Postcolonial Studies

Semester V:
Spring 2024/2025 Postcolonial Theory:
Session I /23rd Sept.
Introduction
Professor A. El Bakkali
 Postcolonial Theory: Introduction
• Introduction
• Postcolonial Theory
• Colonial Legacy
• The Goal
• Strategic Essentialism
• Write Back
• Colonizer and Colonized
• The literature(s) of the colonized
• Rising a Canon
• The literature(s) of the colonists
 Introduction
• Postcolonialism (postcolonial theory, postcolonial studies, post-colonial theory) is a postmodern intellectual
discourse that reacts to and analyzes the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
• It is defined in anthropology as the relations between European nations and areas they colonized and once ruled.
• It comprises a set of theories found in history, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, film, political science,
architecture, human geography, sociology, Marxist theory, feminism, religious and theological studies, and
literature.
• What remains of colonization when it is, in principle, over?
• What's remaining of this great movement of European conquest that began in the sixteenth century and ended
with the decolonization movements of the late twentieth century? What is active, still present, in this past that seems
to haunt societies that have been affected in many ways and in many forms?
• This philosophical/political question crosses a multitude of disciplinary fields in and out of the human sciences:
history, sociology, political science, ethnology, economics, linguistics, geography, etc. It really concerns all areas of
culture.
• Attempting to overcome, to a certain extent, a Marxist third-world ideology that dreamed of an absolute liberation
succeeding a no less absolute Western domination, the postcolonial theory intends to take as its object of study the
link (symbolic or material) that ex-colonized with their traumatic past, lived as history and/or memory.
• These preoccupations and reflections that many English-speaking countries lead, in a deep but also sometimes
disordered way, in a disciplinary field that ended up acquiring a certain autonomy in the university institutions.
 Postcolonial Theory
• This term was forged in the generally accepted sense of the North Atlantic by theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabba, who were motivated at the same time by their experience as immigrants,
by their reflection on the colonial past and by their reading of the philosophers (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault) or
essayists (Memmi, Fanon), or others (Robert J.C. Young, Bill Aschcroft, Laura Chrisman, Benita Parry, Leela
Gandhi, Ania Loomba, David Spurr)to undertake a deconstruction of the western canon, to bring suspicion to
the ethnocentrism of European literatures and aesthetic theories.
• As a discipline, Postcolonial Studies attempt to be sensitive to the geopolitics of literature, attentive to the
consequences of the great movement of civilization (and destruction of civilizations) that was European
colonization.
• It also measures the footprints of Western hegemony on more than three-quarters of the world's people. Thus,
the term postcolonial refers to all cultures the imperial process has affected from colonization to today:
Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan,
Singapore, South Pacific Islands, Sri Lanka, etc.
• These consequences of colonization are not only political and economic; they concern all the forms of cultural life
and production that the domination of the center, when not eradicated, has durably disturbed, inflected, and
modified.
• The literatures, born of these transformations (for some, well before decolonization proper), constitutes an
ideal laboratory for observing this postcolonial fate, insofar as they generally call into question the very
imperialism that inspired them.
 Colonial Legacy
• Where does it come from? Post-colonial literature comes from Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa
and India, where many post-colonial writers write in English and focus on common themes such as the struggle for
independence, emigration, national identity, allegiance and childhood.
• What is Post-colonial theory?
• Postcolonial theory is a literary theory or critical approach that deals with literature produced in countries that were
once, or are now, colonies of other countries. It may also deal with literature written in or by citizens of colonizing
countries that take colonies or their peoples as its subject matter. The theory is based on concepts of otherness and
resistance.
• Typically, the theory proponents examine how writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even
celebrate their cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonizers. They also examine ways in which the
literature of the colonial powers is used to justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized
as inferior. However, attempts at creating a single definition of postcolonial theory have proved controversial, and some
writers have strongly critiqued the whole concept.
• It focuses on how literature by colonizing cultures, distorts the experience and realities and inscribes the
inferiority of the colonized people in literature by attempting to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in
the face of that past's inevitable otherness.
• It can also deal with how literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and
so forth of colonized countries.
• This tends to cover all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of
colonization to the present day (European imperial aggression.)
 The Goal
• The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is accounting for and combating the residual effects of colonialism on
cultures. It is not simply concerned with salvaging past worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond
this period together, towards a place of mutual respect.
• Post-colonialist thinkers recognize that many of the assumptions that underlie colonialism's "logic" are still
active today.
• A key goal of post-colonial theorists is clearing space for multiple voices. This is especially true of those voices
previously silenced by dominant ideologies - subalterns.
• It is widely recognized within the discourse that this space must first be cleared within academia.
• Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, provides a clear picture of how the scholars who studied what used to
be called the Orient disregarded the views of those they studied – preferring instead to rely on the intellectual
superiority of themselves and their peers; an attitude that was forged by European imperialism.
• To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought
and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalists, brought into reality
by them, or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's grander interpretive
activity. (Said)
• The subaltern voice has long been incorporated into social studies. However, with so much criticism against
the idea of studying "others," many social scientists felt paralyzed, fatalistically accepting it as an
impossibility.
• Gayatri Spivak, an Indian postcolonialist thinker, rejects this outright. "To refuse to represent a cultural Other is
salving your conscience, and allowing you not to do any homework."
 Strategic Essentialism
• Spivak recognizes the project is problematic, as the presentation of a subaltern voice would likely essentialize its
message, negating the subaltern masses' heterogeneity. She suggests "strategic essentialism" - speaking on behalf
of a group while using a clear image of identity to fight opposition - as the only solution to this problem.
• In the conclusion to her paper "Marginality as a site of resistance," Bell Hooks addresses the white academic reader on
behalf of subalterns. "This is an intervention. a message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and
power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we meet in solidarity to erase the category
colonized/colonizer. "
• Homi K. Bhabha feels the postcolonial world should valorize spaces of mixing; spaces where truth and authenticity
move aside for ambiguity. This space of hybridity, he argues, offers the most profound challenge to colonialism.
• Critiques have been put forward that Bhabha ignores Spivak’s stated usefulness of essentialism. Essentialisms’
potential usefulness is referenced. An organized voice provides a more powerful challenge to dominant
knowledge—whether in academia or active protests.
• Frantz Fanon offered a violent prescription for moving beyond the colonial mindset. But violence in Fanon, who was
trained as a psychoanalyst, is a cathartic practice aimed at "cleansing" the male colonized psyche from the effects
of the epistemic violence of colonialism. That is why Fanon supported the most violent factions of FLN in Algeria.
It is important to read Fanon's emphasis on revolutionary violence within the discourse of psychoanalysis.
• Postcolonialism is a hopeful discourse. The very "post" defines the discipline as one that looks forward to a world
that has truly moved beyond all that colonialism entails, together.
• Mbembe finds it gives him "hope in the advent of a universal brotherly and community". Asking what it means to
be human together, post-colonialism aims at decolonizing the future.
 Write Back
• The critical nature of postcolonial theory entails destabilizing Western ways of thinking, therefore creating space for the subaltern, or
marginalized groups, to speak and produce alternatives to the dominant discourse. Often, the ‘once-colonized world’ is full of
“contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and liminalities”.
• By some definitions, postcolonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism, albeit through different or new relationships
concerning power and the control/production of knowledge.
• Postcolonialism-a sub-segment specifically focuses on postcolonial identity formation and culture of the diasporic Indo-Europeans,
Colonized people, especially of the British Empire, attended British universities an with their access to education, created this new
criticism.
• Often, previously colonized places are homogenized in Western discourse under an umbrella label such as the ‘Third World’. Postcolonialism
demonstrates the heterogeneity of colonized places by analyzing the uneven impact of Western colonialism on different places, peoples,
and cultures.
• This is done by engaging with the variety of ways in which “relations, practices and representations” of the past are “reproduced or
transformed” and studying the connections between the empire's “heart and margins.”
• Moreover, postcolonialism recognizes that there was, and still is, resistance to the West. This resistance is practiced by many, including the
subaltern, a group of marginalized, and least powerful.
• The postcolonial theory provides a framework that destabilizes dominant discourses in the West, challenges “inherent assumptions,”
and critiques the “material and discursive legacies of colonialism.”
• Postcolonial studies need to be grounded to challenge these assumptions and legacies of colonialism. This entails working with tangible
identities, connections, and processes (Said's Orientalism).
• Postcolonialism deals with cultural identity in colonized societies: the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; how
writers articulate and celebrate that; how the knowledge of the colonized (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the
colonizer's interests; and how the colonizer’s literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonized as a perpetually inferior people,
society and culture.
 Colonizer and Colonized
• The creation of binary opposition structures changed the way we view others. In the case of colonialism, the Oriental
and the Westerner were distinguished as different from each other (i.e. the emotional, static, Orient vs. the principled,
progressive Occident).
• This opposition justified the "white man's burden," the coloniser's self-perceived "destiny to rule" subordinate peoples. In
contrast, postcolonialism seeks out areas of hybridity and transculturalization. This aspect is particularly relevant during
globalization processes.
• Not a naïve teleological sequence that supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with and contestation
of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies ... A theory of postcolonialism must, then, respond to
more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience
of imperialism."
• Colonized peoples reply to the colonial legacy by writing back to the center, while Indigenous peoples write their histories and
legacies using the colonizer's language for their own purposes. "Indigenous decolonization is the intellectual impact of
postcolonialist theory upon Indigenous peoples, thereby generating postcolonial literature.
• Postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonized's creative resistance to the colonizer and how that resistance
complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects, which utilized a range of strategies, including anti-
conquest narratives, to legitimize their dominance.
• Postcolonial writers object to the colonized's depiction as hollow "mimics" of Europeans or as passive recipients of
power. Consequent to the Foucauldian argument, postcolonial scholars, i.e., the Subaltern Studies collective, argue that
anti-colonial resistance accompanies every deployment of power.
• This addresses matters of identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial
national identity, of how a colonized people’s knowledge was used against them in service of the colonizer's interests.
 The literature(s) of the colonized
• Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness.
• There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, which includes doubleness, both identity and
difference, so that every other, every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and
meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define; the western concept of the oriental is based: if
the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil.
• To reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and identity-destroying power (all is reduced to a set of
dichotomies, black or white, etc.); colonized peoples are highly diverse and in their traditions, and as beings in cultures
they are both constructed and changing, so that while they may be 'other' from the colonizers, they are also different one
from another and from their own pasts. They should not be totalized or essentialized -- through such concepts as a black
consciousness, Indian soul, or aboriginal culture.
• Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of resistance as subversion, or opposition, or mimicry --
but with the haunting problem that resistance always inscribes the resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a two-
edged sword.
• Also, the concept of resistance carries with it or can bring with it ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity,
individuality, etc., which may not have been held, or held in the same way, in the colonized culture's view of
humankind.
• On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce literature that helps to reconstitute the
identity of the colonized one may have to function in at the very least the means of production of the colonizers -- the
writing, publishing, advertising and production of books, for instance.
• These may require a centralized economic and cultural system, ultimately either a Western import or a hybrid form, uniting
local conceptions with Western conceptions.
 Rising a Canon
• The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept foreign to the traditions of the
colonized peoples, who (a) had no literature as it is conceived in the Western traditions or no literature or writing at all, or
did not see art as having the same function as constructing and defining cultural identity, and/or were, transported into a wholly
different geographical/political/economic/cultural world.
• It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid identity, which is created or called forth by the colonizers' attempts to
constitute and represent identity. (hybridity = mixing of cultures; ex. double consciousness.
• There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized country can reclaim or
reconstitute its identity in a language that is now but was not its own language and genres that are now but were not the
genres of the colonized.
• The literature may be written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized people or area, in which
language use does not read like Standard English and in which literature the standard literary allusions and common
metaphors and symbols may be inappropriate and may be replaced by allusions and tropes which are alien to British culture
and usage.
• The violation of the aesthetic norms of Western literature is inevitable as colonized writers search to encounter their
culture's ancient yet transformed heritage and as they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so
pressing that the normal aesthetic transformations of Western high literature are not relevant, make no sense.
• The idea that good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced at a point in a culture's history, and therefore for a
particular cultural usage not be good literature at all, is difficult for us who are raised in a culture with strong aesthetic
ideals to accept.
• The development of hybrid and reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven disparate, and might defy those
notions of order and common sense that may be central not only to Western thinking but to literary forms and traditions
produced through Western thought.
 The literature(s) of the colonists
• In addition to the post-colonial literature of the colonized, there exists as well the postcolonial literature of the colonizers.
• As people of British heritage moved into new landscapes, established new founding national myths, and struggled to define
their own national literature against the force and tradition of the British tradition, they, although of British or European
heritage, ultimately encountered the originating traditions as Other, a tradition and writing to define oneself against (or, which
amounts to the same thing, to equal or surpass).
• Every colony had an emerging literature that resembled but differed from the central British tradition. This literature articulated
in local terms the myths and experiences of a new culture and expressed that new culture as, to an extent, divergent from
and even opposed to the culture of the "home", or colonizing, nation.
• The colonizers largely inhabited countries that absorbed the peoples of several other heritages and cultures (through
immigration, migration, the forced mingling of differing local cultures, etc.), and in doing so, often adapted to using the
myths, symbols, and definitions of various traditions.
• In this regard a salient difference between colonialist literature (literature written by colonizers, in the colonized country, on the
model of the "home" country and often for the home country as an audience) and post-colonial literature, is that colonialist
literature is an attempt to replicate, continue, equal, the original tradition, to write in accord with British standards; postcolonial
literature is often (but not inevitably) self-consciously literature of otherness and resistance, and is written out of the
specific local experience.
• Major Post-colonial Theorists:
• Homi K. Bhabha "The Commitment to Theory"
• Edward W. Said Orientalism
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
 References
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