Transcript Post Colonial Literary Theory - Don Bosco Technical Institute

Literature of the Colonizers and the
Colonized
Concerning literature produced by
colonial powers and works produced by
those who were/are colonized.
•Looks at issues of power, economics,
politics, religion, and culture  how these
elements work in relation to colonial
hegemony (colonizers controlling the
colonized)
•
ALTERITY – Lack of identification with some part of one’s
personality or one’s community, differentness, or otherness.
DIASPORA – Refers to any people or ethnic population forced or
induced to leave their ethnic homelands, being dispersed
throughout other parts of the world, and the developments in that
dispersal.
EUROCENTRISM – The practice of placing emphasis on European
(or Western) concerns, culture, and values at the expense of other
cultures.
HYBRIDITY – Refers to the integration of cultural signs and
practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures
(ASSIMILATION). Positive, enriching, but oppressive as well.
IMPERIALISM – Policy of extending control or authority over
foreign entities  acquisition, maintaining empire
OTHERNESS
•Includes
doubleness  identity and difference. Every other is
created and includes the values of the colonizing culture, but
rejects its power to define
•Manichean allegory  sees world as divided into mutually
exclusive opposites
•One complexity  colonized people are highly diverse;
though they may be seen as “other” from colonizers POV, they
are different from one another and should not be totalized.
•You can’t go home again  Past can be reclaimed, but never
reconstituted
RESISTANCE  AS SUBVERSION,
OPPOSITION, OR MIMICRY
•Resistance always inscribes the resisted into the
texture of the resisting
•Carries with it ideas about human freedom,
liberty, identity, individuality ideas that may
or may not have been held by the colonized
People of British heritage encountered the originating
traditions as Other every colony had emerging
literature: imitation of but differed from central British
tradition
•Colonizers absorbed and adapted by using the myths,
symbols, and definitions of other cultures in their
writing. Therefore, these writers are the others
compared to colonial British writers.
•Difference between colonialist lit and postcolonial lit
• Colonialist  attempt to replicate, continue, equal
the original tradition
• Postcolonialist  a literature of otherness and
resistance, written out of the local experience
•
•How
does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically,
represent various aspects of colonial oppression?
•What does the text reveal about the problematics of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between
personal and cultural identity and such issues as double
consciousness and hybridity?
•What person(s) or groups does the work identify as
"other" or stranger? How are such persons/groups
described and treated?
•What does the text reveal about the politics and/or
psychology of anti-colonialist resistance?
•What
does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference
- the ways in which race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation,
cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form individual identity - in
shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world in which
we live?
•How does the text respond to or comment upon the characters,
themes, or assumptions of a canonized (colonialist) work?
•Are there meaningful similarities among the literatures of different
post-colonial populations?
•How does a literary text in the Western canon reinforce or
undermine colonialist ideology through its representation of
colonialization and/or its inappropriate silence about colonized
peoples?