The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.Che Guevara
Postcolonialism (or post-colonialism—either spelling is acceptable, but each represents slightly different theoretical assumptions) consists of a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned with literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other countries. For the most part, postcolonial studies excludes literature that represents either British or American viewpoints and concentrates on writings from colonized or formerly colonized cultures in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, and other places that were once dominated by, but remained outside of, the white, male, European cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Referred to as “third-world literature” by Marxist critics and “Commonwealth literature” by other terms many contemporary critics think pejorative—postcolonial theorists investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one of them, with its accessory ideology, empowers and deems itself superior to the other.
Post-colonialism marks the end of colonialism by giving the indigenous people the necessary authority and political and cultural freedom to take their place and gain independence by overcoming political and cultural imperialism.
Postcolonial discourse was the outcome of the work of several writers such as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Ngugi Wa Thiango, Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft and his collaborators, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Aizaz Ahmad and others.
Rooted in colonial power and prejudice, postcolonialism develops from a four-thousand-year history of strained cultural relations between colonies in Africa and Asia and the Western world. Throughout this long history, the West became the colonizers, and many African and Asian countries and their peoples became the colonized. During the nineteenth century, Great Britain emerged as the largest colonizer and imperial power, quickly gaining control of almost one quarter of the earth’s landmass. By the middle of the nineteenth century, terms such as colonial interests and the British Empire were widely used both in the media and in government policies and international politics. Many British people believed that Great Britain was destined to rule the world. Likewise, the assumption that Western Europeans and, in particular, the British people were biologically superior to any other race—a term for a class of people based on physical and/or cultural distinctions— remained relatively unquestioned.
Such beliefs directly affected the ways in which the colonizers treated the colonized. Using its political and economic strength, Great Britain, the chief imperialist power of the nineteenth century, dominated her colonies, making them produce then give up their countries’ raw materials in exchange for what material goods the colonized desired or were made to believe they desired by the colonizers.
Forced labor of the colonized became the rule of the day, and thus the institution of slavery was commercialized. Often the colonizers justified their cruel treatment of the colonized by invoking European religious beliefs. From the perspective of many white Westerners, the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Asia were “heathens,” possessing pagan ways that must be Christianized. How one treats peoples who are so defined does not really matter, they maintained, because many Westerners subscribed to the colonialist ideology that all races other than white were inferior or subhuman.These subhumans or “savages” quickly became the inferior and equally “evil” Others, a
philosophical concept called alterity whereby “the Others” are excluded from positions of power and viewed as both different and inferior.
By the early twentieth century, England’s political, social, economic, and ideological domination of its colonies began to disappear, a process known as decolonization. By mid century, for example, India had gained her independence from British colonial rule. Many scholars believe that this event marks the beginning of postcolonialism or third-world studies, a term coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy. When India received her independence, the former British colony was divided into two nations, the India Union and Pakistan. This partitioning, what scholars dub the “Great Divide,” led to ethnic conflict of enormous proportions between India, a new member of the British Commonwealth in 1947, and the mostly Muslim state of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the struggle, igniting the outrage of a vast array of scholars, writers, and critics concerning the social, moral, political, and economic conditions of the afteraffects of colonialism in what were once called third-world countries.
The beginnings of postcolonialism’s theoretical and social concerns can be traced to the 1950s. Along with India’s independence, this decade witnessed the ending of France’s long involvement in Indochina; the parting of the ways between the two leading figures in existential theory, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, over their differing views about Algeria; Fidel Castro’s now-famous “History Shall Absolve Me” speech; and the publication of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958).
In particular, postcolonialism gained the attention of the West with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s monumental text The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989). With the publication of these two texts, the voices and the concerns of many subaltern cultures would soon be heard in both academic and social arenas.
The person living and writing in a colonized culture poses three significant questions:
1. Who am I?
2. How did I develop into the person I am?
3. To what country or countries or to what cultures am I forever linked?
In asking and answering the first question, the colonized author is connecting himself or herself to historical roots. By asking and answering the second question, the writer is admitting a tension between these historical roots and the new culture or hegemony imposed on the writer by the conquerors. By asking and answering the third question, the writer confronts the fact that he or she is both an individual and a social construct created and shaped primarily by the dominant culture. The written works penned by these authors will be personal and always political and ideological. Furthermore, both the creation of a text and its reading may be painful and disturbing but also enlightening.
Whatever the result, the text will certainly be a message sent back to the empire, telling the imperialists the efforts of their colonization and how their Western hegemony has damaged and suppressed the ideologies of those who were conquered.
When applying postcolonialist theory to a text, consider the following questions.
What happens in the text when the two cultures clash, when one sees itself as superior to another?
• Describe the two or more cultures exhibited in the text. What does each value? What does each reject?
• Who in the text is “the Other”? What are the forms of resistance against colonial control?
• How does the superior or privileged culture’s hegemony affect the colonized culture?
• How do the colonized people view themselves? Is there any change in this view by the end of the text?
Is the language of the dominant culture used as a form of oppression? Suppression?
• In what ways is the colonized culture silenced?
• Are there any emergent forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
• How do gender, race, or social class function in the colonial and postcolonial elements of the text?
A bit Of Everything 