Ms.

Crandell
AP English Lit
Literary Theory: Postcolonial Criticism

(adapted from Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson, http://signsjournal.org/intersectionality-theorizing-
power-empowering-theory-summer-2013-vol-38-no-4/, http://www.uccnrs.ucsb.edu/intersectionality,
http://www.eomega.org/sites/default/files/resources/sm15-5805.303.requiredreading3.pdf, and
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/06/)

Read, annotate, and be ready to discuss!

Perhaps one of the most important abilities critical theory develops in us is the ability to see
connections where we didn’t know they existed: for example, connections between our personal
psychological conflicts and the way we interpret a poem, between the ideologies we’ve internalized and
the literary works we find aesthetically pleasing, between a nation’s political climate and what its
intellectuals consider “great” literature, and so forth.

Most of the critical theories we’ve studied so far have encouraged us to make connections along one or
more of these lines. Postcolonial criticism is particularly effective at helping us see connections among
all the domains of our experience—the psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and
aesthetic—in ways that show us just how inseparable these categories are in our lived experience of
ourselves and our world.

Because postcolonial criticism defines formerly colonized peoples as any population that has been
subjected to the political domination of another population, you may see postcolonial critics draw
examples from the literary works of African Americans as well as from, for example, the literature of
aboriginal Australians or the formerly colonized population of India. Postcolonial criticism tends to focus
on global issues and on comparisons and contrasts among various peoples.

Although postcolonial criticism didn’t become a major force in literary studies until the early 1990s, the
cultural analysis of colonialism on which it draws has played an important role in anticolonial political
movements everywhere and took its place as a field of intellectual inquiry when colonial regimes began
to topple after World War II. As a domain within literary studies, postcolonial criticism is both a subject
matter and a theoretical framework. As a subject matter, postcolonial criticism analyzes literature
produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination, from the first point of colonial
contact to the present.

Postcolonial Identity

That so many peoples formerly colonized by Britain speak English, write in English, use English in their
schools and universities, and conduct government business in English, in addition to the local
languages they may use at home, is an indication of the residual effect of colonial domination on their
cultures. In fact, the dynamic psychological and social interplay between what ex‐ colonial populations
consider their native, indigenous, pre-colonial cultures and the British culture that was imposed on them
makes up a large part of the field of study for postcolonial critics. For postcolonial cultures include both
a merger of and antagonism between the culture of the colonized and that of the colonizer, which, at
this point in time, are difficult to identify and separate into discrete entities, so complete has been the
British intrusion into the government, education, cultural values, and daily lives of its colonial subjects.

What has been left behind is a deeply embedded cultural colonization: the inculcation of a British
system of government and education, British culture, and British values that denigrate the culture,
morals, and even physical appearance of formerly subjugated peoples. Thus, ex‐ colonials often were
left with a psychological “inheritance” of a negative self‐ image and alienation from their own indigenous
cultures, which had been forbidden or devalued for so long that much pre-colonial culture has been
lost.

Colonialist ideology, often referred to as colonialist discourse to mark its relationship to the language in
which colonialist thinking was expressed, was based on the colonizers’ assumption of their own
superiority, which they contrasted with the alleged inferiority of native (indigenous) peoples, the original
inhabitants of the lands they invaded. The colonizers believed that only their own Anglo‐ European
culture was civilized or sophisticated. Therefore, native peoples were defined as savage, backward,
and undeveloped. Because their technology was more highly advanced, the colonizers believed that
their whole culture was more highly advanced, and they ignored or swept aside the religions, customs,
and codes of behavior of the peoples they subjugated. So the colonizers saw themselves at the center
of the world; the colonized were at the margins, or as with New Zealand, at the end of the earth.
The colonizers saw themselves as the embodiment of what a human being should be, the proper “self”;
native peoples were considered “other,” different, and therefore inferior to the point of being less than
fully human. This practice of judging all who are different as less than fully human is called othering,
and it divides the world between “us” (the “civilized”) and “them” (the “others” or “savages”). The
“savage” is usually considered evil as well as inferior (the demonic other). But sometimes, as we see
with many Romantic writers, the “savage” is perceived as possessing a “primitive” beauty or nobility
born of a closeness to nature (the exotic other). In either case, however, the “savage” remains other
and, therefore, not fully human.

Today, this attitude—the use of European culture as the standard to which all other cultures are
negatively contrasted—is called Eurocentrism. An example of Eurocentric language can be seen in the
terms First World, Second World, Third World, and Fourth World to refer to, respectively, (1) Britain,
Europe, and the United States; (2) the white populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and
southern Africa (and, for some theorists, the former Soviet bloc); (3) the technologically developing
nations, such as India and those of Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia; and (4) the
indigenous populations subjugated by white settlers and governed today by the majority culture that
surrounds them, such as Native Americans and aboriginal Australians (and, for some theorists,
nonwhite populations who have minority status in “First World” countries, such as African Americans).
Although these four “worlds” are commonly referred to today, we should be aware of their Eurocentric
implications. Such language makes sense only if history begins with Europe and is organized in terms
of European colonial conquest. It ignores the existence of earlier worlds, such as those of Greece,
Egypt, and Africa, and it privileges European military conquest as the primary means of organizing
world history.

Another example of Eurocentrism is a specific form of othering called orientalism, analyzed by Edward
Said, which has been practiced in Europe, Britain, and America. Its purpose is to produce a positive
national self‐ definition for Western nations by contrast with Eastern nations on which the West projects
all the negative characteristics it doesn’t want to believe exist among its own people. Thus the Chinese
or the Arabs, or whatever Asian or Middle Eastern population is politically convenient, are defined as
cruel, sneaky, evil, cunning, dishonest, given to sexual promiscuity and perversion, and the like. (Think
of the cruel, deceitful Arab merchant in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who is saved from prison by the
young De Lacey, a European, whom the Arab subsequently betrays.)

Postcolonial theorists often describe the colonial subject as having a double consciousness or double
vision, in other words, a consciousness or a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two
antagonistic cultures: that of the colonizer and that of the indigenous community.

Double consciousness often produces an unstable sense of self, which is heightened by the forced
migration colonialism frequently caused, for example, from the rural farm or village to the city in search
of employment. (Forced migration, either as a quest for employment, including indentured servitude, or
as the result of enslavement, has scattered large numbers of peoples around the globe, and large
populations of their descendants have remained in the diaspora, or separated from their original
homeland.) This feeling of being caught between cultures, of belonging to neither rather than to both, of
finding oneself arrested in a psychological limbo that results not merely from some individual
psychological disorder but from the trauma of the cultural displacement within which one lives, is
referred to by Homi Bhabha (director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University) and others as
unhomeliness. Being “unhomed” is not the same as being homeless. To be unhomed is to feel not at
home even in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has
made you a psychological refugee, so to speak.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is the name given to the conflicts that confront both individuals and movements
as they seek to navigate among the raced, gendered, and class-based dimensions of social and
political life. Individuals seeking to make a socially just and fulfilling everyday life and groups
trying to effect change through political action and social movements struggle with the unstable
connections between race, gender, and class. The methodological and explanatory framework for
linking these three axes of identity and difference, of alliance and antagonism, remains elusive. Any
serious comparative historical view suggests that demands for solidarity across race, class, or gender
lines are as likely to compete as to coalesce. However, the more important understanding of
intersectionality is that it is a way of turning fatal couplings of power and difference into actions that
deepen democratic activity and create an understanding of identity that takes into account the hybrid
nature of identity.

Many postcolonial theorists argue that postcolonial identity is necessarily a dynamic, constantly
evolving hybrid of native and colonial cultures. Moreover, they assert that this hybridity, or syncretism
as it’s sometimes called, does not consist of a stalemate between two warring cultures but is rather a
productive, exciting, positive force in a shrinking world that is itself becoming more and more culturally
hybrid. This view encourages ex‐ colonials to embrace the multiple and often conflicting aspects of the
blended culture that is theirs and that is an indelible fact of history.

N.B. There is a general consensus that the United States and Ireland are not postcolonial nations, the
first because it has been independent for so long and has itself colonized others1, the second because
it has long been an integral part of British culture (though some Irish people, especially in Northern
Ireland, would surely disagree with this assessment, and many postcolonial critics cite the work of Irish
poet W. B. Yeats as emblematic of anticolonialist nationalism). However, there is much debate among
postcolonial critics concerning whether or not the literature of white settler colonies—specifically, those
established in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa—should be included in the study
of postcolonial literature.

1 Liberia is a good example, as is Guam and American Samoa.

Cultural imperialism, a direct result of economic domination, consists of the “takeover” of one culture by
another: the food, clothing, customs, recreation, and values of the economically dominant culture
increasingly replace those of the economically vulnerable culture until the latter appears to be a kind of
imitation of the former. American cultural imperialism has been one of the most pervasive forms of this
phenomenon, as we see American fashions, movies, music, sports, fast food, and consumerism
squeeze out indigenous cultural traditions all over the world. America's expansion cannot be seen on a
geographical map, but it can be seen on a map of world industry.

On the other hand, theorists who believe white settler cultures should be included under the rubric
postcolonial argue that the foundational concept of postcolonial criticism is anticolonial resistance, and
the literatures of white settler cultures have a good deal to teach us about the complexities of
anticolonial resistance because their own resistance to cultural obliteration by an overwhelming British
cultural presence has occurred without the help of a clear distinction between colonized and colonizer,
a distinction that nonwhite invader colonies have been able to count on. In other words, white colonial
subjects experience—in a subtler, less clearly demarcated form—the same double consciousness
experienced by nonwhite colonial subjects. From this perspective, we can’t simply ignore the anti-
colonialist literature produced by developing nations while we uncritically assume that all the literature
produced by nonwhite colonized peoples is necessarily a literature of resistance.

Postcolonial criticism and literature

Wherever postcolonial critics place themselves in terms of these debates, however, most interpret
postcolonial literature in terms of a number of overlapping topics. These include, among others, the
following common topics:

1. The native people’s initial encounter with the colonizers and the disruption of indigenous culture

2. The journey of the European outsider through an unfamiliar wilderness with a native guide

3. Othering (the colonizers’ treatment of members of the indigenous culture as less than fully human)
and colonial oppression in all its forms

4. Mimicry (the attempt of the colonized to be accepted by imitating the dress, behavior, speech, and
lifestyle of the colonizers)

5. Exile (the experience of being an “outsider” in one’s own land or a foreign wanderer)
6. Post‐ independence exuberance followed by disillusionment

7. The struggle for individual and collective cultural identity and the related themes of alienation,
unhomeliness (feeling that one has no cultural “home,” or sense of cultural belonging), double
consciousness (feeling torn between the social and psychological demands of two antagonistic
cultures), and hybridity (experiencing one’s cultural identity as a hybrid of two or more cultures,
which feeling is sometimes described as a positive
 alternative to unhomeliness)

8. The need for continuity with a pre-colonial past and self‐ definition of the political future

Intersectionality is not only important to consider during this unit when we read The God of Small
Things and Heart of Darkness; as you move from high school to life beyond, remember to consider
these aspects of intersectionality:

 What are your own identities, privileges, and positions of power?

 What are the specific identities that overlap or intersect to make people vulnerable to rights
violations?

 Who are the people/groups with power and privilege? Have the groups/people/individuals
changed over time?
 What issues have been historically left out of discussions of rights issues? Why? How would
these issues benefit from recognizing their shared or overlapping concerns?

 What do we all need to be vigilant of to ensure we do not further contribute to marginalizing a

group or groups and to ensure we account for their full inclusion in other areas? What are the
power dynamics at play and how should they be accounted for and addressed?