Post colonialism

 

Hello friends,

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized.

Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism is an invaluable introductory text to the many theories, debates and critical agendas that inform and animate postcolonial studies.

Two things in particular make this book especially noteworthy:

(1) the first is its clarity and accessibility, especially in its explanations of the complex philosophical ideas that form the basis of postcolonial criticism.

(2)The second is its contemporary relevance, as this edition has been updated to engage with political and social events over the last decade.

 

Historical summary

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 forms of imperialism.

Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western constructions of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term “postcolonial”  was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then, the use of cognate terms “Commonwealth” and “Third World” that were used to describe the literature of Europe’s former colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of the field and the definition of the term “postcolonial,” in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to have held sway over more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having consolidated its control over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism in our own times.

The formation of the colony through various mechanisms of control and the various stages in the development of anti-colonial nationalism interest many scholars in the field. By extension, sometimes temporal considerations give way to spatial ones  in that the cultural productions and social formations of the colony long before colonization are used to better understand the experience of colonization. Moreover, the “postcolonial” sometimes includes countries that have yet to achieve independence, or people in First World countries who are minorities, or even independent colonies that now contend with “neocolonial” forms of subjugation through expanding capitalism and globalization. In all of these senses, the “postcolonial,” rather than indicating only a specific and materially historical event, seems to describe the second half of the twentieth-century in general as a period in the aftermath of the heyday of colonialism.

Even more generically, the “postcolonial” is used to signify a position against imperialism and Eurocentrism. Western ways of knowledge production and dissemination in the past and present then become objects of study for those seeking alternative means of expression. As the foregoing discussion suggests, the term thus yokes a diverse range of experiences, cultures, and problems; the resultant confusion is perhaps predictable.

The emphasis on colonizer/colonized relations, moreover, obscures the operation of internal oppression within the colonies. Still others berate the tendency in the Western academy to be more receptive to postcolonial literature and theory that is compatible with postmodern formulations of hybridity, syncretization, and pastiche while ignoring the critical realism of writers more interested in the specifics of social and racial oppression. The lionization of diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, for instance, might be seen as a privileging of the transnational, migrant sensibility at the expense of more local struggles in the postcolony.

Further, the rise of Postcolonial Studies at a time of growing transnational movements of capital, labor, and culture is viewed by some with suspicion in that it is thought to deflect attention away from the material realities of exploitation both in the First and the Third World.

Important questions with which text deals

How did the experience of colonization affect those who were colonized while also influencing the colonizers?

How were colonial powers able to gain control over so large a portion of the non-Western world?

What traces have been left by colonial education, science and technology in postcolonial societies?

How do these traces affect decisions about development and modernization in postcolonies?

What were the forms of resistance against colonial control?

How did colonial education and language influence the culture and identity of the colonized?

How did Western science, technology, and medicine change existing knowledge systems?

What are the emergent forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?

To what extent has decolonization been possible?

Are Western formulations of postcolonialism overemphasizing hybridity at the expense of material realities?

Should decolonization proceed through an aggressive return to the pre-colonial past ?

How do gender, race, and class function in colonial and postcolonial discourse?

Are new forms of imperialism replacing colonization and how?

Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field , postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.