Postcolonialism

Some Issues in Postcolonial TheoryENGL 4F70, Contemporary Literary Theory, Brock

University

Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory

attribution, for non-profit purposes.

As with all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. If you

have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail me.

Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in

previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing

countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses

particularly on

the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience

and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people

on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity

and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness.

It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries

appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized

countries.

This page addresses some of the complexities of the post-colonial situation, in

terms of the writing and reading situation of the colonized people, and of the

colonizing people.

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,

for instance:

otherness 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, as Abdul JanMohamed argues, on

the Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding

opposites): if the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the

orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil. Simply 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 in their nature 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, and should not be

totalized or essentialized -- through such concepts as a black

consciousness, Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This

totalization and essentialization is often a form of nostalgia which has its

inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of the colonized, and

it serves give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while

mystifying that of others; as John Frow remarks, it is a making of a

mythical One out of many...

the colonized peoples will also be other than their pasts, which can be

reclaimed but never reconstituted, and so must be revisited and realized in

partial, fragmented ways. You can't go home again.

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. As well, the concept of resistance carries

with it or can carry with it ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity,

individuality, etc., which ideas 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 a literature which 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 well require a centralized

economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a

hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions.

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 in fact no

literature or writing at all, and/or b) did not see art as having the same

function as constructing and defining cultural identity, and/or c) were, like

the peoples of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different

geographical/political/economic/cultural world. (India, a partial exception,

had a long-established tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a highly

balkanized sub-continent with little if any common identity and with many

divergent sub-cultures). It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid

identity, which is created or called forth by the colonizeds' attempts to

constitute and represent identity.

The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or

convey in the cultural traditions of colonized peoples.

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 which are now but were

not the genres of the colonized. One result is that the literature may be

written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized

people or area, 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/or may be replaced by allusions and tropes

which are alien to British culture and usage. It can become very difficult

then for others to recognize or respect the work as literature (which concept

may not itself have relevance -- see next point).

There other are times when 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 the

culture which strong aesthetic ideals to accept.

The development (development itself may be an entirely western concept) of

hybrid and reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven, disparate, and

might defy those notions of order and common sense which may be central not

only to western thinking but to literary forms and traditions produced through

western thought.

The term 'hybrid' used above refers to the concept of hybridity, an important

concept in post-colonial theory, referring to the integration (or, mingling)

of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures

("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the variety of

stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt

themselves to the necessities and the opportunities of more or less oppressive

or invasive cultural impositions, live into alien cultural patterns through

their own structures of understanding, thus producing something familiar but

new). The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the

cross-fertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and

dynamic, as well as as oppressive. "Hybridity" is also a useful concept for

helping to break down the false sense that colonized cultures -- or colonizing

cultures for that matter -- are monolithic, or have essential, unchanging

features.

The representation of these uneven and often hybrid, polyglot, multivalent

cultural sites (reclaimed or discovered colonized cultures searching for

identity and meaning in a complex and partially alien past) may not look very

much like the representations of bourgeois culture in western art,

ideologically shaped as western art is to represent its own truths (that is,

guiding fictions) about itself.

To quote Homi Bhabha on the complex issue of representation and meaning from

his article in Greenblatt and Gun's Redrawing the Boundaries,

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational.

It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted

in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the middle

passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage out of the civilizing mission,

the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the

Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within

and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial

histories of displacement -- now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of

global media technologies -- make the question of how culture signifies, or

what is signified by culture , a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to

distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across

diverse cultural experiences -- literature, art, music, ritual, life, death

-- and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as

they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social

systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation --

migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation -- makes the process of

cultural translation a complex form of signification. the natural(ized),

unifying discourse of nation , peoples , or authentic folk tradition, those

embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The

great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you

increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of

tradition.

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 themselves,

although of British or European heritage, ultimately encountered the

originating traditions as Other, a tradition and a writing to define oneself

against (or, which amounts to the same thing, to equal or surpass). Every

colony had an emerging literature which was an imitation of but differed from

the central British tradition, which articulated in local terms the myths and

experience of a new culture, and which 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 which absorbed the peoples of a

number of other heritages and cultures (through immigration, migration, the

forced mingling of differing local cultures, etc.), and in doing so often

adapted to use the myths, symbols and definitions of various traditions. In

this way as well the literature of the hitherto colonizers becomes

'post-colonial'. (It is curiously the case that British literature itself has

been colonized by colonial/postcolonial writers writing in Britain out of

colonial experiences and a colonial past.)

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 a literature of otherness and resistance, and is written out

of the specific local experience.

Return to: Top ENGL 4F70 Main Page Department of English Main Page

URL of this page: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/postcol.html

Last updated on July 22, 1998 by Professor John Lye Disclaimer

Brock University Main Page