often couched in
terms of social order, stability and advancement, all of which are defined by
the colonizing power. Hegemony is important because the capacity to influence
the thought of the colonized is by far the most sustained and potent operation
of imperial power in colonized regions. Indeed, an ‘empire’is distinct from a
collection of subject states forcibly controlled by a central power by virtue
of the effectiveness of its cultural hegemony. Consent is achieved by the
interpellation of the colonized subject by imperial discourse so that
Euro-centric values, assumptions, beliefs and attitudes are accepted as a
matter of course as the most natural or valuable. The inevitable consequence of
such interpellation is that the colonized subject understands itself as
peripheral to those Euro-centric values, while at the same time accepting their
centrality. A classic example of the operation of hegemonic control is given by
Gauri Viswanathan, who shows how ‘the humanistic functions traditionally
associated with the study of literature
Hybridity:
However, Young himself offers a
number of objections to the indiscriminate use of the term. He notes how
influential the term ‘hybridity’ was in imperial and colonial discourse in
negative accounts of the union of disparate races – accounts that implied that
unless actively and persistently cultivated, such hybrids would inevitably
revert to their ‘primitive’ stock. Hybridity thus became, particularly at the
turn of the century, part of a colonialist discourse of racism. Young draws our
attention to the dangers of employing a term so rooted in a previous set of
racist assumptions, but he also notes that there is a difference between
unconscious processes of hybrid mixture, or creolization, and a conscious and
politically motivated concern with the deliberate disruption of homogeneity. He
notes that for Bakhtin, for example, hybridity is politicized, made
contestatory, so that it embraces the subversion and challenge of division and
separation. Bakhtin’s hybridity ‘sets different points of view against each
other in a conflictual structure, which retains “a certain elemental, organic
energy and openendedness”’ (Young 1995: 21–22). It is this potential of
hybridity to reverse ‘the structures of domination in the colonial situation’
(23), which Young recognizes, that Bhabha also articulates. ‘Bakhtin’s
intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of
challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power . . . depriving the
imposed imperialist culture,not only of the authority that it has for so long
imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to
authenticity’ (23). Young does, however, warn of the unconscious process of
repetition involved in the contemporary use of the term. According to him, when
talking about hybridity, contemporary cultural discourse cannot escape the
connection with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a
clear racial meaning. Therefore ‘deconstructing such essentialist notions of
race today we may rather be repeating the [fixation on race in the] past than
distancing ourselves from it, or providing a critique of it (27). This is a
subtle and persuasive objection to the concept. However, more positively, Young
also notes that the term indicates a broader insistence in many
twentieth-century disciplines, from physics to genetics,upon ‘a double
logic,which goes against the convention of rational either/or choices, but
which is repeated in HYBRIDITY 110 science in the split between the
incompatible coexisting logics of classical and quantum physics’ (26). In this
sense, as in much else in the structuralist and poststructuralist legacy, the
concept of hybridity emphasizes a typically twentieth-century concern with
relations within a field rather than with an analysis of discrete objects,
seeing meaning as the produce of such relations rather than as intrinsic to
specific events or objects. Whilst assertions of national culture and of
pre-colonial traditions have played an important role in creating anti-colonial
discourse and in arguing for an active decolonizing project, theories of the
hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a different model for resistance,
locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit in the
colonial ambivalence itself and so undermining the very basis on which
imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.
Negritude:
NÉGRITUDE A theory of the
distinctiveness of African personality and culture. African Francophone writers
such as Leopold Sédar Senghor and Birago Diop, and West Indian colleagues such
as Aimé Césaire, developed the theory of négritude in Paris in the period
immediately before and after the Second World War. These African and Caribbean
intellectuals had been recruited under the French colonial policy of
assimilation to study at the metropolitan French universities.The fact that
they came from diverse colonies and that they were also exposed in Paris to
influences from African American movements such as the NÉGRITUDE 144 Harlem
Renaissance,may have influenced them in developing a general theory of negro
people that sought to extend the perception of a unified negro ‘race’to a
concept of a specifically ‘African personality’(see Black Atlantic). The
négritudinist critics drew the attention of fashionable European intellectuals
such as Jean Paul Sartre,who wrote an introduction,entitled ‘Black Orpheus’, to
the first anthology of black African writing published in France, the
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache de langue française (1948).
These critics insisted that African cultures and the literatures they produced
had aesthetic and critical standards of their own, and needed to be judged in
the light of their differences and their specific concerns rather than as a
mere offspring of the parental European cultures. The establishment of the
critical magazine Présence Africaine,founded by Alioune Diop in Paris in 1947,
had initiated a new critical interest in the French language writing of Africa
and the Caribbean, and this important magazine became the vehicle for a number
of crucial critical statements over the next twenty years or so, including
Cheik Anta Diop’s influential essay ‘Nations,négres et culture’and Jacques
Stephen Aléxis ‘Of the magical realism of the Haitians’ (see magic realism).
With the decision in 1957 that future publications would be in French and
English, Présence Africaine also became an important location for critical consideration
of African writing in English (Mudimbe 1994). Négritude, and the work it
developed, took as its territory not only Africa but the whole of diasporic
African culture, since, as Senghor defined it, négritude encompassed ‘the sum
total of the values of the civilization of the African world’ (Reed and Wake
1965: 99). For this reason it was the earliest and most important movement in
establishing a wider awareness of Africa’s claim to cultural distinctiveness.
The concept of ‘négritude’ implied that all people of negro descent shared
certain inalienable essential characteristics. In this respect the movement
was, like those of earlier race-based assertions of African dignity by such
negro activists as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Dubois and
Marcus Garvey, both essentialist and nativist. What made the négritude movement
distinct was its attempt to extend perceptions of the negro as possessing a
distinctive ‘personality’ into all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and
physical.
Orientalism:
ORIENTALISM this is the term
popularized by Edward Said’s Orientalism, in which he examines the processes by
which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to be, constructed in European thinking.
Professional Orientalists included scholars in various disciplines such as
languages, history and philology, but for Said the discourse of Orientalism was
much more widespread and endemic in European thought. As well as a form of
academic discourse it was a style of thought based on ‘the ontological and epistemological
distinction between the “Orient” and the “Occident”’ (Said 1978: 1). But, most
broadly, Said discusses Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing
with the Orient ‘dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing
views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in
short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient’ (3). In this sense it is a classic example of
Foucault’s definition of a discourse. The significance of Orientalism is that
as a mode of knowing the other it was a supreme example of the construction of
the other, a form of authority. The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, but
a phenomenon constructed by generations of intellectuals, artists,
commentators, writers, politicians, and, more importantly, constructed by the
naturalizing of a wide range of Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes. The
relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power, of
domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Consequently, Orientalist
discourse, for Said, is more valuable as a sign of the power exerted by the
West over the Orient than a ‘true’ discourse about the Orient. Under the
general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western
hegemony over the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards, there emerged ‘a
complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum,
for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in
anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about
mankind and the universe’ (7). Orientalism is not, however, a Western plot to
hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is: ORIENTALISM 153 a distribution of
geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical
and philological texts;it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical
distinction . . . but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which . . . it not
only creates but maintains. It is, rather than expresses, a certain will or
intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even
incorporate, what is a manifestly different world (Said 1978: 12).
Significantly, the discourse of Orientalism persists into the present,
particularly in the West’s relationship with ‘Islam’, as is evidenced in its
study, its reporting in the media, its representation in general. But as a
discursive mode, Orientalism models a wide range of institutional constructions
of the colonial other, one example being the study, discussion and general
representation of Africa in the West since the nineteenth century. In this
sense, its practice remains pertinent to the operation of imperial power in
whatever form it adopts; to know, to name, to fix the other in discourse is to
maintain a far-reaching political control. The generalized construction of
regions by such discursive formations is also a feature of contemporary
cultural life. (See Griffiths 2003). Oddly enough, Orientalism spills over into
the realm of self construction, so that the idea of a set of generalized ‘Asian’
values (e.g. Asian democracy) is promoted by the institutions and governments
of peoples who were themselves lumped together initially by Orientalist rubrics
such as ‘the East’ (Far East, Middle East, etc.), the Orient or Asia.
Work
cited: (Bill Ashcroft, 2000)
