Paper No 11: Postcolonial Literature.

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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)

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