BEGINNING POSTCOLONIALISM

Due to its variety and wide range, it is worth considering if we can ever really talk of a
“postcolonialism”(“umbrella” term).
The range of issues covered by the term is large and sometimes contradictory. There’s no
single postcolonialism, because it can be articulated in different ways as an enabling and
critical concept.
It is important that we take into account the historical and cultural context of writers and
thinkers when we consider their work, and understand the dynamic relationship between a
writer and the culture about which he/she writes.
Critics often cannot agree on how to spell “postcolonialism”: with the hyphen (“post-
colonialism”) or without?
● POST-COLONIALISM = seems better suited to denote a particular historical period
or epoch;
● POSTCOLONIALISM = as referring to different forms of representations, reading
practices, attitudes and values. This phenomenon can circulate across the historical
border between colonial rule and national independence.

FROM “COMMONWEALTH” TO
“POSTCOLONIAL”
COLONIALISM AND DECOLONISATION
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered a large area of the
Earth that included parts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, Caribbean and Ireland. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century this Empire had not survived, due to the decolonisation
of millions of people, who were once subject to the authority of the British crown. Even
though there’s no Empire left, colonialism and decolonisation remain fundamental
elements in the contemporary world:
● COLONIALISM = To fully understand its meaning we have to consider its
relationship with two other terms: capitalism and imperialism.
1. CAPITALISM = Judd in his book “Empire: the British imperial experience
from 1765 to the present” argues that colonialism was first a fundamental
part of the commercial venture of Western nations that developed from the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The seizing of foreign lands
for government and settlement was in part motivated by the desire to
generate wealth and control international markets, by exploiting the natural
resources and labor power of different lands and peoples at the lowest
possible cost to Europeans;
2. IMPERIALISM = “colonialism” is often used interchangeably with the term
“imperialism”, but in truth the terms mean different things. “Imperialism” is an
ideological project based on the economic and military control of one nation
by another. “Colonialism” results from the ideology of imperialism, and it
specifically concerns the settlement of people in a new territory (imperialism is
not strictly concerned with the issue of settlement). Colonialism is one of the
mechanisms of imperialism. While colonialism is over today as a practice,
 imperialism continues as Western nations are still engaged in imperial acts,
securing wealth and power through the continuing economic exploitation of
other nations.
● DECOLONISATION = there are 3 different periods of decolonisation when the
colonized nations won the right to govern their own affairs:
1. The loss of the American colonies and declaration of American
independence in the late eighteenth century;
2. Creation of the “dominions” from the end of the nineteenth century to the
first decade of the twentieth century. This term was used to describe the
nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These nations
consisted of large European populations that had settled overseas, often
violently displacing or destroying the indigenous peoples of these lands. The
settler peoples of these nations campaigned for forms of self-government
which they achieved as dominions of the British Empire. Yet, as a dominion,
each still recognised and pledged allegiance to the ultimate authority of
Britain as the “mother country”. In 1931 the “Statute of Westminster” removed
the obligation for the dominions to defer ultimate authority to the British crown
and gave them full governmental control;
3. After the end of WW2 most colonized lands in South Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean achieved independence, often as a consequence of indigenous
anti-colonial nationalism and military struggle.
There are many reasons for decolonisation:
1. Growth of many nationalist movements;
2. Decline of Britain as a world power after 1945 and the ascendency of the
United States and Soviet Union;
3. Changes to technology of production and international finance, which
enabled imperialist and capitalist ambitions to be pursued without the need for
colonial settlement.

THE EMERGENCE OF “COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE”

One important antecedent for postcolonialism was the growth of the study of
“Commonwealth literature”. It was a term literary critics began to use to describe literatures
in English emerging from a selection of countries with a history of colonialism. It incorporated
the study of writers from the European settler communities, as well as writers belonging to
those countries which were in the process of gaining independence from British rule.
One consequence of the decline of the British Empire in the twentieth century was the
establishment of the British Commonwealth of Nations. At first, this term was used to refer
to the special status of the dominions within the Empire and their continuing allegiance to
Britain. However, as the relationship between Britain and the dominions changed, a different
meaning of “Commonwealth” emerged. Britain hosted frequent “colonial conferences”
which gathered together the Governors of the colonies and heads of the dominions. These
meetings were renamed “imperial conferences” in recognition of the fact that dominions
were no longer strictly British colonies. After WW2 these meetings became
“Commonwealth conferences” and featured the Heads of State of the newly independent
nations. The British monarch was recognised as the head of the Commonwealth in symbolic
terms only.
“Commonwealth” became redefined as meaning an association of sovereign nations without
deference to a single authority. It aims to promote democracy, world peace and non-
racialism across its 54 member states. The shift from “colonial” to “Commonwealth” suggests
that the status of the colonized countries has changed from subservience to equality. But the
economic and political relations between Britain and the Commonwealth are far from equal.
“Commonwealth literature” may have been created in an attempt to bring together writings
from around the world on an equal footing, yet the assumption remained that these texts
were ultimately to be judged by a Western English-speaking readership.
Just as the idea of a Commonwealth of nations suggested a diverse community,
Commonwealth literature was assumed to reach across national boundaries and deal with
universal concerns. The “Journal of Commonwealth literature” saw the need to recognise
the important national and cultural differences between writers from different locations. But it
also revealed the ways in which literature from Commonwealth countries was unified through
the category of Commonwealth literature.
National differences were certainly important, adding personality to the novel, but these
national differences were secondary to the fundamental universal meaning of the work: this
is called liberal humanism. For liberal humanists most literary texts always transcended the
provincial contexts of their initial production and dealt with moral preoccupations deemed
relevant to people of all times and places. Many critics of Commonwealth literature appear
very much like liberal humanists, while postcolonial critics assisted in ensuring that these
literatures were a major field that merited serious attention on the same terms as the
classics of English literature.

THEORIES OF COLONIAL DISCOURSES: FANON AND SAID

Theories of colonial discourses have been fundamental to the development of
postcolonialism as an academic discipline. They explore the ways that representations and
modes of perception are used as weapons of colonial power to keep colonized peoples
subservient to colonial rule.
Colonialism operates discursively due to the internalizing of certain expectations about
human relationships. Colonialism suggests certain ways of seeing and understanding the
world. These ways of seeing, attitudes and values are at the base of the study of colonial
discourses.
Colonialism establishes ways of thinking, by justifying to those in the colonizing nation the
idea that it is right and proper to rule over other peoples, and by getting colonized peoples to
accept their lower ranking in the colonial order of things (this is called “colonizing the
minds”).
Colonial discourses form the intersections where language and power meet. Language
does not only just reflect reality, but also creates a person’s understanding of the world. The
Empire did not rule by military and physical force alone, but also by getting both colonizing
and colonized people to see their world and themselves in a particular way, using the
language of the Empire as representing the truth.
In 1950 there emerged much important work that attempted to record the psychological
damage suffered by colonized peoples who internalized those colonial discourses.
● FRANTZ FANON = he wrote about the damage French colonialism had upon
millions of people who suffered its power. He is an important figure in the field of
postcolonialism. “Black skin, white masks” and “The wretched of the Earth” deal
with the mechanics of colonialism and its effects on those who suffered it. “Black
skin, white masks” examined the psychological effects of colonialism, drawing upon
Fanon’s clinical experience as a psychiatrist. He looked at the cost to the individual
who lives in a world where due to the color of his/her skin, he/she is an object of
 derision (in the chapter “The fact of blackness” he remembers how he felt in France
when white strangers pointed out his blackness with phrases such as “dirty nigger!”).
Fanon’s identity is defined in negative terms by those in a position of power: he’s
forced to see himself not as a human subject, but as an object. He feels violated,
imprisoned by a way of seeing him that denies him the right to define his own identity
as a subject. Identity is something that the French made for him.
The colonized subject is forced into the internalization of the self as the “other”: the
negro is deemed to see himself as everything that the French are not. The colonizers
are intelligent, civilized and rational. The negro remains other to all these qualities
against which colonizing peoples derive their sense of superiority and normality.
However hard the colonized try to accept the education, values and language of
France, they are never accepted on equal terms.
The distinction between man and black man is an important part of the colonial
domination that imprisons the mind.
For Fanon the end of colonialism meant not just political and economical changes,
but psychological changes too. Colonialism is destroyed only once its way of thinking
is challenged.
● EDWARD SAID = “Orientalism” is considered to be one of the most influential
books of the late twentieth century, in which Said looked at the divisive relationship
between the colonizer and the colonized and explored how colonialism created
knowledge which supported the divisive practices of colonial government and
settlement. Said examined how the knowledge that Western imperial powers formed
about their colonies helped to justify their subjugation. Said pointed out that rarely did
Western travelers in these regions ever try to learn much about the native peoples
they encountered. Instead, they recorded their observations based upon commonly
held assumptions about the Orient. These observations were presented as scientific
truths that justified colonial domination and produced a degenerate image of Orient
for those in the West.
With the Orient perceived as inferior, its colonization could be justified as a way of
spreading the benefits of Western civilization and saving native peoples from their
own barbarism.
The work of Fanon and Said inspired a new generation of critics, who learnt from their work
the fact that Empires colonize the imagination: Fanon shows how this works at a
psychological level for the oppressed, while Said demonstrates the legitimation of Empire
for the oppressor. To resist colonization one of the main instruments is “decolonizing the
mind”.

THE TURN TO “THEORY” IN THE 1980s

Emerging from the 1980s were new forms of textual analysis. 3 forms in particular became
popular:
● RE-READING CANONICAL ENGLISH LITERATURE = in order to examine if past
representations continued or questioned the latent assumptions of colonial
discourses. This form of textual analysis proceeded along two avenues:
1. Critics looked at writers who dealt with colonial themes and argued about
whether their work was supportive or critical of colonial discourses (EX.
Conrad’s novel about colonialism in Africa, “Heart of Darkness”);
2. Texts that had little to do with colonialism were re-read provocatively in terms
of colonial discourses (EX. Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”).
 ● REPRESENTATION OF COLONIZED SUBJECTS = across a variety of colonial
texts and not just literary ones. This issue was pursued in different ways by Bhabha
and Spivak:
1. BHABHA = explored the possibility of reading colonial discourses as never
able to install the colonial values they seemed to support;
2. SPIVAK = explored the problem of whether or not it was possible to recover
the voices of those who had been made subjects of colonial representations,
● WRITING BACK TO THE CENTRE = Postcolonial literatures were considered to
challenge the colonial center from the colonized margins and for this reason they
were considered actively engaged in the act of decolonizing the mind. This approach
was channeled in the book “The Empire writes back: theory and practice in
postcolonial literatures”, written by 3 Australian critics named Ashcroft, Griffiths
and Tiffin. It epitomized the increasingly popular view that literature from the once-
colonized countries was fundamentally concerned with challenging the language of
colonial power and producing new modes of representation. Its authors looked at the
fortune of the English language in countries with a history of colonialism. English was
being displayed by different linguistic communities in the post-colonial world. They
expressed the belief that the crucial function of language as a medium of power
demands that post-colonial writers define themselves by seizing the language of the
center and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. This
refashioning worked in several ways:
1. inserting untranslatable words into their texts;
2. by refusing to follow standard English syntax and using structures derived
from other languages;
3. incorporating different creolized versions of English into their texts.
The new English of the colonized place was different from the language at the
colonial center. The new Englishes could not be converted into standard English
because they have broken its rules. As a consequence of this difference, new values,
identities and value-systems were expressed, and old colonial values rejected.
There were 3 criticisms against “The Empire writes back”:
● GENDER DIFFERENCES = it neglects gender differences between writers.
Women and men do not live postcoloniality in the same way. Exactly the
same can be said about class differences;
● REGIONAL/NATIONAL DIFFERENCES = there’s little attempt to differentiate
within or between writings from different places;
● IS WRITING BACK REALLY OR PREVALENT? = Not all writing from
countries with a story of colonialism is primarily concerned with colonial
history, colonial discourses and decolonizing the mind.

INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

By the late 1990s key thinkers in the field of postcolonialism published several works which
have come to shape much of the contemporary postcolonial scholarship:
● Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” = he extended the project of Orientalism in
thinking about the ways in which European culture was indebted to imperialism, as
well as exploring modes of resistance to Empire;
● Bhabha’s “The location of culture”;
● Spivak’s “A critique of postcolonial reason: toward the history of the vanishing
present”.
This “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial thinkers had become established at the vanguard of what
had come to be known as “postcolonial theory”.
There were critics against postcolonialism’s most popular assumptions, concepts and critical
positions, especially the work of Said, Bhabha and Spivak.

“POSTCOLONIALISM”: DEFINITIONS AND DANGERS

Colonialism fundamentally affects modes of representation. Language carries with it a set of
assumptions about the proper order of things that is taught as truth and reality.
Colonialism stops when a colony achieves its independence. Yet, it is crucial to realize that
colonial values do not simply vanish on the first day of independence. Life after
independence in many ways is characterized by the persistence of many of the effects of
colonization.
The issue of internal colonialism persists in many once-colonized countries (for such
people colonialism is far from over).
The term “postcolonialism” is not the same as “after colonialism”. It does not define a new
historical era. Postcolonialism recognizes both historical continuity and change:
● CONTINUITY = It recognizes that the material realities and discursive modes of
representation established through colonialism are still very much with us today,
even if the political map of the world has changed through decolonization;
● CHANGE = it prizes the promise, the possibility and the continuing necessity of
change, while recognizing that important challenges and changes have already been
achieved.
Postcolonialism involves one or more of the following:
● reading the cultural endeavors produced by people from countries with a history of
colonialism, primarily those concerning with the workings and legacy of colonialism;
● reading cultural texts produced by those that have migrated from countries that have
a history of colonialism, or those descended from migrant families;
● re-reading texts produced during the colonial period often by members of the
colonizing nations.

READING COLONIAL DISCOURSES

IDEOLOGY, INTERPELLATION, DISCOURSE
Colonialism was often dependent upon the use of military and physical force, but it could not
function without the existence of a set of beliefs that justify the dispossession and continuing
occupation of other people’s lands. These beliefs are encoded in the language spoken by
the colonizers and to which the colonized people are subjected. Colonialism is an
operation of discourse that interpellates colonial subjects by incorporating them in a
system of representation. “Interpellation” describes a process by which individual
subjects come to internalize the dominant values of society and think of their place in society
in a particular way (EX. Fanon’s memory).
Theories of colonial discourses are influenced especially by the work of the French post
structuralist philosopher FOUCAULT and his concept of discourses as a site where power
and knowledge are connected. Although the example of Fanon highlights the pain of being
represented negatively by other people, Foucault argues that power also worked through
gratification. Colonial discourses were successful because they enabled some colonizers to
feel important and superior.
Knowledge is inseparable from the influence of power. The notion of discourse derived from
Foucault points up the complicity of knowledge, representation and culture in the operation
of power in any moment and location. Discourses make and shape the world.
Reading cultural texts in the context of colonial discourses serves different purposes:
● This reading approach, sometimes called “colonial discourse analysis”, places
texts in history by underling how their ideological and historical contexts influence the
production of literary texts and the historical moment;
● The analysis of colonial discourses points out the extent to which the best of Western
culture is caught up in the history of colonial dispossession and exploitation;
● The attention to machinery of colonial discourses in the past can act as a means of
resistance to the continuation of colonial representations and realities which remain
after formal colonization has come to an end (“neo-colonialism”).
In understanding how colonial discourses have functioned historically we refuse their
assumptions and participate in the process of decolonizing the mind.
Said’s definition in “Orientalism” about colonial discourses was important in theorizing them
and in shaping postcolonial studies.

READING “ORIENTALISM”
Orientalism and colonial discourses are not interchangeable terms. Colonial discourses can
be more complex and varied than Said’s specific model of Orientalism. Orientalism is one
particular theorization and manifestation of how colonial discourses might operate, specific
to particular historical and colonial contexts. Said’s book is a study of how Western colonial
powers of Britain and France represented and ruled North Africa and Middle Eastern lands
from the eighteenth century. “Orientalism” refers to the sum of Western representations of
the Orient. In the book Said looks at how Orientalism persisted into the late twentieth century
in Western media reports of Eastern lands, despite formal decolonization for many countries.
The persistence of Orientalist representations reinforces the fact that colonialism does not
quickly disappear as soon as once-colonized countries achieve independence.
One of Orientalism’s main qualities is its readability: Said’s sophisticated and plain written
style distinguishes it from the writing of Bhabha and Spivak.

THE SHAPE OF ORIENTALISM

Orientalism can be described following the general shape of its discourse or its stereotypical
assumptions.
SHAPE:
● ORIENTALISM CONSTRUCTS BINARY OPPOSITIONS = Orientalism makes a
distinction between the Orient and the Occident. The Orient is considered as being
everything that the West is not, its alter ego. Each is assumed to exist in opposition
to the other. The Orient is frequently described in negative terms that underline the
sense of West’s superiority and strength. If the West is assumed as the global seat of
knowledge and learning, then the Orient is a place of ignorance and stupidity (that’s
an unequal dichotomy). The West occupies a superior rank while the Orient is its
“other”, occupying a subservient position.
Said says that European culture gained strength and identity by setting itself against
the Orient as a sort of surrogate end even underground self;
● ORIENTALISM IS A WESTERN FANTASY = Western views of the Orient aren’t
based on what might actually exist in Oriental lands, but on the West’s dreams,
fantasies and assumptions about what that place might contain. Orientalism is a set
 of images, ways of seeing and thinking that come to stand as the Orient’s reality for
those in the West. Orientalism constitutes a vision of the Orient. It doesn't mirror
what’s there. Orientalism imposes upon the Orient specifically Western visions of its
reality;
● ORIENTALISM IS INSTITUTIONAL = The imaginative assumptions of Orientalism
make opinions, views and theses about the Orient circulate as legitimate knowledge,
wholly acceptable truths.
● ORIENTALISM IS LITERARY AND CREATIVE = Orientalism also made possible
new forms of representation and genres of writing that often celebrated Western
experience abroad;
● ORIENTALISM IS LEGITIMATING AND SELF-PERPETUATING = Orientalist
representations function to justify the propriety of Western colonial rule in foreign
lands;
● DISTINCTION BETWEEN “LATENT” AND “MANIFEST” ORIENTALISM = in order
to emphasize the connection between the imaginative assumptions of Orientalism
and its specific examples and effects, Said borrows some terms from Freud to
distinguish between a “latent” Orientalism and a “manifest” Orientalism.
1. “Latent” Orientalism = describes the dreams and fantasies about the Orient
that remain relatively constant over time;
2. “Manifest” Orientalism = refers to the multiple examples of Orientalism
knowledge produced during different historical periods.
While manifestations of Orientalism will inevitably be different, due to reasons of
historical specificity and individual styles and perspectives, their premises will tend to
be the same.

STEREOTYPES:
● THE ORIENT IS TIMELESS = if the West is considered the place of historical
progress and scientific development, then the Orient is considered to be far from the
enlightening process of historical change. The Orient is conceived as timeless, static
and changeless. Conceived in this way, the Orient was often regarded as primitive or
backwards: Western traveling to Oriental lands was not just moving in space from
one location to another, but it was also moving back in time, out of history;
● THE ORIENT IS STRANGE = the Orient is not just different, but it’s oddly different,
unusual and bizarre. Westerners can see all kinds of spectacle there. The Orient
perceived eccentricity often functioned as a source of marvel, mysticism and curiosity
for Western writers and artists. Such perceived strangeness often fascinated and
horrified those in the West in equal measure;
● ORIENTALISM MAKES ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT PEOPLE = Oriental peoples often
appeared in Western representations as examples of various stereotypes. The
assumptions might include the murderous and violent Arab, the lazy Indian, the
sexually obsessed African…Such peoples are homogenized and robbed of their
individuality as Orientalism creates a set of generalized types (so all Arabs are
violent, all Indians are lazy…).
● ORIENTALISM MAKES ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER = there are also popular
gendered stereotypes, such as the effeminate Oriental male or the sexually lustful
exotic Oriental female. The Oriental male was considered to be insufficiently manly,
while the Oriental female, often depicted as nude or partially clothed, could be
presented as an active creature of sexual pleasure who held the key to mysterious
 erotic sexual delights. Oriental men and women don’t comply with these gendered
roles: their gender identity is regarded as transgressive (homogenizing logic: all
Oriental men and women are prejudged as defective in gendered terms);
● THE ORIENT IS FEMININE = In Orientalism, the East as a whole is feminized,
passive, submissive, sexually tempting and mysterious, while the West is thought in
terms of the masculine, active, dominant, heroic, rational. This gendering is
underlined by the use of a specifically sexual vocabulary, used by Western travelers
when describing the Orient. This vocabulary of sexual possession reveals the Orient
as a site of perverse desire on the part of many male colonizers. If the Occident was
associated with the mind, then the Orient was associated with the body: colonizers
could do what was considered a taboo in the West;
● THE ORIENTAL IS DEGENERATE = Orientalist stereotypes fixed the Orientals as
weak, cowardly, lazy, untrustworthy, violent and luxurious. Orientalism says that
Orientals needed to be made civilized and made to conform to the perceived higher
moral standards upheld in the West.

CRITICISMS OF ORIENTALISM
● ORIENTALISM IS AHISTORICAL = one major criticism of Orientalism concerns its
capacity to make totalizing assumptions about a varied range of representations over
a very long period of history. Said’s history of Orientalism is in itself essentially
ahistorical, because it glosses over the various factors that make historical moments
distinctive: we might say that Said prefers latent Orientalism to manifest Orientalism
by neglecting to think whether the representations of the Orient made by those in the
West might modify the enduring assumptions of Orientalism;
● SAID IGNORES RESISTANCE BY THE COLONIZED = Orientalism moves in one
direction from the active West to the passive East, but it doesn't stop to examine how
Orientalist peoples may have contested colonial discourses. Said never thinks about
how Western representations might have been received, accepted, modified,
challenged, overthrown or reproduced by colonized countries;
● SAID IGNORES RESISTANCE WITHIN THE WEST = according to Said, every
European was a racist and imperialist, even those who were horrified by the
treatment of colonized peoples. There’s no room for the so called “counter-
hegemonic thought”, that is opinions contrary to the dominant views within the West
which contest the normative claims of Orientalist discourses;
● SAID NEGLECTS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GENDER = in Orientalist writings
women are usually the creatures of a male-power fantasy: they are willing and
express unlimited sensuality. Did Western women write about the Orient using the
same assumptions and stereotypes? Many women traveled to the colonies and had
their own observations, yet Said rarely looks at women’s writing in Orientalism.

Sara Mills points out that the position of women in relation to Orientalism is often
different to that of men because of the tensions between the discourses of
colonialism and the discourses of gender. Looking at late Victorian and early-
twentieth-century travel writing by women,on one hand these women were
empowered by colonialism owing to the superior position they perceived themselves
to hold in relation to the colonized, but on the other hand they were disempowered
owing to the inferior position they were placed in relation to Western men (women
occupy a dominant position due to colonialism, but an inferior position due to
 patriarchy). Mills’s arguments exemplifies the view that colonial discourses are
multiple, contested and more ambivalent than Said conveys in Orientalism.

AMBIVALENCE AND MIMICRY IN COLONIAL DISCOURSES

Texts rarely embody one point of view, but can bring into play several different ways of
seeing without always firmly deciding which is the true or most appropriate one (EX. “The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom” might seem a firmly robust example of Orientalism, but we can
identify moments when it seems to depart from an Orientalist position and articulate
alternative ways of thinking about the differences between East and West).
Questions about the stability and conviction of colonial discourses have preoccupied
Bhabha, who, like Said, is considered one of the leading voices in postcolonialism today.
Unlike Said’s, Bhabha’s writing is often very challenging to comprehend at a first reading
because of his complex written style. We have to look at Bhabha’s thought to fully
understand his concepts of ambivalence and mimicry in the operation of colonial
discourses:
● AMBIVALENCE = like Said, Bhabha argues that colonial discourses are
characterized by a series of assumptions which aim to legitimate the colonial
settlement of other lands and peoples. The objective of colonial discourses is to
construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial
origin, in order to justify conquest and establish systems of administration and
instruction.
On one hand, the discourse of colonialism would have it that the Oriental (colonized
subject) is a radically strange creature. Conceived as such, the colonized are figured
as the “other” of the Westerner (colonizing subject), essentially beyond Western
comprehension, outside Western culture and civilization. On the other hand, the
discourse of colonialism attempts to domesticate the perceived radical difference of
colonized subjects, bringing them within Western understanding through the
Orientalist project of constructing knowledge about them and making them an object
of study. For Bhabha, the colonialist construction of “otherness” is hence split by the
contradictory positioning of the colonized as simultaneously inside and outside of
Western knowledge.
This contradiction can be grasped through the function of the colonialist stereotype.
Stereotypes translate the unfamiliar into coherent terms by seeming to understand,
fix and explain the strangeness of other peoples. Securing the identity of the
colonized in this way lessens the perceived distance between the colonizers and the
colonized by bringing the colonized inside colonialist modes of representation. But at
the same time, the stereotype functions in a contradictory way to maintain a sense of
difference and distinction between the colonized and the colonizers (the stereotype
both accepts and rejects difference). The discourse of colonialism is frequently
populated with terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust and anarchy. This
is why the colonized are both fascinating and frightening to the colonizers.
Bhabha argues that stereotypes are also frequently repeated in an imperfect attempt
to secure the colonized subject within the discourse of colonialism, but this repetition
is also an acknowledgement that this can never happen.
Bhabha’s discourse of colonialism differs from Said’s, because for Bhabha colonial
discourses are characterized by both ambivalence and anxious repetition. In trying to
do two things at once it ends up doing neither properly;
 ● MIMICRY = described as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial
power and knowledge. He focuses on the fact that in colonized locations such as
India, the British authorities required native peoples to work on their behalf and thus
had to teach them the English language (EX. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian
Education”, in which he seeks to establish the need to impart English education to
Indian “natives”. He said Indians must have been Indians by nature but English in
mind and in manner). These figures are described by Bhabha as “mimic men”, who
learn how to act English, but who do not look English and are not accepted as such.
They are Anglicized rather than English. Bhabha argues that the presence of
Anglicized peoples menaces the discourse of colonialism because they threaten to
expose the ambivalence at its heart. Hearing their language coming through the
mouths of the colonized, the colonizers are faced with the worrying threat of
resemblance between colonizer and colonized.
By revealing that the discourse of colonialism is forever split between ambivalence and
mimicry, Bhabha invites us to think about the ways in which colonial discourses can always
break down when attempting to secure their primary aims.

NATIONALIST REPRESENTATIONS
The idea of nation originates in the West, due to the growth of Western capitalism and
industrialisation and was a fundamental element of imperialism expansion. Nations, like
buildings, are designed by people and built upon particular foundations, which means that they
can also rise and fall. The nation has its own historical narrative that enshrines the common past
of a collective people. It has its own historical account which explains its origins: in reality there
are plenty of potentially different versions of history, but a national history legitimates one
particular version of the past. In many national histories, certain events are ritually celebrated
(EX. Independence day). Each looks back to an occasion that is considered a defining moment in
the history of the nation, helping create a shared sense of a common past and a collective
identity in the present.

LANGUAGE, SPACE, TIME

The notion of a national language is a key mode of collectivity which services the unifying
propensity of the nation.
There is one further important element that is often fundamental to nationalist representations:
constructions of otherness. Every definition of identity is always made in relation to something
else, a perceived other. The drawing of imaginative borders between nations is fundamental to
the legitimacy of the nation, and borders formulate the distinction between the nation’s people
and those others outside and beyond.
Nations are created through elaborate cultural ideological and political processes which
culminate in the individual's feeling of connectedness to other national subjects. The feelings of
connectedness have proved a valuable resource to many anti-colonial movements, which have
turned to the nation and nationalism as primary resources in contesting European colonial
settlement.
If colonialism had condemned millions to a life of subservience and dispossession then anti-
colonial nationalism promised a new dawn of independence, suffrage and political self-
determination for colonized peoples. Many colonies were represented in this period as nations-in-
chains, whose people had been alienated from the land which was their rightful possession and
which would be returned to them once independence dawned. The various anti-colonial
nationalisms across the colonized world in Africa, South Asia and the Americas were not
necessarily identical. Anticolonial nationalist movements often accepted and worked with the
national territorial borders that had not necessarily existed prior to the advent of European
colonialism and were often invented by the colonizing nations (EX. At the Berlin Conference of
1884-1885 the Western powers divided up many African lands between them by drawing
imaginary borders around various parts of the continent. In making and imposing such borders,
many Western powers reorganized African political space. These borders were not ones that
indigenous colonized peoples would have recognized. So in calling for national liberation from
colonialism, many anti-colonial nationalisms were working with a map of the world drawn by the
colonizers).
The appropriation of these imposed constructions of the nation by anti-colonial independence
movements was an expedient and enormously effective maneuver in their various struggles for
freedom, but it also created some problems. In the settler colonies, for example, colonial
settlement had proceeded by denying the legitimacy of “aboriginal peoples” claims to the land.
The colonization of Australia was underwritten by the assumption that this South Pacific land
mass was “terra nullius”, meaning that it belonged to no-one. The judgment that Australia was
“terra nullius” meant not only that the British could claim legal sovereignty over the entire
continent, effectively declaring the Crown as the new and undisputed owner, but also that they
did not need to negotiate any formal treaties with the Aborigines. However, the assumption that
Australia was “terra nullius” was revoked only in 1992 as a consequence of the “Mabo Case”,
when the High court of Australia recognized that Aboriginal peoples had the legal right of “native
title” to the land.

NEGRITUDE
In Paris , after the II World War, Senghor, Diop, Césaire, developed theory of négritude:
It was a particularly powerful mode of disagreement used to forge “deep, horizontal,
comradeship” between colonized peoples. Negritude has been influential in Africa, the Caribbean
and America as a mode which enables oppressed peoples to imagine themselves as a particular
and united collective. One of its aims was to unite peoples living in different places through a
sense of shared ancestry and common origin. Its main exponents are Senghor and Aime
Cesaire, that despite their different backgrounds, found themselves commoly identified in France
as “negres”, an insult that approximates to the racist term “nigger” in English. They both fought
back at derogatory views of black peoples in their writing by presenting the condition of being
black as profoundly valuable. Whereas colonial discourses frequently represented black peoples
as primitive and degenerate, having no culture of any worth, the Negritude writers wrote in praise
of the laudable qualities of black peoples and cultures. Colonial discourses are almost always
racist discourses: they frequently evoke blackness as the visible sign of colonized degeneracy,
and make skin colors the ultimate sign of racial difference. In the nineteenth century, throughout
Europe it was commonly believed that the world’s population existed as a hierarchy of “races”
based upon skin color, with white Europeans being the most civilized and black Africans as the
most savage.
Negritude was an attempt to rescue and reverse blackness from its definition always in negative
terms. Blackness was reconstructed as something positive and valuable, behind which black
peoples throughout the world could unite as one body. Black Africans simply had a different
relationship with the world than Europeans did. These qualities manifested themselves in things
like “emotional warmth” and a “natural” sense of rhythm.
Western education has impoverished their existence, divided themselves from them and made
them suppress their instinctual responses because they are not deemed to be acceptable
behaviors in France. Senghor urged all those of black African descent to realign themselves with
these special, unique qualities, to embrace their “characteristics of the African soul” with pride
and dignity. Cesaire’s notion of Negritude was a little different to Senghor’s: he never lived in
Africa but he was part of the descended people from the African slaves that had been brought to
the Caribbean to work. His concept was based much less on the perceived instinctual essential
differences between whites and blacks. He understood negritude primarily as something to be
measured “with the compass of suffering”, this meant that black people were united more by their
shared experience of oppression than by their essential qualities as “Negroes”. Cesaire criticizes
blacks (and himself) for accepting too readily white condemnation of blackness: but he also
celebrates black people’s perceived valuable aspects that have lain inert during their confinement
by colonialism.
Senghor and Cesaire were passionate humanists, and that the long-term aim of Negritude was
the emancipation of the entire human race, and not just black peoples. Therefore, Negritude
offered a way of uniting oppressed black peoples and recognizing their true value but both writers
also saw the ultimate goal of Negritude: the emancipation of all peoples from the sorry
condition of colonialism.

FRANTZ FANON
He has become an important figure in the field of postcolonialism. He was deeply affected by his
experiences of racism in North Africa during the war. In postcolonial studies, his work has been
significant as providing a way of conceptualizing the construction of identity under colonialism
and as a way of configuring the relationship between nation, nationalism, national consciousness
and national culture in an anti-colonial context. He advocated a more dynamic and vacillating
relationship between the past and the present than that made available by Negritude, although it
must also be said that Fanon was sympathetic to the project of Negritude to a degree.
But because Fanon’s ideas were influenced more by Marxist notions of revolution, his theorizing
of the resistance to colonialism ultimately refused an uncritical notion of an African past, the
universal and historical idea of the “Negro” and the pan-national aspirations of Negritude.
Instead, national culture and national consciousness were historically dynamic things. “On
national culture” begins with Fanon’s critique on Negritude and the “native intellectual”. The term
‘native intellectual’ refers to the writers and thinkers of the colonized nation who have often
been educated under the auspices of the colonizing power. Consequently the Western-educated
native intellectual is in danger of identifying more with the middle-class bourgeoisie of the
colonizing nation than with the indigenous masses. According to Fanon, like the Negritude
writers, the native intellectuals at first refused the view that colonized peoples had no meaningful
culture prior to the arrival of colonizers.
Negritude might promise unity, but it is a unity based on false premises: African and African-
descended peoples face different challenges in a variety of locations at any one moment. This is
because the historical circumstances of African peoples in different parts of the globe cannot be
so readily unified, as what happened in America or the Caribbean. Writers, artists and
intellectuals have a vital role to play in imagining the nations and they participate centrally to
resisting colonialism. Fanon suggests that the creation of a distinctly national culture moves
through 3 phases:
1. In the first, the native intellectual attempts what he calls “unqualified assimilation”:
this means that he or she is inspired by the attempts to copy the dominant trends in
the literature of the colonizing power. In doing so the cultural traditions of the
colonized nation are ignored as the native intellectual aspires to reproduce the
 cultural fashions of the colonizing power. Hence the native intellectual is estranged
from the indigenous masses, identifying more with the colonizing power;
2. In the second phase, the native intellectual grows dissatisfied with copying the
colonizer and instead becomes immersed in the cultural history of the people when
the native intellectual begins to reflect upon the past of the people. By championing
the cultural treasures of the colonized nation the native intellectual becomes too
concerned with cherishing the past and ignores the struggles taking place in the
present;
3. The third phase or “fighting phase” in which the native intellectual becomes directly
involved in the people’s struggle against colonialism. In this phase he or she
becomes conscious of his or her previous estrangement from the people and after
doing a journey in the past of them it is not enough to try to get back to the people in
that past out of which they have already emerged. Traditional culture is mobilized as
part of the people’s fight against oppression and, consequently, is transformed in the
process.
Fanon emphasizes national culture as a vital, unstable matter that is always being made and re-
made. He concludes by underlining the central role that culture has to play in creating the
conditions for a national consciousness that can overcome colonialism and lay the foundations
for a newly and truly independent nation. Fanon is raising the issue of neo-colonialism: he calls
attention to the fact that the newly independent nation can find itself administered by an
indigenous middle class that uses its privileged education and position to replicate the colonial
administration of the nation for its own financial profit. Practically nothing is resolved, they are
only natives who authorize the exploitation of their lands for profit, ergo, it isn’t independence.

THE NATION IN QUESTION

Nationalism cannot be considered the alternative to imperialism. In the years since the period of
decolonisation there has emerged a disenchantment with the ideas of nation and nationalism.
This is in many ways a consequence of the experience of decolonisation with several national
liberal movements, especially in Africa, parts of the Caribbean and South Asia, who encountered
problems once formal independence was achieved. Some nationalist representations might
contribute to the continued oppression of some groups within the national population who have
not experienced liberation in the period of formal independence. From their points of view
“national liberation” seems almost a contradictory term. Although the myth of the nation might be
seen as uniting people in opposition to colonialism, it often does so by choosing to ignore the
diversity of those individuals it seeks to homogenize; created out of gender, racial, religious and
cultural differences. Many once-colonized nations have struggled with the internal differences
that threaten the production of national unity, especially after formal independence. This does not
simply reflect a political failure on the part of the newly independent nations but perhaps reveals
a problem inherent in the concept of the nation itself.

NATIONALISM: A DERIVATIVE DISCOURSE?

There is a conflict right at the heart of nationalism, the “liberal dilemma”: nationalism promises
liberty and universal suffrage, but is complicit in undemocratic forms of government and
domination.
NATIONALISM REPRESENTATION AND THE ELITE
Interrogations of anti-colonial nationalisms on the grounds of their so called ‘elitism’ make two
important points: First, following Fanon, anti-colonial nationalism can result in the replacement of
a Western, colonial ruling class with a Western-educated, ‘indigenous’ ruling class who seem to
speak on behalf of the people but function to keep the people disempowered.
Second, representations of nationalist struggle tend to celebrate the activities of individual
members of the elite and do not recognise the role played by less privileged individuals or groups
in resisting colonial rule.
Contemporary representations of Indian anti-colonial nationalism tend to place the subaltern
classes as subject to the whims of the elite. Hence, Indian nationalism often reads as a venture
in which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation to freedom. The history of Indian
nationalism is thus written up as a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite.

NATIONALISM, “RACE” AND “ETHNICITY”

Historically, divisive criteria have been used in some countries with a history of colonialism as
ways of manufacturing national unity; criteria based upon ideas of racial, ethnic or religious
exclusivity.
While this has rewarded some with the trappings of power, others have found themselves
restricted from positions of authority and condemned as second-class citizens.
Race and ethnicity have been used to set the norms and limits of the nation's imagined
community. The first thing to note is that these terms do not mean the same thing, although they
have some similarities.
Race: all constructions of racial difference are based upon human invention and not biological
fact. Racial differences are best thought of as political constructions which serve the interests of
certain groups of people. Skin color has predominantly been the primary sign of racial difference
and a frequent target of racializing discourses.
Racism is the ideology that upholds the discrimination against certain people on the grounds of
perceived racial differences. 'Race' tends to prioritize physiological features as evidence of
similarity between individuals.
Ethnicity: tends to involve a variety of social practices, rituals and traditions in identifying
different collective groups. Although 'race" and ethnicity are not synonymous, both can be used
as the grounds for discrimination. However, ethnic and racial identities can also be used by
marginalized peoples as valuable resources (Negritude writers).
Balibar makes a useful distinction between external and internal racism.
External racism is a form of xenophobia, when groups of people who are located outside the
borders of the nation are discriminated against on the grounds of their 'race'.
Internal racism is directed at those who live within the nation but are not deemed to belong to
the imagined community of the national people due to their perceived 'race'. Internal racism can
result in its most extreme and violent form in the extermination of racialized individuals (as in the
destruction of Aboriginal communities in the South Pacific in the nineteenth century, for
example).
So, if nationalism is derived from the West, then attempts to construct a unifying myth of the
nation can worsen existing conflicts between groups in some once-colonized nations or between
different 'races' or ethnicities.

NATIONALISM, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Nationalism is very frequently a gendered discourse, because it perpetuates disempowering
representations of women in once-colonized countries. The process of national liberation is
constructed as an exclusively male effort which ignores the contributions made by millions of
women to countless independence struggles around the globe.
Historically, it seems, men and women experience national liberation differently: women do not
have equal benefits from decolonisation for reasons of gender inequality. Women's contributions
to the nationalist struggle are too quickly forgotten after independence is achieved and do not
appear in nationalist representations. In the aftermath of independence, women have been
reconsidered to their formerly "domestic roles”. There are “5 major ways” in which women
historically have been positioned within nationalist discourses:
1. As biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities, women are encouraged by
the state to believe that it is their duty to produce children to replenish the numbers of those who
'rightfully' belong to the nation for reasons of ethnicity.
2. As reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic groups, women are charged with ensuring that
the act of reproduction does not threaten group identity at a symbolic level. To take one example,
in some cases it is taboo for women to have sex with men of a different ethnic group or social
class.
3. As transmitters of culture, women are deemed to be the primary educators of children and
responsible for introducing them to the heritage and traditions of the nation's culture.
4. As signifiers of ethnic/national differences, women are used as icons, such as mother-
figures of the nation.
5. Finally, we are reminded that women are participants in national, economic, political and
military struggles, contrary to many nationalist representations which depict women 'in a
supportive relation to men'. Nationalist discourses attempt to position women in particular ways
which serve patriarchal, sexual and ethnic interests. But we must not let these representations
distract us from the fact that women actively contributed to nationalist struggles and, after
decolonisation, have resisted the operations of forms of patriarchy.

THE NATION AND ITS MARGINS

Bhabha's essay reveals nationalist representations as highly unstable and fragile constructions
which cannot produce the unity they promise.
As we have seen, it is the aim of nationalist discourses to create community out of difference, to
convert the 'many' into 'one'. In so doing, Bhabha argues, they engage with two contradictory
modes of representation, which he calls the pedagogic and the performative. On the one hand,
nationalism is a 'pedagogical' discourse. It asserts a sense of a continuous history which links the
nation's people in the present to previous generations of national subjects. It is pedagogical
because it warrants the authority, legitimacy and primacy of the nation as the central political and
social unit which collects the population into a 'people'. But on the other hand, Bhabha argues
that nationalist discourses are simultaneously 'performative'. This term refers to the ways in
which nationalist icons and popular signs must be continually rehearsed by the people in order to
keep secure the sense of 'deep, horizontal comradeship'.
As a consequence of this 'double' narrative movement, the nation is split by what Bhabha calls
the 'conceptual ambivalence' at the heart of its discursive strategies. The nation is always being
pulled between two incompatible opposites: the nation as a fixed originary essence (continuist
and pedagogic), and the nation as socially manufactured and devoid of a fixed origin (repetitive
and performative). The pedagogical ideal of homogeneous people can never be realized,
because the performative necessity of nationalist representations opens an opportunity for all
those who reside within its borders but who are placed on the margins of its imagined 'norms and
limits' such as women, migrants, the working class, the peasantry, those of a different 'race' or
ethnicity. The performative can corrupt rather than guarantee the operations of the pedagogical.
The nation remains a site of heterogeneity and difference. In Bhabha's work, nationalist
discourses are ultimately illiberal and must always be challenged.

ENGLISH IN SETTLER NATIONS

The English language is one of several European languages which has become a national
language in once-colonized countries, yet many writers and critics in the settler nations have
been keen to differentiate their usage of English from its standard form, which evolved in Britain.
The European settlers faced a problem when they arrived in Australia, as the English language
as it had been previously used was not capable of bearing witness to the particular sights,
sounds and experiences of this new, Australian environment. Managing the relationship with
English in the settler colonies has remained a problematic issue. What worked was the reworking
of English under new conditions, forcing it to change from its standard version into something
new and more suited to the new surroundings. Bill Ashcrofs has theorized this process in his
essay 'Constitutive Graphonomy: A Post-Colonial Theory of Literary Writing'. Ashcroft explores
how all language texts are produced and received in specific contexts and emerge from unique
situations.
Meaning depends upon the moment of textual production and the place where texts are
produced. So, when English is used in a once-colonized location, the specifics of the site of
textual production will necessarily force its meanings to change. The new forms of 'English' which
result are deliberately proclaimed to be distant from the received norm, and offer a means for
English speakers in the settler colonies to conceive their difference through their language.
Native and Aboriginal peoples have had a conflictual relationship with the English language.
Native languages, frequently oral rather than written, have been marginalized or dismissed in
educational and other institutions along with the cultural values and traditions to which they
testify.

“THIRD WORLD” ENGLISHES: ELITE DISCOURSES OR NATIONAL LANGUAGE?

India's languages are various, including Hindi, Urdu, English, etc. Yet there has developed an
exciting body of Indian literature in English. This creates a situation where only the literary
document produced in English is a national document; everything else is regional, hence minor
and forgettable. The continuing predominance of English in India at administrative and cultural
levels is best described as 'co-colonial’, in that it continues to exclude many millions of Indians
who are not literate in English. The English language continues to serve the interests of the
educated elite and not the people as a whole.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o has also adopted hostile attitude towards English. In 1980 he stopped writing
in English and now writes in his native tongue, Gikuyu. For Ngugi the silencing of Gikuyu was a
violent and destructive act of colonialism.
To dismiss a language is to dismiss a whole culture. To write in English is to see the world
through colonial lenses and not through inherited 'spiritual eyeglasses'. He calls on other African
writers to renounce English so that, through the use of indigenous language, they might
'reconnect themselves in their struggle to defeat imperialism'.
Chinua Achebe offers a different view to Ngugi when he declares that English is an African rather
than a foreign language because it is used daily throughout the continent.
Today, English remains one of the predominant languages of education and power. It is difficult
to recover an 'indigenous' language in the Caribbean to which one 'belongs' when the native
languages have been destroyed and the most frequently spoken languages were brought from
overseas.
English remains widely spoken in parts of the Caribbean, but its form has been radically changed
by its users.
Standard English is transformed into 'nation language' due to the different syncopations and
patterns of spoken English in the Caribbean. Indeed, 'nation language' is the language of the
people, it is not an elite language. These everyday voices become the inspiration for new ways of
using English literary and linguistic forms in poetry.
Through 'nation language', poets find their unique "voice" that is particular and appropriate to the
Caribbean; and not solely derived from, nor obedient to, its European sources.

RE-READING AND RE-WRITING ENGLISH

LITERATURE
Colonialism and the teaching of English literature
Many postcolonial writers and critics were taught the ‘classics’ of English Literature in once-
colonized locations. The teaching of English literature in the colonies has been understood by
some critics as one of the many ways in which Western colonial powers asserted their cultural
and moral superiority while at the same time devaluing indigenous cultural products. Through
education certain values are asserted as the best or the most true. Colonialism uses educational
institutions to increase the perceived legitimacy and propriety of itself, as well as providing the
means by which colonial power can be maintained. Many administrators were keen to build an
English-speaking Indian workforce that would help carry out the colonial authorities. Lord
Macaulay, president of the Council on Education in India, put it thus in his now infamous ‘Minute
on Indian Education’ of 1835.
Knowledge is deemed the enriching possession of the ‘scientific’ West and must be taught to
those in India, but the process is not reciprocal. An Orientalist hierarchy is asserted between a
knowledgeable, civilized West and an ignorant, savage East. Rather than studying issues such
as grammar or diction, English literary texts were presented in profoundly moral terms, with
students invited to consider how texts conveyed ‘truths’. So, in an Indian context the teaching of
English literature in the colonies was complicit with the maintenance of colonial power. Chinua
Achebe controversially denounced Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness on the grounds that it
proved how Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist, Achebe objected to Conrad’s derogatory and
dehumanizing representation of Africa and Africans. In continuing to teach this novel as ‘great’,
Conrad’s alleged late-Victorian racism was being perpetuated in the present day as this
supposedly racist text was falsely presented to students as of exceptional literary value. As
Achebe knows, not all such texts are inevitably colonialist. If we consider Shakespear’s “The
tempest” which is set on an unnamed magical island and frequently depicts the magician
Prospero in command of his unruly subjects Ariel and especially Caliban. Prospero and Caliban
have become synonymous with the figures of colonizer and colonized for many postcolonial
writers and theorists. Some postcolonial writers have conceived of Prospero and Caliban as
archetypes of the colonizer and the colonized, placing emphasis on the psychological
consequences of colonialism and Caliban’s response to the imposition of Prospero’s language.
This is not the same as claiming that Shakespear wrote a play about colonialism; although there
has been much debate about the extent to which colonialism was its subject.
READING LITERATURES “CONTRAPUNTUALITY”
Two ‘classic’ English novels that have been re-read in their colonial contexts are Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Mansfield Park’s relations with colonial
contexts have been discussed at some length by Edward W. Said in his book Culture and
Imperialism. Said explores the relations between Austen’s Mansfield Park and Britain’s
colonization of the Caribbean island of Antigua. Mansfield Park is the property of Sir Thomas and
Lady Bertram. As Said argues, Sir Thomas’s economic interests in the Caribbean provide the
material wealth upon which the comfortable middle-class lifestyle of Mansfield Park depends.
The domestic interior world of this English country house cannot exist independent from the
world outside, no matter how remote it might seem from the plantations of Antigua. Indeed, the
inseparability of the world ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the house is reflected in other ways. Throughout
much of the novel Sir Thomas is absent from Mansfield park because of some problems that
arose on his plantation in Antigua. Said suggests that Sir Thomas’s ability to set his house in
order on his return is reflective of his role as a colonial landlord. The parallels Said detects
between these locations supports his argument that the borders between inside and outside,
domestic and international, England and Empire are permeable. The interior world of M. P. is not
static or enclosed but dynamic and dependent upon being resourced from the outside. There are
three consequences of re-reading M.P. in its colonial contexts. First, such a reading bears
witness to what Said calls the worldliness of culture (a term that refers to the historical and social
and political conditions of the time). Second, this approach both exemplifies and encourages
contrapunctual readings of literary texts. Said defines a contrapuntal reading as one which
remains simultaneously aware ‘both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other
histories against which the dominating discourse acts’. Reading Mansfield park contrapuntally not
only involves spotting moments when the colonies are represented; it is also to bring to the novel
a knowledge of the history of the Caribbean which the novel is not necessarily writing about but
upon which it ultimately depends.

RE-READING CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S “JANE EYRE”

In order to provide an income for his second son, Rochester’s father secured Edward’s marriage
to Bertha, the daughter of a planter and merchant living in Jamaica. Bertha’s mother was a
Jamaican Creole (a term which Bronte uses to signify “racially mixed parentage”). Two particular
colonial scenarios are conjured: via the Mason we are exposed to the plantation-owning
community in Jamaica, while St John Rivers connects the novel with British missionary work in
India. In addition, elements from colonial locations also emerge in the novel figuratively; they
supply Jane with a series of images and metaphors which she uses to articulate her own position
on several occasions. The economic relationship between the novel’s characters are vital to the
plot. Rochester’s first marriage to a Jamaican-born Bertha gains him a fortune of 30.000 pounds
which makes possible his lifestyle in Thornfield. Jane’s inheritance of 20.000 pounds also has a
colonial source: It comes from her uncle in Madeira, who is an agent for a Jamaican wine
manufacturer, Bertha’s brother. The location of Jane’s uncle John (Eyre) in Madeira, off Morocco,
where Richard Mason stops on his way home from England, also suggests, through Mason’s
itinerary, the triangular route of the British slave traders, impling that John’s fortune comes from
the slave trade.
Yet despite the novel’s use of the economics of colonialism, re-readings of Jane Eyre in its
colonial contexts have emerged only in recent years. One of the most important is Spivak’s essay
“Three Women’s Texts: A critique of Imperialism”, that reveals how Jane Eyre is implicated in
colonialism not just in terms of economic wealth, but at the level of narrative and representation.
"Three Women's Texts: a Critique of Imperialism” is a response to Anglo-American feminist
literary criticism of the late 1970s, in which Jane Eyre had become celebrated. Gilbert and Gubar
in their book “The Madwoman in the Attic” celebrate Jane as a proto-feminist heroine who
struggles successfully to achieve female self-determination in a patriarchal and oppressive world.
Jane's journey from subservience to female self-determination, economic security and marriage
on her terms could not occur without the oppression of Bertha Mason. Spivak points out that
Gilbert and Gubar read Bertha always in relation to Jane, never as an individual self in her own
right.
In their words, Bertha is Jane's 'truest and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan
child, the ferocious secret self that Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at
Gateshead'. Thus conceived, Bertha's lunacy represents the anger that Jane represses in order
to be deemed an acceptable woman in a patriarchal world. This reading of Bertha purely in
relation to Jane's self leaves out the colonial context of Bertha's imprisonment and fails to
examine some of the assumptions concerning Bertha's lunacy and her representation in terms of
'race'.
For example, if we consider the moment when Rochester takes Jane to see Bertha just after the
wedding has been disrupted by Mr. Mason.
Jane describes seeing a figure 'whether beast or human being, one could not at first sight tell'.
Bertha's ambiguous bestiality, her wild and violent nature dovetail with her 'mixed' Creole lineage
and Jamaican birthplace. This slippage repeats a frequent assumption in colonial discourses that
those born of parents not from the same 'race' are degenerate beings, perhaps not fully human,
closer to animals. Bertha is robbed of human selfhood; she has no voice in the novel other than
the demoniac laughter and the discomforting noises that Jane reports. Her animalistic character
disqualifies her from the journey of human self-determination for which Jane is celebrated by
Anglo-American feminist critics.
Bertha is always connected to Jane as an 'other'; she never achieves any self of her own, Jane's
journey to self-fulfillment and her happy marriage are achieved at the cost of Bertha's human
selfhood and her life. As Spivak memorably puts it, Bertha 'must play out her role, act out the
transformation of her "self" into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that
Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction'. Spivak wants to bring
to crisis the celebration of Jane as a proto-feminist individualist.
Spivak takes colonialism into account when approaching not only this novel, but nineteenth-
century literature in general.
One result of Spivak's essay is the impression that Jane Eyre is entirely complicit with many of
the assumptions in colonial discourses. Although it is not the only conclusion that can be made.
The first passage is taken from Rochester's narrative of his marriage to Bertha which occurs in
Chapter 27. This passage seems to perpetuate many colonial assumptions. Rochester's terms of
reference depict Jamaica as a satanic and apocalyptic location. The references give the
impression of Jamaica as a hell-on-earth. The crazed world outside is responsible for driving
Rochester wild, and his decision to shoot himself shows how much his mind has been deranged
by the stormy environment.
Bertha represents what Rochester could become - indeed, perhaps has become - by staying in
Jamaica: Lunatic and useless. What saves him from madness and suicide, as Rochester
describes it, is a wind 'fresh from Europe'. This passage depicts a different Jamaica, one of
growth and beauty.
Although this passage acknowledges the beauty of the landscape, one that contrasts sharply
with the bleak mosquito-infested environment of the night before, 'regeneration' has been
produced by the 'sweet' wind from Europe. In comparing these two scenes we notice how Brontë
constructs her fictional world in terms of what we might call manichean oppositions. "Manichean
aesthetics' refers to a system of representations which conceives of the world in terms of
opposed categories. Reality is constructed as a series of polarities which derive from the
opposition posited between light and darkness, and good and evil.
This provides a structure of both meaning and morality. So, in a system of manichean aesthetics,
all that is light is orderly, tractable, rational, angelic and ultimately good; whereas all that is dark
is degenerate, chaotic, transgressive, lunatic, satanic and hence evil. The relationship between
Jamaica and Europe is both contrasting and unequal.

“JANE EYRE”: A POSTCOLONIAL TEXT?

Many literary texts can be re-read to discover the hitherto hidden history of resistance to
colonialism that they also articulate. Many of the slaves working on the plantations in Jamaica
were originally Africans who had been captured, shipped in appalling conditions across the
Atlantic Ocean and sold to the plantation owners. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 but it
still permitted the use of slaves as hard labour on the plantations. Full slave emancipation in the
British Caribbean possessions was achieved between 1834 and 1838. In western Jamaica
between December 1831 and early 1832 there occurred what historians call the 'Baptist War',
when over 60,000 slaves rose against the British. Fires were started which served as beacons to
let other slaves know that an uprising had begun, and the burning of the plantations was an
important part of the slaves' resistance. It could be argued that Bertha's attempt to set fire to
Rochester's chamber while he is asleep recall the fiery resistant activities of slaves in Jamaica.

POSTCOLONIAL REWRITINGS: “WIDE SARGASSO SEA”- JEAN RHYS

Jean Rhys was born in the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1890 and moved to Britain as a
sixteen-year-old, where she endured a difficult and at times controversial life. Her mother's family
had once owned slaves. Rhys had a significant relationship with the Caribbean and Britain, yet
her sense of belonging to both was complicated by the circumstances of her birth. As a
descendent of the white slave-owning class, her relations with black Caribbeans descended from
slavery could not be unaffected by the historical circumstances of the region, and as a
Dominican-born white woman she could not consider herself first and foremost British. Because
of her Caribbean background, Rhys became preoccupied with Bronte's Bertha Mason with whom
in some respects she occupied a similar position. Both Bertha's mother and Rhys's mother were
Creoles; both Bertha and Rhys left the Caribbean for England as young women. In “Wide
Sargasso Sea”, Rhys takes as her point of inspiration the figure of Bertha Mason and places her
center-stage, allowing her the possibility to achieve selfhood and granting her the opportunity of
telling things from her point of view. This is not done for the purposes of completing Jane Eyre.
Rhys's novel both engages with and refuses Jane Eyre as an authoritative source. We can
regard this refusal as part of the postcolonial strategies.

Plot: Wide Sargasso Sea proceeds through three parts:

● The first is narrated by Antoinette Cosway, who records her childhood with her
widowed mother Annette in a large house, Coulibri, in Jamaica just after the
Emancipation Act which formally ended slavery. She remembers her childhood as a
time of both beauty and danger. Antoinette's mother marries Mr Mason, who
attempts to reinvest in Coulibri. But Coulibri is set on fire and Antoinette's brother
Pierre is killed. The incident drives Annette to distraction, and Anto is sent away to a
convent school during which time her mother dies. Later, as a seventeen-year-old
she is visited by her stepfather Mr Mason who invites her to live with him in Jamaica.
 ● In Part 2 the narrative shifts unexpectedly to an unnamed male character, who, it
quickly transpires, has married Antoinette. Although this figure is never named, the
reader familiar with Jane Eyre might assume that this character is analogous to
Bronte's Rochester. The unnamed narrator takes to calling his wife 'Bertha', a name
to which she objects. Antoinette's husband is uncomfortable with the island and its
inhabitants, especially his wife's black servant Christophine. Eventually he is
contacted by one Daniel Cosway who claims to be Antoinette's half-brother. He
informs the narrator about the madness of the Cosway family and links Christophine
to the practice of obeah (or voodoo). Choosing to believe Daniel, the narrator
convinces himself that he has been tricked into marriage, and his relationship with
Antoinette deteriorates. Antoinette interrupts the narrative and tells briefly of how she
pleads with Christophine to give her a potion that will make her husband love her
again. Instead, her husband has a sexual encounter with a black servant, Amélie,
and decides to return to England with the wealth he has inherited through his
marriage. Antoinette will come too.
● The third part of the novel is set in England, in a large house. The opening
paragraphs are narrated by Grace Poole but the rest is delivered by Antoinette. She
contrasts her memories of Caribbean life with the gray surroundings of her attic cell,
and tells of her wanderings through the house at night. In a remarkable climax to the
novel she dreams of setting the house on fire and jumping from the rooftop. The
novel ends with Antoinette walking with the candle along a dark passage.

There are two elements of the text on which we shall particularly focus: the novel's curious
narrative structure and the importance of naming. One of the novel's complexities concerns
narrative voice. The text has two major first-person narrators, Antoinette and her husband, as
well as other contributors such as Grace Poole and Daniel Cosway; this raises questions
concerning the overall control of the narrative. Antoinette's representation of events comes into
competition with her husband's. On several occasions in the text our attention is drawn to the
incompatibility of each other's vista, as they both compete for the control of meaning. In this clash
of perspectives we can trace a contest of power which is simultaneously colonial and patriarchal.
In this exchange we might also find the relationship between Jane Eyre and the Wide Sargasso
Sea. In marrying Antoinette, he lays claim to the authority over her representation. Antoinette's
debasement takes place entirely within his first-person narrative. He chooses to believe Daniel
Cosway's that there is madness in that family. Preferring these allegations to Antoinette's version
of her family history. By the end of Part 2 he has made for himself his own version of events in
which he believes that his father and eldest brother have married him off to Antoinette. It is these
masculine voices which attempt to define and confine Antoinette, reconstructing her character
and judging her behavior. Significantly, Antoinette's husband makes a drawing which anticipates
both her fate and that of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre.
She becomes what he makes her. Antoinette and Bertha are not the crude definitions given by
their husbands. No matter how much others try to define Antoinette's identity, we know she is not
what her husband represents in his narrative. In these terms, Antoinette is both confined by and
escapes her representation by other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea. This is reflected in the
novel's structure. Her husband may relate the longest section of the narrative, reflecting his
desire to control meaning, but Antoinette's voice interrupts him at the novel's central point in Part
2. She is also the novel's first and last narrator, making her husband's narratives contained inside
hers. Neither character is fully in control.
The dependent relationship between two texts echoes the colonial relationship between Britain
and its Caribbean colonies. Wide Sargasso Sea is set during the 1830s and 1840s, specifically
after much of the action of Jane Eyre takes place. Yet, the action must have occurred much
earlier in time. This oddity has led the novel to be called a 'post-dated prequel' of Jane Eyre. The
temporal anomaly makes Wide Sargasso Sea seem to pre-date Jane Eyre, Rhys enjoins future
readers to envisage Victorian Britain as dependent upon her colonies, just as Bronte's heroine
depends upon a colonial inheritance to gain her own independence. Wide Sargasso Sea stands
in a similar relationship to Jane Eyre, engaging with Bronte's novel in order to challenge its
meaning by criticizing its representations.
Which leads us, finally, to the naming of characters in the Wide Sargasso Sea. Names are often
central to our sense of identity. Note how Antoinette's name is constantly changing in the novel
as her family circumstances alter (some critics refer to her as Bertha Antoinette Cosway Mason
Rochester). Such a long convoluted name calls attention to the extent to which Antoinette's
identity is always being defined in relation both to men and by men. It is tempting perhaps to fix
Bertha Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester as simply 'Bertha' and her husband as 'Rochester',
we trap these characters inside representations made by somebody else which only approximate
to the individuals we have met. Rhys reminds us that we as readers always have an active role to
play in the creation and questioning of meaning. The Wide Sargasso Sea demands that we think
carefully about our attempts to discover one authoritative voice among the clamor of many
voices. It invites us to consider that such attempts might not be too remote from colonial and
patriarchal impulses to fix representations of others whose voices are consequently silenced.
Ultimately, the extent to which Wide Sargasso Sea confirms or resists the authority of Jane Eyre
is the responsibility of the reader.

POSTCOLONIALISM AND FEMINISM

Postcolonialism and feminism are sometimes seen to share tense relations with each other.
Feminists have questioned the extent to which Western, or “First World” feminism, is able to deal
with the problems encountered by women in once-colonized countries or those living in Western
societies with ancestral connections to these countries (such as migrants and their descendants).
“First World” feminism and “Third World” women: these terms relate to a system of ways of
mapping the global relationships of the world's nations which emerged after WW2. The “First
World” referred to the rich, predominantly Western nations in Europe, America and Australia; the
“Second World” denoted the Soviet Union and its communist allies; while the “Third World”
consisted in the main of the former colonies such as countries in Africa and South Asia which
were economically under-developed. Although the phrase "First World” feminism is an unhappy
generalization, the naming of a “First World” feminism has proved a productive means of
acknowledging and questioning the limits of feminist scholarship in the West, particularly its
relations with “Third World” women.

THE “DOUBLE COLONIZATION” OF WOMEN

Petersen and Rutherford have used the phrase "double colonization" to refer to the ways in
which women have simultaneously experienced the oppression of colonialism and patriarchy.
Colonialism celebrates male achievement in a series of male-oriented myths (EX.
missionaries…), while women are subject to representation in colonial discourses in ways which
collude with patriarchal values. It affects women from both the colonized and colonizing cultures
in various ways. The book “Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths” of Kabbani looks at the
production of the Eastern female as a figure of licentiousness, and Western heterosexual male
desire. But the arrival of the British interrupted the previous organization of genders to impose
their own. And so indigenous gender roles aren’t fair. Gender inequalities exist in both the
indigenous and the colonial culture: both often simultaneously oppress women during colonialism
and in its wake.

FEMINISM AND “RACE”

Western feminism is criticized for the Orientalist way it represents the social practices of other
“races” as backwards and barbarous, from which black and Asian women need rescuing by their
Western sisters. In so doing it fails to take into consideration the particular needs of these
women, or consider different cultural practices on their own terms. Western feminism frequently
suffers from an ethnocentric bias in presuming that the solutions which white Western women
have advocated in combating their oppression are equally applicable to all. As a consequence,
issues of “race” have been neglected, which has hindered feminists from thinking about the ways
in which racism and patriarchy interact. In addition, white women have failed to see themselves
as the potential oppressors of black and Asian women, even when adopting benevolent positions
towards them. “First World” and “Third World” are brought to crisis by exposing their limits,
shortcomings and blind-spots. Spivak argues that a “First World” feminist is often mistaken in
considering that her gender authorizes her to speak for “Third World” women. Feminists must
learn to speak to women and not for women. It is important to notice that Spivak's argument
avoids the charge of ethnocentrism by refusing the logic that, for example, only Indian women
can speak for other Indian women.
She recognises that Western feminism's attention to “Third World” women is valuable and
laudable. “Third World” nations remain subservient to the West, at the levels of economic wealth,
scientific development and technological resources. All women in divergent contexts are first and
foremost victims of different kinds of oppression: male violence, the structure of the family,
economic structures and so on. Women are taken as a unified "powerless" group prior to the
historical and political analysis in question. The second presumption concerns the ways by which
“universal womanhood” is proved:
● The first, the “arithmetic method”, presumes that certain forms of oppression are
universal if they circumscribe large numbers of women (EX. It is assumed that
because Muslim women in places such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India and
Egypt wear the veil, they all suffer from the same form of oppression);
● The second methodology concerns the assumption that concepts (such as
patriarchy, reproduction, the family etc.) are often used “without their specification in
local cultural and historical contexts”.
These are the convenient aesthetic distinctions we make to conceptualize the world

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

The category of Third World women is an effect of discourse rather than a reality.
Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern speak?” is a complex critique of the representation of
human subjectivity in a variety of contexts, but with particular reference to the work of the
Subaltern Studies scholars (interested in the representation of the subaltern in colonialist
texts, with subaltern defined as those who did not comprise the colonial elite).
Spivak begins by turning first to work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault, who has
challenged the notion that human individuals are “sovereign subjects” with autonomous
agency over their consciousness . As poststructuralism would have it, human consciousness
is constructed discursively. We are not the authors of ourselves. We don’t simply construct
our own identities but have them written for us: the subject cannot be wholly sovereign over
the construction of selfhood, but the subject is “de-centered” in that its consciousness is
always being constructed from positions outside of itself.
Spivak argues that, when Foucault talks about oppressed groups, he falls back into these
uncritical notions of the sovereign subject by restoring to them a full centered
consciousness. Spivak is concerned that these theoretical failings also problematize the
study of colonized subjects.
Representations of subaltern insurgency must not be trusted as reliable expressions of a
sovereign subaltern consciousness (like Third World women, subaltern consciousness is an
effect of discourse).
All forms of representations which claim to identify subaltern consciousness are complicit in
the colonialist discursive dynamics they seek to challenge. In the act of giving visibility and
voice to the subaltern, the subaltern actually disappears and is silenced. These problems are
further compounded by the issue of gender, because representations of subaltern
insurgency tend to prioritize men. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern
has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in
shadow.
The problem that Spivak identifies in her essay is not that the woman cannot speak as
such, but that she is assigned no position of enunciation and therefore everyone else
speaks for her, so that she is rewritten continuously as the object of patriarchy or of
imperialism. Rather than making the subaltern as female seem to speak, intellectuals
must bring to the crisis the representational system which rendered her mute in the
first place.
Spivak has reflected on the ideas raised in “Can the Subaltern speak?” and the responses
they provoked. An important point she makes concerns the use of the term “speak” in the
title of her essay: she suggests that she was not using the term literally to suggest that such
women never actually talked. It is not so much that subaltern women did not speak, but
rather that others did not know how to listen. The silence of the female as subaltern is
the result of a failure of interpretation and not a failure of articulation.

“GOING A PIECE OF THE WAY”: CREATIVE DIALOGUES IN POSTCOLONIAL

FEMINISM
Other ways of thinking about the relationship between First World feminism and Third World
women turn on thinking about the ways in which the experiences of women from different
locations and cultures can indeed be connected in exciting and novel ways.
The possibility of building such new relations between women across First and Third World
feminism is evidenced by a book of Nasta called “Motherlands”. Nasta argues that a
“creative dialogue” is possible where First World and Third World voices both contribute to
learn from each other.
The creative writers studied in “Motherlands” all use various forms of English in their work,
and Nasta acknowledges how as a “father tongue” English remains a problematic language
for those women in that it houses both colonial and patriarchal values. Language is both
enabling and disabling.
In showing how a “creative dialogue” is possible, “Motherlands” makes an important
contribution to the debates concerning postcolonialism and feminism, while also calling the
reader’s attention specifically to the agency and voices of black women from Africa, the
Caribbean and South Asia.
Davies makes a valuable point in “Black women, Writing and Identity” when she uses the
phrase “going a piece of the way with them” to explain her own encounters with Western
theory. She argues that it is impossible for her to work fully with the various theoretical
schools available, because they have the potential to marginalize her as a black woman in
their methodological assumptions. She proposes a kind of “critical relationality” in which
various theoretical positions are interrogated for their specific applicability to black women’s
experiences. Her notion of “going a piece of the way with them” bears witness to the ways in
which black women have unsettled received ideas and challenged the biases of First World
theory and male-centered postcolonialism.

REPRESENTING WOMEN IN SALLY MORGAN’S “MY PLACE”

Set in Australia, ”My Place” is an autobiographical text which explores the history of Sally
Morgan’s family in the wider context of Australian history. Sally records her childhood as a
time of difficulty. During the course of her youth she begins to realize that she is not always
regarded by others in the same way as white children. She is told that she is an Indian, but
later on she learns that this is a lie and that she is descended from Australia’s Aborigines.
This sets Sally on a determined quest to discover the hidden branches of her family tree.
This involves her traveling to the places where her mother and grandmother grew up and
meeting Aboriginal people whom she had no idea existed.
“My Place” offers a corrective to historical representations of Australian history. There’s
nothing written from a personal point of view about Aboriginal people. All their history is
about white men. The writing of Australian history privileges white male. In opposition to this,
Sally’s narrative calls attention to the experiences of women and records the exploitation of
Aboriginal peoples by white settlers.
The text evidences the “double colonization” of women, as many characters find
themselves subservient of colonialism and patriarchy. It exposes how Aboriginal women
could become objects of sexual desire for white men and how they do not care about
pregnancy.
Throughout the text there’s uncertainty about the identity of her grandmother’s father, who
could be one of several possible white men. In addition, her mother’s narrative records how
the children fathered by white men and born to Aboriginal women were taken from their
mothers and forced to grow up separately (“stolen generation”).
The position of white women is also an issue. On the one hand “My Place” shows how
they are subject to the patriarchal authority of white men and have to endure the men’s
sexual encounters with Aboriginal women. Yet they are also complicit in the marginalization
of Aboriginal women due to the ways that colonial discourses position them in relation to
Aboriginal peoples.
It is clear that in the text Aboriginality is more than a description of physiological race. It
appears that Sally could choose to conceal her Aboriginality and claim a non-Aboriginal
identity, just like her mother, who told her children they were Indian to keep their Aboriginal
heritage a secret. Sally’s firm decision to embrace and explore an Aboriginal identity is
an important political decision.

DIASPORA IDENTITIES
MIGRATION, COLONIALISM AND DECOLONISATION
Through the work of colonialism a lot of people voyaged out from Britain, often settling
around the world in a variety of different places. Important were the voyages by colonized
peoples from around the world who traveled to the major European countries, where many
remained for the rest of their lives.
While human migrations needs to be recognized as an ancient phenomenon with a long
colonial history, decolonization has had major consequences for the migration of peoples
from once-colonized countries to European metropolitan centers. A wealth of cultural texts
has been created as a consequence of twentieth century migrations and these often take the
themes of migration and diaspora as their subject matter.
The reasons for migration are different: in Britain, some colonial peoples were specifically
recruited by the government, others arrived to study or to escape political and economic
difficulties in their native lands. Some followed family members who migrated before them.
As a consequence, today many European countries can boast a wide variety of diaspora
communities.

WHAT IS A DIASPORA?
The term “diaspora” once referred to the dispersal of Jews, but within contemporary cultural
analysis the term is now more likely to evoke global movements and migrations. Within
postcolonialism, “diaspora” has come to signify generally the movement and relocation of
groups of different kinds of peoples throughout the world; it also names a new way of being
based on adaptations to changes, dislocations, transformations and the construction of new
forms of knowledge and ways of seeing the world.
Diaspora are communities of people living together in one country who acknowledge that the
old country always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions. The emphasis on
collectivity and community is very important, as in the sense of living in one country but
looking across time and space to another. A member’s adherence to a diasporic community
is demonstrated by an acceptance of a link with their past migration history and a sense of
co-ethnicity with others of a similar background.
GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES = children born to migrant peoples in Britain may lay
claim to British citizenship, but their sense of identity and subjectivity borne from living in a
diaspora community can be influenced by the past migration history of their parents that
makes them forge bonds with more than one nation. The emotional and affective link these
people might have to a distant location can be powerful and strong even if they have never
lived in or visited the place in question.
Differences of gender, class, race, religion and language make diaspora a space open to
change.
Diaspora communities and diasporic thinking are not free from problems. Diaspora peoples
often remain excluded from feeling they belong to the new country and suffer their cultural
practices to be mocked and discriminated against. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in
the treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants who have found
themselves demonized in many Western locations. Diaspora are not free from their own
internal inequalities of power and divisive prejudices.

”OF, AND NOT OF, THIS PLACE”: HOME AND DISPLACEMENT

Naipaul’s memoir “Prologue to an Autobiography” tells us that he grew up in the
Caribbean island of Trinidad and came from a family descended from Indian immigrants to
the Caribbean.
Naipaul points out that migration alters how migrants think about their home and host
countries. Trinidad, which many Indians had expected to be a place of opportunity and
promise, but the experience of the miserable working conditions meant it did not live up to
the myth. But, due to migrancy, India also had changed into something illusory: a dream.
When viewed from the poverty of Trinidad, India can seem to the migrants a refuge from
their miserable conditions. Yet, their voyage home reveals this view of India similarly to be
more imaginary than true. The migrant’s illusion of home does not square with the
experience of going home, to the extent that “home” seems to exist above and beyond
both Trinidad and India, perpetually out of reach for the migrants (India imagined by
laborers at Trinidad exists at first in their mind). “Home” is a mythic place of desire in the
diasporic imagination.
Naipaul uses this episode to convey his own dreamlike view of India as home, as somebody
born in Trinidad into an Indian family. For him, India is also an illusory place from which he is
fractured in both time and space, but which retains an emotional influence over his life.
Migrancy has effects which last long after the act of migrating has finished, and which impact
on how people feel and think. Migration is a mode of being in the world.
For migrants and diaspora peoples “home” is a complex idea which impacts in central ways
on their existence. “Home” seems far-removed in time and space, available for return only
through the act of imagination: “home” becomes an especially unstable and unpredictable
mental construct built from the incomplete odds and ends of memory that survive from the
past.
In migrating from one country to another, migrants inevitably become involved in the process
of setting up home in a new land. Migrants tend to arrive in new places with their own
beliefs, traditions, customs, behaviors and values. This can have consequences for the ways
in which others may or may not make migrants feel “at home” on arrival in a new place:
although migrants may pass through the political borders of nations, the dominant discourse
of race, ethnicity and gender may function to exclude them from being recognized as part of
the nation’s people (their home is seen to exist elsewhere, back across the border).
For migrants and their descendants, no single location can act as a secure home. Their
sense of identity and belonging may be eternally split between two or more locations.
Migrants, with their childhood memories of a distant place, have a certain degree of “interior
knowledge” no matter how fragmentary it may be. But to the children of migrants, the
“interior knowledge” of a distant place is unavailable. Thus, their reflections about these
places in terms of “home” are often differently constructed. These generational differences
are not absolute: migrants can share both similarities and differences with their descendants.

“CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM”-EDWARD SAID

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in the interpretations of the
present. What animates such appeals is the uncertainty about whether the past is really
past, over and concluded, or whether it continues in different forms.
There’s no just way in which the past can be separated from the present. Past and present
inform each other, each implies the other and co-exists with the other. Neither past nor
present has complete meaning alone. Individuals and institutions decide on what is tradition
and what is not, what is relevant and what not. How we formulate or represent the past
shapes our understanding and views of the present.
Ideas about the complexity of the relationship between past and present are really important
in the debate about the meaning of “imperialism”. This debate focuses on questions
about imperialism (Was it principally economic? How far did it extend? What were its
causes? When did it end?) and its applicability (or not) to the United States. The debate was
principally economic and political, while scarce attention was paid to the role of culture in the
modern imperial experience.
Britain and France controlled immense territories that in time were liberated from British and
French rule. In addition, the United States, Russia and other European countries were also
imperial powers in the nineteenth century. This pattern of dominions and possessions laid
the groundwork for the fully global world of today and was made possible and established by
modern empires.
A whole range of people in the “Western world” and in the “Third world” share a sense that
the era of high or classical imperialism has in one way or another continued to exert
considerable cultural influence in the present.
An important event of the nineteenth century is the so-called “Rise of the West”: Western
power allowed the imperial metropolitan centers to acquire and accumulate territory and
subjects. By 1914 Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the Earth as colonies,
protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealth, even though Europe was such
a small territory (compared to the vastness of the world). By doing so the world was united
into a single interacting whole as never before.
The American experience was from the beginning founded upon the idea of creating an
“imperium”, a dominion, a state of sovereignty that would expand in population and territory
and increase in strength and power. The American intervention all over the world has been
considered as “American altruism” to show “American greatness” (the American revolution
considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) and “American
innocence” (doing good, fighting for freedom. It is just like citizens of nineteenth century
Britain and France considered their empires). Nowadays this “altruism” is considered as a
form of imperialism, especially when we consider United States culture, history and politics.
Imperialism and colonialism are both supported by ideological formations that include
notions that certain territories and peoples require and beseech domination, as well as forms
of knowledge affiliated with domination.
The primacy of the British and French empires by no means obscures the quite remarkable
modern expansion of other countries. There are several forms of dominations as well as
several responses to it, but the “Western” one and the resistance it provoked are the
main subject of this work by Said.
The main elements of the expansion of the great Western empires were:
● Profit;
● Hope of further profit;
● Commitment, which allowed men and women to accept the notion that distant
territories and their native peoples should be subjugated;
● Very little domestic resistance to these empires, although they were frequently
established and maintained under disadvantageous conditions.
Will, self-confidence and arrogance maintained the control in those countries. The durability
of the empire was sustained on both sides, that of the ruler and that of the distant ruled, and
in turn each had a set of interpretations of their common history with its own perspective,
historical sense, emotions and traditions.
To a very great degree the era of high nineteenth century imperialism is over: France and
Britain gave up most of their possessions after WW2. The meaning of the imperial past is not
totally contained within it, but has entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people and
still exercise tremendous force.
“Lines between cultures” are the divisions that not only allow us to discriminate one culture
from another, but also enable us to see the extent to which cultures are humanly made
structures of both authority and participation. There’s in all nationally defined cultures an
aspiration to sovereignty and dominance. Cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements
than they consciously exclude. Large immigrant populations from the former colonies have a
large residue in their daily life of the culture of those nations which once colonized their
country.

Domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial facts of human society. They
have something to do with imperialism, its history and its new forms. Many nations, which
today are politically independent, are also as dominated and dependent as they were
when ruled directly by European powers. On the one hand, this is the consequence of
self-inflicted wounds: “they” (non-Westerners) are to blame for what they are, and it’s no
use droning on about the legacy of imperialism. On the other hand, blaming the Europeans
for the misfortunes of the present is not much of an alternative. We should look at these
matters as interdependent histories that would be useful and interesting to understand.
In the late twentieth century the imperial cycle of the previous century in some way
replicated itself: we live in a world where there are no more lands to discover and conquer,
so the same selfishness of the previous century (patriotism…) can lead to mass
destructiveness. The schooling for such thought and action is still prevalent, accepted and
replicated in the education of generation after generation. We are all taught to venerate our
nation and admire our traditions: we are taught to pursue their interests with toughness and
in disregard for other societies.
It is useful to look at what remains of imperialism in recent culture discussion. These traces
of the past in the present point the way to a study of the histories created by empire, not just
the stories of white men and women, but also those of non-whites whose lands and very
being were at issue.
One significant contemporary debate about the residue of imperialism is the matter of how
natives are represented in the Western media, not only in what is said but also in how it is
said, by whom, where and for whom.
After Vietnam and Iran, and their loss to radical nationalism, lines had to be defended, so
Western democracy rethought the whole process of decolonization: “Was it really good to
leave these countries by themselves? Was it really good to trust their capacity for
independence? Why don't these countries appreciate the West after all we did for them?”.
The answer to the last question could be that most of the time Westerners forgot how
colonized peoples endured for centuries summary justice, economic dispossession,
submission, how millions of Africans were supplied to the slave trade and the cost of
maintaining Western superiority.
This imperial attitude is well captured and represented in Conrad’s novel “Heart of
Darkness'', written between 1898 and 1899. The novel is based on Conrad’s personal
experience of a voyage as a riverboat pilot in Congo. It is at the same time a spiritual voyage
into knowledge of his inner self. The narrator Marlow acknowledges the tragic predicament
of all speech and manages to convey the enormous power of Kurtz’s African experience
through his own narrative of his voyage into the African interior toward Kurtz. This narrative
is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror, of
Europe’s mission in the dark world. Within the narrative of how he journeyed to Kurtz’s
Inner Station, Marlow moves backward and forward materially in small and large spirals,
very much the way episodes in the course of his journey up-river are then incorporated by
the principal forward trajectory into the “heart of Africa.” The journey itself, despite all the
many obstacles, is sustained through the jungle, time, hardship, to the heart of it all: Kurtz’s
ivory trading empire. Conrad wants us to see how Kurtz’s adventure, Marlow’s journey and
the narrative itself all share a common theme: European performing acts of imperial
mastery and will in Africa. What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers is
that he was self-conscious about what he did. “Heart of darkness” is the dramatization of
Marlow himself and his telling the story about his wandering in colonial regions to a group of
British listeners (readers) at a specific time and place: what Marlow does is acted out for a
set of like-minded British listeners, and limited to that situation. “Heart of darkness” works so
effectively because its politics and aesthetic are imperialist, which in the years of its
publication was inevitable (EX. The sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the
jungle or the fact that Marlow, another white man, is the narrator). Conrad could probably
never have used Marlow to present anything other than an imperialist world-view, given what
was available to see of the non-European at the time.
The form of Conrad’s narrative has made it possible to derive two possible visions in the
post-colonial world that succeeded his:
● THE FIRST VISION = Westerners may have physically left their old colonies, but
they continued to rule morally and intellectually. The nineteenth century imperial
encounter continues today to draw lines and defend barriers. It persists also in the
interchange between former colonial partners (EX. Britain-India or France-
Francophone countries of Africa).
● THE SECOND VISION = Conrad permits his later readers to imagine something
other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if he had little
notion of what that Africa might be.
Conrad sets the story on the deck of a boat anchored in the Thames. As Marlow tells his
story the sun sets, and by the end of the narrative the heart of darkness has reappeared in
England. Outside the group of Marlow’s listeners lies an undefined and unclear world.
Despite their European names and manners, Conrad’s narrators are not average
unreflecting witnesses of European imperial idea: they think about it a lot. Conrad’s way of
demonstrating this is to keep drawing attention to how ideas and values are constructed
through dislocations in the narrator’s language.
The whole point of what Kurtz and Marlow talk about is in fact imperial mastery (white
European over black African and their ivory, civilization over the primitive dark continent). By
underling the discrepancy between the official idea of empire and the remarkably
disorienting actuality of Africa, Marlow unsettles the reader’s sense not only of the very idea
of empire, but of reality itself. With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade
all the time. What appears stable and secure is only slightly more secure than the white men
in the jungle, and requires the same continuous triumph over an all-pervading darkness,
which by the end of the tale is shown to be the same in London and in Africa.
Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge the darkness, the former as he is dying, the latter as he
reflects on the meaning of Kurtz’s final words. They are both ahead of their time in
understanding that what they call “darkness” as an autonomy on its own and can reinvade
and reclaim what imperialism had taken for its own.
As a creature of its time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his
severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Achebe is a Nigerian novelist famous for his unsentimental depictions of social and
psychological disorientation together with the imposition of Western customs and values on
traditional African society. His particular concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of
crisis; his novels usually talk about the first contact of an African village with the white man to
the educated Africans' attempt to create a firm moral order out of the changing values in a
large city.
In June 1962 there was a gathering of all writers at Makerere “A Conference of African
Writers of English Expression”. They tried to define “African literature” satisfactorily.
This conference defined African literature as “creative writing in which an African setting is
authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral”.
We are told that Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” qualifies as African literature while Greene’s
“Heart of the Matter” does not because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa.
Achebe was amused by the curious circumstances in which Conrad, writing in English could
produce African Literature while others would be ineligible even though they would write a
novel based on their experiences in the West Indies. What this has suggested to him is that
African Literature cannot be crammed into a small, neat definition, in fact the sum total of all
national and ethnic literature of Africa is what forms African literature. A national literature is
one that takes the whole nation for its province and has a realized potential audience
throughout its territory. In other words, literature that is written in the national language. An
ethnic literature is one which is available only to one ethnic group within the nation.
Example: Nigeria, national literature is the literature written in English; and the ethnic
literatures are in Hausa, Ibo. The fact that the national language of Nigeria is English might
sound like a controversial statement, but it is not. The reality of present day Africa may
change as a result of deliberate, (EX. political, action). The country which we know as
Nigeria now began not so very long ago as the arbitrary creation of the British. Nigeria was
created by the British- for their own ends. Colonialism in Africa disrupted many things, but it
did create political units. Nigeria had hundreds of autonomous communities ranging, today it
is one country. It also gave them a language in which to talk to one another. Therefore those
African writers who have chosen to write in English or French are not unpatriotic, they are
by-products of the same process that made the new nation-states of Africa. The only reason
why we can even talk about African unity is that when we get together, we have many
languages to talk in - English, French, Arabic.
It is impossible for anyone ever to use a second language effectively as his first. Of course it
is true that the vast majority of people are happier with their first language than with any
other. Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in
creating writing? Of course. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings
out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium
of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning an English which is at
once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. It looks like a dreadful betrayal for a
man to abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s, but for Achebe, there is no other
choice. He has been given this language and he intended to use it.
“THE AFRICAN TRILOGY: THINGS FALL APART” = The novel is not a classical re-writing
of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, but a peculiar form of “writing back”. Achebe defines
Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist” and he claims that the humanity of his people “was totally
undermined by the mindlessness of its context and the pretty explicit animal imagery
surrounding it”. Africans are reduced to “limbs and rolling eyes”, deprived of humanity, of the
faculty of expressing themselves. Africa is represented as “the other world, the antithesis of
Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and
refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality”. Achebe spurs his readers to look at
texts such as Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness“ with a new awareness, and that they may carry
that awareness to other things that they see or read, because all we are saying is do not
treat any members of the human race as if they were less than human”. “The worst thing that
can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect”. It is the duty of the
writer “to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them and
what they lost ''.
The novel is set in Ibo-land towards the end of the 19th century, when Europeans were just
beginning to penetrate inland in West Africa. It describes the change that comes over an old
and firmly established society under the impact of new, different ideas from outside brought
about by the culture and social organization of the colonizers.
● In the first part it shows the community of Umuofia, 9 related villages, just before the
arrival of the white man. It offers the readers a detailed picture of the way of life of
these peoples. We learn about elaborate social rituals and ceremonies and of how
everyday lives are interpenetrated with the otherworld of magic and mystery.
Okonkwo, the protagonist, is a man of this old order. Brave, fearless fighter, hard
worker, he is highly respected in his clan;
● In the second part of the novel Okonkwo is in exile and his village has changed
dramatically as a consequence of the arrival of the white colonizers;
● The third part brings the final, tragic phase of Okonkwo’s story. He returns to
Umuofia and finds that things have indeed changed. Great crisis and conflicts within
the community. In the end, when the Commissioner’s men arrive to arrest him, they
find that he has hanged himself, preferring a shameful death to the white man’s
justice. The commissioner does not understand the people and its customs but plans
to include the “incident” in a paragraph of the book he is writing.
Achebe challenges the “white man’s official History” with his novel which gives Okonkwo his
deserved status and which explores his tragic predicament. Not just a paragraph, but a
whole book will tell his story.

“DECOLONIZING THE MIND”-NGUGI WA

THIONG’O
This book is dedicated to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over
the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy and other
treasures carried by African languages.
Imperialism continues to control the economy, politics and cultures of Africa. But on the other
hand are the ceaseless struggles of African people to liberate their economy and politics
from that Euro-American. The choice of language and the use to which language is put is
central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social
environment.
In 1884 the capitalist powers of Europe sat in Berlin and carved an entire continent with a
multiplicity of peoples, cultures and languages into different colonies. The Berlin-drawn
division under which Africa is still living was obviously political and economic, but it was also
cultural (division of Africa into different languages of European powers). African countries
came to be defined and define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe.
In 1962 there was the “Conference of African writers of English expression”: the title
automatically excluded those who wrote in African languages. A student could qualify for the
meeting on the basis of only two published short stories, but an African poet with several
works of poetry and prose couldn’t participate because he didn’t write in English.
The discussions were based on extracts from works in English and hence they excluded the
main body of work in African languages. This Conference sat down to the first item on the
agenda: What is African literature?
The debate that followed was animated. It was mainly about the subject matter and the racial
origins and geographical habitation of the writer. English, like French and Portuguese, was
assumed to be the natural language of literary and political mediation between African
people in the same nation and between nations in Africa and other continents.
English and French have become the common languages with which to present a nationalist
front against white oppressors. In the literary sphere they were often seen as coming to save
African languages against themselves. Chinua Achebe, in a speech entitled “The African
writer and the English language”, asked if it was right that a man should abandon his
mother tongue for someone else’s. It is like a betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for
him there’s no other choice: he was given the language and intends to use it.
African ideas, African folklore and African philosophy were translated almost literally from the
African language native to the writer into whatever European language he was using as
medium of expression. Why should any African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by
taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues instead of enriching his own tongue?
These kinds of questions were not asked. What seemed to worry more was if the results
would have been accepted as good English or good French.
The English language would be able to carry the weight of the African experience of those
writers, but it would have been a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home
but altered to suit new African surroundings. There are American, West Indian, Australian,
Canadian and New Zealand versions of English. All of them add life and vigor to the
language while reflecting their own respecting cultures. Why shouldn’t there be Nigerian or
West African English which these poets can use to express their own ideas, thinking and
philosophy in their own way?
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born into a large peasant family: a father with 4 wives and about 28
children. They spoke Gikuyu as they worked in the fields. They spoke Gikuyu in and outside
the home. The stories they have been told when they were children with mostly animals as
the main character were all told in Gikuyu. They didn’t neglect stories with human beings as
the main characters. There two types of characters in these human-centered stories:
● The species of truly human beings with qualities of courage, kindness, mercy…;
● A man-eat-man two-mouthed species with qualities of greed, selfishness,
individualism…
Cooperation as the ultimate good in a community was a constant theme. It could unite
human beings with animals against evil.
There were good and bad storytellers. The differences were in the use of words and images
and the inflection of voices to effect different tones.
The language of their evening teachings, the language of their community and the language
of their work in the fields were one: Gikuyu.
When Ngugi started attempting school, a colonial school, this harmony was broken: the
language of his education was no longer the language of his culture. English became the
language of his formal education. It became more than a language: it was THE LANGUAGE,
and all the others had to bow before it in difference. One of the most humiliating experiences
was to be caught speaking Gikuyu near the school: the culprit was given corporal
punishment or was made to carry a metal plate around his neck with inscriptions such as “I
am stupid” or “I am a donkey”. How did the teachers capture the culprits? A button was
initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught
speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would say who
had given it to him and the process would bring out all the culprits of the day. By doing so,
children were taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.
Any achievements in spoken or written English were highly rewarded: English became the
main dominant factor of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal education.
The colonial system of education had the structure of a pyramid: there were exams to pass
from one level to another. Nobody could pass the exam who failed the English paper no
matter how brilliantly he had done in the other subjects. English was the element of colonial
elitedom.
Literary education was now determined by the dominant language: oral literature in Kenyan
languages stopped. They were taught and read simple versions of British canonical texts.
Language and literature were taking them further and further from themselves to other
selves, from their world to another world.

“BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS” - FANON

He emphasizes the dehumanizing aspect of colonialism and pushes its analysis into
the realm of the psyche and the subjectivity of colonized people as well as of the colonizers.
Colonized people are those «in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the
death and burial of its local cultural originality».
CH.4 “THE FACT OF BLACKNESS” = The chapter begins with two exclamations: “Dirty
nigger” and “Look! A Negro!” Fanon notes that such phrases turn black people into objects
(“I am an object among other objects”). After hearing them, he wants to give them a sign
confirming that he is indeed human, but gets nothing, so he calls this other person “Other”
with a capital letter. As long as black people remain living in black nations, they will not have
to exist “being for others”. Fanon argues that colonialism has destroyed people’s ability to
grasp the ontology of blackness, meaning that it is impossible for people (of all races) to
understand what it means to exist as a black person. This is due to the way colonialism
forces black people to live in relation to white colonizers (“For not only must the black man
be black; he must be black in relation to the white man”) and adds “The black man has no
ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man”. Due to this ontological erasure, black
people are cut off from their own bodily experience, forced to view themselves in third
person in what is the “white man’s world”. Fanon considers the effect of hearing a child on a
train shout “Look! A Negro!” over and over again, followed by “I’m scared!”. He argues that if
he had only heard that phrase once it might be easy to dismiss, but hearing it multiple times
leads to a complete crisis of identity, he starts questioning about him being aware of his own
body and seeing it no longer in the third person but in triple (“in the train instead of one seat
they left me two or three”). He feels self-conscious about his body and starts saying that he
feels responsible for his race but also for the history of his ancestors. He feels disoriented
and incapable of confronting the Other, so that he starts transporting himself far from that
place with his imagination, and says that all he wanted was to be “a man among men, I
would have liked to enter our world young and sleek, a world we could build together” and
again “I wanted to be a man and nothing but a man”, with these words he means that he no
longer wishes to be considered as an object, as a dehumanized thing. Then he adds that
some people would like to make him have the same treatment as his ancestors had and he
decided to let them do it, to accept this kind of treatment, because he considers his kinship
important. Fanon then returns to the scene on the train, adding that the child’s mother urges
Fanon to ignore the boy, saying “he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.” Yet
this does not make it any better. The woman who comments is exoticizing and fetishizing
Fanon, marking him out as strange, different, and inhuman.
Fanon then runs through all the negative stereotypes and fears about black people such as
“The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, ugly, etc.” before writing that
the little boy now cries: “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me.” Fanon feels crushed by
whiteness and is now filled with anger. When a woman remarks, “Look how handsome that
Negro is”, Fanon reacts with the same fury, responding: “Fuck you.” He is roused by the
thought of a conflict, but is disappointed by the reality that white people respond to his
righteous anger only with further rejection. He feels determined to “behave as a BLACK
MAN, or at least like a Negro”, since the Other was reluctant to recognize him.
Sartre argues that Jewish people are constantly fearful of confirming anti-Semitic
stereotypes, and that this fear corrupts their personalities. Yet Fanon points out that it is
possible for Jews to hide or downplay their Jewishness, and that, while Jewish people have
faced terrible persecution, unlike black people they do not suffer from being “trapped” in their
own race in the same way, since black people cannot hide their blackness “I am a slave not
to the idea others have of me but to my appearance”. Fanon desires nothing more than to be
“unnoticed.” He feels ashamed and humiliated, and cannot even find solace in other black
people, as they have internalized racist ideas and are constantly trying to make themselves
white.
He affirms that when people claim to like him, they also say that it has nothing to do with the
color of his skin, and when people hate him they say the same thing. Either way, he feels
like a prisoner of this vicious circle. He tries to find comfort in the people of his same race but
they are almost white, they have conformed to the white world and try to “hide” their
blackness and change it, like having babies with a white woman to have slightly brown
children “who knows, gradually, perhaps…” they will turn white, but he does not finish his
sentence. He also adds that his blackness was there, dense and undeniable and it
tormented him.
At the time Fanon is writing, there are many black doctors, teachers, and priests, so it might
seem to some as if negative stereotypes about black people are dying away. However, he
points out that black doctors exist in a precarious situation. If they make a single mistake it
will be taken as proof that black people are not capable of being doctors at all. White people
claim to hope that “color prejudice” will soon “disappear,” but Fanon must still live with the
torturous knowledge that he is irrationally “despised” on account of his race “I was hated not
by my next-door neighbor or a close cousin but by a whole race”. Science has now proven
that there is no biological hierarchy of the races, and that, from a biological perspective,
people are all the same. Yet while white people reluctantly acknowledge this, they have
remained steadfast in their opposition to sexual and romantic intimacy between different
races.

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
Colonization = “thingification” (Colonialism does not simply exploit, but dehumanizes and
objectifies the colonized subject). Africa is considered as the binary opposite of Europe:
Europe is decadent and morally and spiritually indefensible. Non-European civilizations were
“communal”, “anti-capitalist”, “democratic”, “co-operative” before they were invaded by
European colonialism, capitalism and imperialism

“IMAGININGS OF SAND” - ANDRE’ BRINK

Plot: When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Müller hears of her grandmother's impending death,
she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd
escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux
as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying
because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured
her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine
generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend
and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of
the day-to-day. “Imaginings of Sand” is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and
of the women who pioneered that discovery. “Imaginings of Sand” and its counter-narratives,
through a variety of techniques, not only encourage the reader to deconstruct the dominant
historical discourse of the South African past but also undermine reliability of any type of
historical or literary discourse whatsoever. “Imaginings of Sand” is a post-apartheid
romance, the text was published in 1996 but it is historically located a few days before the
democratic elections of 1994, we can consider it as some kind of bridge between the “old”
and the “new” South Africa, dividing past and future, allowing us to highlight the hopes and
ambiguities of such a decisive historical moment. We have noticed that Brink decides to
adopt the point of view of a female narratrice. The figure of the woman plays an important
role, since the text presents itself as an extended rewriting of the Female story, aiming at
giving a voice to an extended and suffering silence.

The spirit of her grandmother goes up to her way before her appearence in SA, anticipating
Anna’s call. When she starts recounting her stories she question the ‘factual’ reality and
context, in fact when Kristen asks for more information about dates she replies “does it
matter, my memory doesn’t depend on dates”. In this way, “the ability of narrative to record
or reclaim (factual) truth is undermined and the unreality of (narrated) reality is highlighted in
a postmodern manner”. For Brink, the fantasy of the storytelling has a political role in relation
to the south african context, going beyond the postmodern questioning of the
representability and pure invention. What is central is the historical moment in which it feels
like it nmecessary to look back at these stories. in this case, an old woman weaving her web
of tales on the eve of the 1994 elections. The question is not primarily what ‘sense’,
metaphorical, political or otherwise, the stories may have, taken individually or in a series,
but what sense, if any, the telling of these stories by this person at this juncture could
possibly make. Because this represents one (fictitious) person’s response to the past, in the
present, facing the future. Whether Ouma Kristina’s stories contain any grain of ‘historical
truth’ or not is immaterial in this regard. Ouma implies that it is not truth per se that is
significant but the fact that different versions of reality should be acknowledged”. After years
in which South Africa has been invaded by facts (or pseudo-facts, filtered in the optic of the
regime) now there is a possibility for recounting stories with fantasy. Reconnecting with the
oral indigenous traditions and afrikaner, storytelling seems recalling an autoctonous way of
magic african realism, a dimension that could make Kristen escape from the prision of the
impositions that have mutileted imagination and creativity for years.

“ROBINSON CRUSOE”- DEFOE

Like Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, “Robinson Crusoe” was part of the process of fixing
relations between Europe and its “others”, of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the
same time. But the function of such a canonical text at the colonial periphery also becomes
an important part of material imperial practice, in that, through educational and critical
institutions, it continually displays and repeats for the other the original capture of his/her
alterity and the processes of its annihilation, marginalization, or naturalization as if they were
axiomatic, culturally ungrounded, ‘universal, natural.”
“Robinson Crusoe” was published in 1719 and it is based on the experiences of Robert
Selkirk, a seaman who was put ashore on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean, later
rescued. Defoe took inspiration from travel books fashionable at the time. The travel
narrative is divided into 3 parts:
1) Robert leaves his family and goes away to sea to make a fortune;
2) Shipwrecked on a desert island he tells about his life for 28 years. Detailed record in
the journal he keeps;
3) He returns to Europe.
In the second part there’s a diary-like account of how he is able to recreate the world
he left behind him, how he saves a young savage and makes him his servant and how he is
finally rescued and brought back to England. Robison is the prototype of the myth of
Western imperialism, as it celebrates that enterprise, enthusiastic narrative of the project of
“civilizing” indigenous people. It is introduced as “ just the history of facts (preface)
autobiographical narrative.
With "Robinson Crusoe", Defoe explores the conflict between economic motivation and
spiritual salvation. The island is the perfect place for Robinson to prove his qualities and to
demonstrate that he deserves salvation and that he is worthy of God's Providence. Defoe
shows that, though God is the prime cause of everything, man can modify his destiny
through action.
On the island Robinson organizes a primitive empire and becomes the prototype of the
English colonizer: the society he creates on the island is not an alternative to the English
one but, on the contrary, an exaltation of England and its ideals. Robinson is also the
archetype colonist: his relation with Friday portrays the one between colonist and native.
Robinson's education of Friday closely recalls the processes of modern colonialism: Crusoe
gives Friday a new name, meant to remind him of his debt to the white man; Robinson gives
Friday European clothes; Robinson teaches Friday his language; Robinson teaches Friday
the principles of Christianity; Robinson never gives Friday a weapon. So Robinson has a
technical, linguistic and cultural advantage on Friday.
A main difference between Crusoe and Cruso is that, the first takes pride in having saved
Friday, in dressing him like himself, like an Englishman, he also takes pride in teaching him
the language and in teaching him that he should never touch human meat ever again.
Meanwhile Cruso is totally different, especially with language, he thinks that it is not
necessary for Friday to learn as many English words as possible to communicate as he says
to Susan “This is not England”.
It is a ur-text (original) of the English realist novel. It represents the embodiment of the myth
of Western imperialism. We find an enthusiastic narrative of the project of “civilizing”
indigenous peoples with the character of Friday. There is an illusion of transparent
representation of a social world which is in fact a construction. New hero of the middle
classes: celebration of the ethics of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, moderation and
rational control, cult of profit and myth of success. Reproduction of the old world in the new.
• The unknown is mapped and thus controlled and tamed (act of taking possession
also through naming).
• Crusoe saves Friday’s life: subjection of the colonized (justification of the colonial
enterprise).
On the paper we have the part in which Crusoe meets Friday: he starts describing him
based on his physical appearance, saying that he had something “very manly in his face,
and yet all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance too”. So we can
notice how he still associates him with the “sweetness and softness” of an European, saying
that he “too” has this quality in his face, as well as himself, even though the stranger clearly
wasn’t of an European race. “The color of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny” and
then procedes “his nose was small, not flat like the Negros”.
The relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday is a rather mixed one. At times the
reader is given the impression that Crusoe and Friday have a similar relationship to that of a
father and son, but at other times, the impression given is that Crusoe is the Master and that
Friday is merely the servant who is to serve his Master for as long as he lives. This colonial
master - servant aspect of the relationship is expressed repeatedly in the text, for instance, "I
[Crusoe] made him know his Name should be Friday ... I likewise taught him to say Master,
and then let him know, that was to be my Name" Crusoe never informs Friday of his real
name, which displays a certain hierarchy system i.e. Crusoe is the master and he is 'higher'
than Friday, who is merely the servant. In that period of time, slaves were named by their
colonial masters and this is portrayed well when Crusoe gives Friday his name, without
regard for what his real name might be. Friday, however, does not take this master-servant
relationship badly, in fact, he welcomes it in an extremely grateful manner and displays
behavior that Crusoe sees as a submission to servitude. The first few thoughts that come to
Crusoe's mind after Friday's evident submission are not negative, as his first reaction. The
cautious level of slightly low trust supports the colonial master-slave relationship, where the
master will not fully trust the slave in his work. The difference is that the master will not
praise the slave for his work. Crusoe however holds quite a good opinion of Friday. In the
description he gives of Friday he is attempting to convince the reader that Friday is anything
but the typical black of those days.

“FOE”- COETZEE
He was born in Cape Town in 1940, and now lives in Adelaide, Australia. Of Afrikaner
origins, he grew up speaking English at home and Afrikaans with his relatives. Afrikaans is
the language spoken by the Africans. English is considered a neutral language of
communication. In this case Afrikaans is the language of oppression used by those who
were responsible for the system of department. It’s a language full of significance, through
which they have violated autonomous peoples.
Slipperiness of his position: he belongs to the oppressors’ community but he opposes the
system which guarantees his privileged status. He studied English and math and moved to
England to study computers, then he went to Texas and returned to South Africa in 1972. He
had obtained prestige but still chooses to go back to SA. He decided to come back to SA in
the most difficult years: 1970s and 1980s were the years of persecution and racial laws. He
returns thinking it is his duty to fight against the Empire. He has a privileged status in South
Africa, he inhabits a peculiar in-between position, in an interview he claims that he is
Afrikaans and cannot deny his origins however he is far away from the system of oppression
of his own people.
He has been accused of irresponsibility because he doesn’t explicitly tackle urgent political
and social issues in his works (self-referential, metafictional texts).
“Foe” was published in 1986.
Plot= Susan Bartan, a castaway on a desert island approaches Daniel Foe. Susan was on
a mission to find her kidnapped daughter, though she believes has been taken into the
New World. During a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon, Susan is set adrift. On reaching the shore
she meets Friday (the tongueless) and Crusoe who has turned content and complacent to
not recollect the past and continue living on the island with Friday. Former slave owners
have committed the act of cutting off Crusoe’s tongue. The trio is rescued, taken to
England but Cruso is unable to survive the voyage to England. She feels that Foe should
tell her story as well as the story of Cruso, a mysterious man who is now her master,
rescuer, at times her lover and at times her companion. Susan then convinces Daniel Foe
to help her with the manuscript in which he fabulates adventures of Crusoe instead of
relating the facts. Cruso is dead and Friday, his manservant, is not able to speak. Susan
takes the effort of relating the truth about him. Themes of the colonized and the colonizer
are explored in the novel. The narrator arrives at new conclusions about otherness, power
and finally sums up that just like chains, language too can enslave.

The book first opens with Susan who landed on a deserted island, the first figure that she
sees is “a dark shadow, not of a cloud but of a man with a dazzling halo” she describes him
“He was black, a Negro” Here she meets the character of Friday. “I have come to the wrong
island, I thought, and let my head sink: I have come to an island of cannibals.” “He reached
out and with the back of his hand touched my arm, He is trying my flesh, I thought”. Friday
brings her to Cruso “a dark-skinned and heavily bearded”. She then tries to present herself
to Robison Cruso talking about how she traveled to Brazil to look for her kidnapped
daughter. “With these words I presented myself to Robinson Cruso, in the days when he still
ruled over his island and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday”.
Even though the woman tries multiple times to recount to Robinson her story he does not
seem interested in the story. He is an anti-Robison. Comparing him with Robison Crusoe,
we have this very first drop of the final letter (E). Furthermore we notice how Cruso is not the
narrator, as in Defoe's novel, in this case we listen to Susan. He is not interested in teaching
something to Friday, he is “indifferent to salvation”. In fact we see how when Susan asks
why he has never escaped the island he responds “ where should I escape to?”. Cruso kept
no journal, perhaps because he lacked paper and ink, but more likely because he lacked the
inclination to keep one. No journal, no progress. He is not interested in making this island his
own, on the contrary he is not interested in creating a kingdom, he is not interested in
discussing his habits and he is described as indifferent to salvation. He doesn't keep any
record of what happens on the desert island, for Robinson Crusoe it is fundamental to know
how much time he has spent on the island. In this case Cruso is completely indifferent; it's
Susan who pushes him to do it. He doesn't want to progress on the desert island, Susan
wants to recount the real story of what happens on the island meanwhile Foe thinks that it is
not necessary and that no one will be interested in the story. But Susan will not change her
mind just because Foe tells her to do so, she is not like Friday who Foe could put words in
his mouth and he would accept. Susan has her own will. He creates some terraces but he
has no seeds to plant. “The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the
foresight to bring seed”. “Not every man who bears the mark of the castaways is a castaway
at heart”. Cruso did not go as Defoe to look for tools that he could use in the ship, he simply
spends his days trying to survive. “I had asked him about the terraces he would not plant,
the boat he would not build and the journal he would not keep and the tools he would not
save from the wreck and Friday’s tongue, there was nothing else to ask.He did not care how
I came to be in Bahia or what I did there.” Susan then adds.
Characters:
● Friday: “negro”, not noble savage of Defoe; lack of tongue, solitary enigmatic mute.
Susan says that her first thought of him was that he was like a dog that herds but one
master, yet it was not so. Cruso had taught him only some words. In fact, Friday is a
mute character, his tongue is said to have been cut out by some cannibals. “Friday
has no command of words and therefore no defense against being reshaped day by
day in conformity with the desires of others. Friday is represented as a solitary and
enigmatic mute character, his character can be a subject of his subjugation but he
cannot be possessed, he does not speak or reveal.
Friday becomes the main subject of his dialogues with Cruso. All the novel turns
around the Issue of silence. Friday is a "hole in the narrative". His silence is
"helpless” Susan wants to educate him "out of darkness", to "make his silence speak"
But silence is also Friday's language of empowerment.
At first, Susan considers him as a slave, but then she starts wondering about his
story. Coetzee foregrounds Friday's silence. By doing so, he undermines the
hegemony of the colonial discourse that presupposes European racial superiority.
Friday (black) and Susan (woman) are both colonized subjects by the male
colonizing characters, (both male and white): Cruso on his island and Foe, whose
trade is in books, not in truth.
● Susan: we notice how in Robinson Crusoe there is no room for a female protagonist
or even character. Coetzee with his female protagonist inserts a companion to
Friday, to engross the ranks of invisibility in the narrative: one is a wild native, the
other is a woman. Susan is very different from Cruso, she seeks salvation and
moreover wishes to recount and to record all that happens on the island, otherwise
she will feel like everything will disappear when they die. Their story will die along
with them. This is what Coetzee tries to do in Foe, Coetzee re-shapes Robison
Cruso’s story and ‘re-lives’ its plot including Susan’s presence, along with her wish to
tell her own version of the story. Susan is committed to the truth, she wants to talk
about the wind, the silence present on the island. She even says that the world would
be disappointed in Cruso’s salvation because he has no apparent story to tell.
● Cruso: he might have died of sorrow, he falls as a prisoner on the ship that is
bringing him to England. Now, only Susan can tell Cruso’s story.
● The island: not a lush tropical isle but barren, empty, and silent. Place of exile. When
Susan first arrives on the island she compares the words of other voyagers, writers,
who have described deserted islands as “a place of soft sands where fruit falls into
the hands of the castaway” but she says that this island is different, a great rocky hill.
In addition the actors are islands too: they are isolated individuals, living in their own
world. The result is an almost autistic silence. In this essay, the main characters are
described as islands in an archipelago, separated characters, condemned to each
other.
Narrative:
Susan talks directly to the reader, “and told him my story, as I have told it to you, which he
heard with great attention”. She considers us, the readers, as someone who is directly in
front of her.
When she recounts her story to the captain when she is rescued from the island, she says
however that when she will tell her story, mainly an oral story, to be written in a printed copy
it will lose the “freshness” of the story, a writer would “reput” freshness but she does not
want his “touch of color” to change the reality of the story, the realness of what really
happened there, she did not want to describe anything that did not really happen, she wasn’t
interested in recounting a romantic story between her and Foe or about cannibals or other
stuff, what she wished to recount is the truth.

COLONIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION OF

THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT
1947 = partition of India

COLONIAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

1910= Formation of Union of South Africa by former British and Boer colonies;
1912= Native National Congress is founded, later renamed African National Congress;
1948= Policy of apartheid adopted when the National Party takes power.
APARTHEID = The term was coined in the 1930s from the Afrikaans word for “apartness”
and used to define the social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination
enforced by white minority governments in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. It included two
basic species of laws:
● Petty Apartheid;
● Grand Apartheid.
South Africa bans most anti-apartheid activities:
● Suppression of Communism Act: it formally prescribed the ideology of
communism. It was in large part due to the believed involvement of communists in
the anti-apartheid movement;
● Terrorism Act: It allowed someone suspected of involvement in terrorism to be
detained for an indefinite period without trial on the authority of a senior police officer;
● South Africa degenerate into a police state. It violently repressed manifestations
against apartheid laws, as for example the Sharpeville Massacre, when the police
started to shoot on a crowd of black protesters
The Apartheid system in South Africa was ended in 1990/1993 through a series of
negotiations between the De Klerk government and the African National Congress. In 1994
there were the first elections with universal suffrage: millions queued in lines over a three
day voting period and Mandela was elected the first democratically State President of South
Africa.

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH
He became the first ever Tanzanian writer and the first black African writer in 35 years to win
a prestigious award: the Nobel Prize. It has been awarded for his compassionate and
uncompromising penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the
gulf between cultures and continents.
Gurnah grew up in Zanzibar. When Zanzibar went through a revolution in 1964: citizens of
Arab origins were persecuted, thousands were slaughtered, whole communities were
expelled and many hundred imprisoned. Gurnah, just like many others, was forced to flee
the country at the age of 18. People took terrible risks to escape: crammed into fishing
boats, clinging to the sides of canoes or bits of wood (they took such risks because they
feared for their lives). Gurnah and his brother escaped on an airplane and, once they arrived
at their destination, they were interrogated by an immigration office and didn’t know they
were in the middle of an exodus. They were not considered refugees seeking asylum, but
illegal immigrants. For centuries, Britain has been torn between offering asylum or
xenophobia: on average asylum prevailed and has resulted in many gains for British culture.
He began to write as a 21 yo refugee in England, choosing to write in English, although
Swahili is his first language. His first novel, “Memory of Departure '', was published in 1987.
He was until recently a professor of English and postcolonial literatures, until his retirement.
In Gurnah’s literary universe everything is shifting (memories, names, identities…). This is
probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense.
ISLAMOPHOBIA = Back then, culture and religion didn't matter, it was color. Now
Islamophobia is pervasive as a result of the attacks on America in 2001 and the war on
terror. Before the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslims were “frightening” or “terrorists”,
whereas now they have become “enemies”. This allows people to feel no guilt in viewing
Muslims as dangerous and unstable.

“THE TEMPEST”- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker He attended grammar school, no
further formal education. He married an older woman and had 3 children. Around 1590 he
left his family behind and went to London to work as an actor and playwright. • His career
bridged the reigns of Elisabeth I and James I and he was the favorite of both monarchs
(James gave the members of his company the title of King’s Men).
“The Tempest” (1611) is considered by some critics as an allegory of colonialism, written
against the background of England’s experiment in colonization. Prospero and Caliban
have become synonymous with the figures of colonizer and colonized. Shakespeare,
like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by both the commercial and the imaginative
possibilities offered by the New World, and this interest informed the writing of his last play.
He was also familiar with travel narratives about the New World. The English colonial project
seems to be in Shakespeare’s mind throughout the Tempest. Almost every character
ponders how he would rule the island if he were its king.
PLOT (act I): A storm strikes a ship carrying Alonso, Ferdinando, Antonio, Gonzalo Stefano,
Trinculo and Sebastian. They are on their way to Italy from Africa. The royal party is
prepared to sink and they all fear for their lives. The second scene begins more quietly.
Miranda and Prospero stand on the shore of their island, looking out to sea at the recent
shipwreck. Miranda asks her father to do whatever he can to save those poor souls.
Prospero reassures her and reveals to her that he orchestrated the shipwreck and tells her
the story of their past. Prospero was the duke of Milan until his brother Antonio, conspiring
with the King of Naples, Alonso, usurped his position. Kidnapped and left to die at sea,
Prospero and his daughter survive. Gonzalo leaves them supplies and Prospero’s books
which are the source of his magic and power. They have lived on the island for 12 years.
Prospero calls his magical agent, Ariel, who brought the tempest upon the ship and set fire
to the mast. He made sure that everyone got safely to the island. Ariel is Prospero’s servant,
an airy spirit. Prospero has promised him freedom if he performs tasks such as these without
complaining. Prospero reminds him that he rescued him from an horrible fate (he was
imprisoned by the witch Sycorax in a tree and then freed by Prospero). Prospero and
Miranda go and visit Caliban, Prospero’s servant, and the son of the dead Sycorax. Caliban
curses Prospero, and they claim that he is ungrateful for what they have given and taught
him.
PROSPERO = One of Shakespeare’s more enigmatic characters. He was wronged by his
usurping brother, but he exerts his absolute power over other characters submitting them.
The pursuit of knowledge gets him into trouble in the first place. By neglecting everyday
matters when he was duke, he gave his brother a chance to rise up against him. His
possession of magical knowledge makes him extremely powerful. His punishments to
Caliban are petty and vindictive. He is very authoritative with Ariel. When Ariel asks him to
relieve him of his duties, he bursts into fury and threatens to return him to his former
imprisonment and torment. Through his schemes, manipulations, spells, he creates the play
itself with its plot. Watching Prospero at work is like watching a dramatist create a play. In his
final speech he likens himself to a playwright by asking the audience for applause. The final
scene is a celebration of creativity, humanity and art. Prospero emerges as a more likable
and sympathetic figure in the final two acts thanks to his love for Miranda, his forgiveness of
his enemies and the happy ending he orchestrates. It is tempting to think of “the Tempest”
as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage because of the theme of the great magician giving up
his art.
CALIBAN = Prospero’s dark, earthly slave, frequently referred to as a monster by the other
characters. Caliban is the son of a witch and the only real native of the island. He insists that
Prospero stole the island from him. He has a sort of dignity when he refuses to bow before
Prospero’s intimidations. He regrets having shown Prospero all the secrets of the island
when he first arrived and that he was enslaved and betrayed by the new master. Prospero
lists Caliban’s shortcomings and describes his good treatment of him, but Caliban answers
with curses. Prospero accuses him of being ungrateful for all he has taught and given him.
He calls him a “lying slave” and reminds him of the efforts he made to educate him. But
Caliban’s nature makes him unfit to live among civilized peoples. On the one hand, Prospero
and Miranda think that their education of him has lifted him from his formerly brutish status.
On the other hand, they seem to see him as inherently brutish. Prospero’s ability to master
Caliban is through words, and the more Caliban gets control over language the closer he
comes to achieve freedom. His beautiful speeches about his island home provide some of
the most impressive imagery in the play. The readers are led to consider his enslavement as
terribly unjust. However he is also presented in the most degrading kind of drunken, servile
behavior. He became the symbol of native peoples and cultures enslaved, exploited and
suppressed by European colonial societies, here represented by the power of Prospero.

Colonization of India
The British arrived in India at the beginning of the 18th century; there they found people who
were already deeply developed, whose major activity was the production of cotton, essential
in the textile industry (their materials were already known to the Romans) , one of the
themes that Ghosh deals with in his novels.
It is only thanks to the Indian textile industry that the industrial revolution took place in
England, because the English had accumulated a significant amount of money thanks to the
colonization of India.
However, the British were interested in the spices of the islands of Indonesia, an interest that
ceased when they’re defeated by the Dutch.
“The reality was that England was underdeveloped, barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased
and striking people, while India was vast, mighty and a magnificent empire, brilliantly
organized and culturally unified” - Alex von Tunzelmann

“India was a greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any in Europe” - J.T.
Sutherland

India is actually an English invention: the Persian in fact referred to the land beyond the river
Indus as the “Hindustan”, a valley situated in the north of India, where now we have Pakistan
and Afghanistan.

In the 16th century India was invaded by the Aryans, who come from the region
of Caucasus, whose language was SANSKRIT, the language from which 98% of all
the languages derived - including English (for example man derives from
“Manu”, their most important god). An important factor is the division in castes,
given also from the color of the skin → the people that lived in this area had a
darker skin tone, for this reason they were put at the bottom of the hierarchy,
whereas at the top we have the priests and warriors.
Among the other conquerors we find Alexander the Great, who contributed to the spread of
Greek culture.

Another important dynasty is that of the Maurya Empire (322–185 BCE), which unified most
of the Indian subcontinent into one state, and was the largest empire ever to exist on the
Indian subcontinent. To this dynasty belongs Ashoka, an enlightened monarch who
understands that wars don’t benefit anyone.

We also have to remember the Huns, who invaded India in the 6th century and
who were warriors, and the Muslims → in 620-622 Mohammed started spreading
islam, arriving also in India.

In the 16th century the Mughal Empire flourishes, a dynasty coming from Mongolia; Babur is
the first emperor of this dynasty, but Akbar is the most famous one; he was the wisest one
and the one who was most interested in religion (hinduism, buddhism). This has been a very
flourishing period also in culture, for example in painting.

Colonization
The Portuguese arrived in southern India in the 15th century and left a mark that can be
seen for example in the Christian churches in the zone of Goa, where they stayed until 1962.

The French arrived in the 17th century because they wanted to expand their reign; however,
they were defeated - like the Portuguese - by the British.

The British in fact, once arrived in the 18th century, defeated all the powers that had already
settled there and applied a strategy used by the Romans = DIVIDE ET IMPERA; they
capitalized on the disintegration that existed in India after the Mughal rule, and were thus
able to rule over India for over 2 centuries. While the British had come in earlier, they only
achieved political power in 1757 AD after the Battle of Plassey.
They took a keen interest in the resources that India had to offer and have been looked back
at as plunderers of India’s wealth of resources - as they took cotton, spices, silk, and tea,
amongst numerous other resources. While they did lay out a massive chunk of India’s
infrastructure, by also bringing the Indians steam engines, it is seldom looked back at as an
equal relationship. The British Raj was divisive and pitted Indians against one another, on
the basis of religion; and also mistreated the laborers. The Indians were essentially slaves of
British rule and were working hard without any returns on their work. This, naturally, led to
multiple mutinies; and prominent freedom fighters came to the forefront. Different ideologies
of thought believed that there were different ways of gaining freedom; however, they all had
one common goal - freedom. The Indian rebellion of 1857 was a large-scale rebellion by
soldiers employed by the British East India Company in northern and central India against
the company's rule. The spark that led to the mutiny was the issue of new gunpowder
cartridges for the Enfield rifle, which was insensitive to local religious prohibition. The key
mutineer was Mangal Pandey.

The British queen had asserted that the aim of the British was to help India progress -
however, multiple problems arose without the consultation of Indian leaders. After 1857, the
colonial government strengthened and expanded its infrastructure via the court system, legal
procedures, and statutes. The Indian Penal Code came into being. In education, Thomas
Babington Macaulay had made schooling a priority for the Raj in his famous minute of
February 1835 and succeeded in implementing the use of English as the medium of
instruction.

The numbers of British in India were small, yet they were able to rule 52% of the Indian
subcontinent directly and exercise considerable leverage over the princely states that
accounted for 48% of the area.
One of the most important events of the 19th century was the rise of Indian nationalism,
leading Indians to seek first "self-rule" and later "complete independence". However,
historians are divided over the causes of its rise. Probable reasons include a "clash of
interests of the Indian people with British interests", "racial discriminations", and "the
revelation of India's past".
From 1920 leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi began extremely popular pacific movements
against the British Raj; others, however, chose to intervene using violence. This led, after
many struggles, to the PARTITION after the second world war: in August 1947 the British
Indian Empire was partitioned into the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan.