Ch.

1 From Commonwealth to Postcolonial

Colonialism and Decolonisation

In the 20th century the British Empire covered parts of Africa, Asia, Canada, Caribbean and Ireland. At the beginning
of the 21st century there remains just few of the British Overseas Territories. The 20th century saw the
decolonisation of millions of people once subjected to the authority of the British crown. The legacies of colonialism
and decolonisation are important constitutive elements of the contemporary world because they inflect geo-political
realities around the world and remain in arts, cultures, languages. But colonialism is also related to "capitalism" and
"imperialism".
Denis Judd said that colonialism was the fundamental part of the commercial venture of western nations and some
date its origins to the Europeans voyages of discovery. All was moved by the desire to create and control
opportunities to generate international markets at the lowest cost to Europeans. As many colonial governments
would come to realise, colonialism was a big business and the construction of the sugar industry in the Caribbean is
an example: in the favourable conditions and employing African slavers, the British empire could produce products
at minimal cost and sell them for high profits.
Imperialism is an ideological project which support the legitimacy of economic and military of one nation by another
so, it become the expansion of commerce under the protection of political controls.
Colonialism is one form of practice, of control, which result from the imperialism and concern the settlement of
people in a new location (unlike imperialism which don't concern the placing of people). It is also considered as an
historical manifestation of imperialism specific in some places and times and more, the settlement of territory, the
development of resources and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands by force (we can
notice the unequal relations of power and the economic aims at the heart of colonialism and also the 'attempt to
government' which means that colonialism was never fully successful because of the resistance of the inhabitants of
colonised lands and sometimes also because of those settled overseas who tried to defer power and authority from
the motherland). While colonialism is over today as a practice, imperialism continues as nations are still engaged in
imperial acts.
British empire has three different periods of decolonisation starting when the colonised nations won the right to
govern their own affairs:
1) The loss of the American colonies and declaration of American independence in late 18th century.
2) From the end of 19th century to the first decade of 20th century, were born the “dominions”: the term used
to describe Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These nations had large European population settled
overseas that often destroyed the indigenous populations of these lands and organised their government bound to
the British Empire. Canada was the first to achieve its political autonomy, then we have to wait 1931 with the
“Statute of Westminster” that gave those nations full governmental control and deferred the British authority.
3) The third period of decolonisation occurred at the end of the Second World War. There were some lands
with just small British colonial elites so the independence occurred as a consequence of anti-colonial nationalism
and military struggle.
There are many reasons for decolonisation but the fundamental one concerned the growth of the nationalist
movements. Other reasons are:
- the decline of Britain as a world power and in the meantime the ascendancy of United States and Soviet
Union
- the changes to technologies of production and international finance which made possible capitalist
ambitions to be pursued without the need for colonial settlement.
The Commonwealth literature was a term used by literary critics to describe literatures in english emerging
exclusively from countries with a history of colonialism that incorporated both writers from European settler
communities and writers of those countries.
The establishment of the British Commonwealth of Nations was one of the consequences of the decline of British
Empire. At first the term was used to refer to those dominions which still had an allegiance (giurato fedeltà) to
Britain but, when the relationship between them changed, a different meaning emerged and it became redefined in
more equitable terms as: an association of sovereigns nations without a single authority. Today the Commonwealth
of Nations exists in name only and it just wants to promote democracy, peace, non-racialism but still there are some
troubles (Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Fiji were suspended from the Commonwealth).
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The shift from ‘colonial’ to ‘Commonwealth’ suggest a change in the colonised countries status from subservience to
equality but as we can notice, the economic and political relations have remained far from equal.
In general, the Commonwealth literature welcomed a shared valuable culture that promoted unity in diversity;
however, it wasn’t really so and we can notice that the development of a nationalist sentiment was one of the most
important reasons for the birth of this literature (so that we have no literature produced by those colonies where
there are large English-speaking population such as Fiji, Hong-Kong and Malta). But, this literature went beyond local
affairs and want to transcend the national and cultural issues of the singular nations. The way literature was unified
through the category of ‘Commonwealth literature’ is revealed in the editor issue of the first edition of the ‘ Journal
od Commonwealth literature’: each texts is evaluated in relation to English literature and just because of this reason
it was able to transcend the its regional spirit and produce works of universal and permanent relevance. For
example, for critics like William Walsh, Commonwealth literature had the same preoccupations of the human
conditions as did writings of Jane Austen and George Eliot and national differences just give something more to the
text. Just in late 1970s and 80s many critics started reading this literature in a new way thinking about the vital value
of historical, geographical and cultural specifics that cannot be considered secondary or background. In this
perspective, for these critics the different preoccupations and context of texts become more important.
Theories of Colonial Discourses: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said
Theories of colonial discourses (discourses because of its many varieties) explore the ways that representations and
modes of perception are used as weapons of colonial power to keep colonised people subservient to colonial rule.
How colonialism suggest certain ways of seeing, attitudes and values?
Colonialism is perpetuated by justifying the idea that it is right to rule over other people while the colonised have to
accept their supremacy: so colonialism established ways of thinking. Colonial discourses put together language and
power: language is more than a way of communication, it constitutes our world-view ordering reality into
meaningful units and the meanings we attach to things let us know the values we consider important. Under
colonialism, colonised people are made subservient to ways of regarding the world which support colonialist values
and, at the same time, the cultural values of colonised people are considered uncivilised and that they must be
rescued. Empire get colonising and colonised people to see their world and themselves in a particular way where the
language of the Empire represent the natural order of life.
In 1950s emerged an important work that focused on the psychological damage suffered by colonised peoples. The
psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote about the damage French colonialism have had upon millions of people. His
experience of racism, while being educated by and working for French, affected him deeply so that he joined the
Algerian rebels fighting against the French. He wrote two polemical books about the mechanism of colonialism and
its psychological effects that he saw through his clinical experience. He focused on the cost to the individual who
lives in a world where the colours of his or her skin is object of derision. Fanon is forced to see himself as an object at
the mercy of a group that identifies him as inferior. Fanon feels violated: identity is something French make for him.
“Black skin white masks” explain the consequences of identity formation and the one response to such drama is just
to embrace the “civilised” ideals of French even if they will never accept them on equal terms. The end of
colonialism meant a psychological change too: colonialism is destroyed only once its ways of thinking are challenged.
One of the most influential books of the late 20th century was Edward Said’s “Orientalism”. Said focused on the
relationship between coloniser and the colonised and he explored how colonialism institutionally supported the
practices of colonial government and settlement. His book looked at the theories of power and the political
philosophy by Gramsci; he also examined how the knowledge that Western Imperial powers, formed about their
colonies, helped to justify their subjugation. Western recorded their observations on assumptions about ‘the Orient’
as a mythic place of exoticism and sexual degeneration: these observations were presented as scientific truths that
wanted to justify colonial domination. With the Orient perceived as inferior, its colonisation could be justified in
moral terms as a way of spreading civilisation and saving native people from their barbarism.
The work of Fanon and Said inspired a new generation of critics that learned the fact that Empires colonise
imaginations. Fanon shows how this works at a psychological level for the oppressed while Said demonstrated the
legitimation of Empire for the oppressor. ‘Decolonising the mind’ is a challenge concerning language, because of the
meaning it makes and the way it is used. So freedom from colonialism comes from a change of minds not just from
signing declarations of independence.
The success of “Orientalism” encourages new colonial discourses and this was probably the beginning of post
colonialism.

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Three forms of textual analysis became popular:
1) It involved re-reading canonical English literature in order to examine if past representations questioned the
assumptions of colonial discourses. This form proceeded in two directions:
- critics looked at writers who used colonial themes whether their work was supportive or critical of colonial
discourses (Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness”)
- texts that seems to have little to do with colonialism but were re-read in terms of colonial discourses.
2) Critics who worked on the representation of colonised subjects across a variety of colonial texts and not just
literary ones. Said, Bhabha and Spivak have opened a variety of theoretical issues central to post colonialism. Each
remains identified as a main figure in the advent of post colonial theory.
The Empire ‘writes back’
3) The third form of literary analysis put together readings of the new literatures from countries with a history of
colonialism. It became popular to say that these literatures were concerned with writing back to the centre: a
process of questioning colonial discourses in their work. It was preferred to use ‘postcolonial literature’ instead of
Commonwealth in describing these writers and their work to signal a new generation of critics. Postcolonial
literatures focused on new ways of seeing and gave voices to colonised and once-colonised peoples and on
decolonizing the mind. We found this approach in “The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial
Literatures”: literature from one-colonised countries concerned with challenging the language power, producing
new ways of representation. Its authors looked at the fortunes of English language in countries with a history of
colonialism, noting how writers were expressing their sense of identity by refashioning English. This refashioning
worked in different ways: writers created new ‘englishes’ inserting untranslatable words, obscure terms and refusing
to follow standard English syntax. Each of these operated in different postcolonial texts. The new English of the
colonised place was different from the language in the centre. They surpassed its limits, broken its rules. As a
consequence, new values were expressed and old values rejected.
Three criticism of The Empire Writes Back are useful to list because they can serve as warnings to some of the
problems within post colonialism:
- Gender differences: It neglects gender differences between writers. Important social facts of a writer’s identity are
passed over by authors to isolate an identifiable, common way of postcolonial writing.
- Regional/national differences: Similarly, there is little sustained attempt to differentiate within or between
writings from different places.
- Is writing back so prevalent? It is important to be clear: we do not assume that all writing from countries with a
history of colonialism is concerned with colonial history, discourses and ‘decolonising mind’.
The book creates a grand theory of post-colonialism that ignores the historical and cultural differences between
writers. So, we should be alert to the fact that theories of post colonialism might not be so remote from the
homogenising tendencies asserted as the central weakness of the ‘Commonwealth literature’. Into the Twenty-first
Century
A number of critical works attempted to guide the readers through the fast developing concepts and new
vocabularies of post colonialism that had been influenced by Said, Bhabha and Spivak. Post colonialism become an
academic discipline in a short time. One important development was the consolidation of postcolonial scholarship
which focus on post colonialism’s shortcomings (difetti) as regards the ways it engages with the material realities of
colonised and once-colonised world. There has emerged a materialist critique of many aspects of postcolonial theory
by Marxist critics who have become unhappy with post colonialism’s concepts and critical positions, especially the
primacy of the cultural and discursive in the work of Said, Bhabha and Spivak. These critics attempt to offer a
reorientation of post colonialism that disconnects it from its theoretical antecedents. We should note that a
significant element of current critical debate centres around the challenge to theoretical models of post colonialism
voices, from those keen to re-connect post colonialism to its Marxist history of resistance. Bill Ashcroft’s book “ Post-
colonial Transformation” conceptualises the ways in which postcolonial writing have been involved in the
transformation of colonial discourses as part of an opposition to colonialism. Postcolonial culture is vitally
transformative as it can intervene in contemporary conditions and effect change.
There is today an emerging field of postcolonial studies in which literature is only one part of a cultural phenomena
that includes film, food, sport, dance. In the “first wave” of postcolonial criticism literary modes of analysis were

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central and most key figures emerged in this period were trained literary critics. The “second wave” considers the
impact of a wealth postcolonial cultural activities that include world music, dance, football. So, postcolonial studies
related to popular culture. We must regard postcolonial representations as both effecting change but susceptible to
containment.
Postcolonialism: definitions and dangers
Colonialism affects modes of representation. The symbolic hoisting of a newly independent colony’s flag might
promise a crucial moment when governmental power shifts to those in the newly independent nation, yet it is
crucial to realise that colonial values do not simply evaporate on the first day of independence. Colonialism’s
representations, reading practices, attitudes and values are not so easily dislodged. Post colonialism involves the
challenge to colonial ways of knowing ‘writing back’ in opposition to such views. The internal colonialism persist in
many once-colonised countries, so colonial oppression is far from over.
The term post-colonialism is not the same as after-colonialism. It does not define a new historical era. Post
colonialism recognises historical continuity and change. It acknowledges that the realities established
through colonialism are very much with us today, even if the political map of the world
has altered through decolonisation. But it promise the possibility and necessity of change.

Post colonialism involves:

- Reading cultural endeavours produced by people from countries with a history of colonialism
- Reading cultural texts produced by those that have migrated from countries with a history of colonialism
- Re-reading texts produced during the colonial period by members of the colonising nations. A central term is
‘reading’.

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 Ch. 2 Reading Colonial Discourses
Colonialism was often dependent upon the use of military and physical force but it can’t exist without the existence
of a set of beliefs that help justifying the occupation of other people’s land. This beliefs are encoded in a language
that colonisers speak and to which colonised people are subjected. So, through a process called interpellation,
individual subjects internalise the values of the society and start thinking of the society in a particular way. The
ideology assign someone an identity which this somebody will internalise as true: Fanon can be an example of the
pain of being represented pejoratively by other people. Colonial discourses enable people feel important. Knowledge
is strictly connected with power. Discourses constitute and produce our sense of reality.
Reading cultural text in the context of colonial discourses serves several purposes:
1) The colonial discourse analysis refuses the assumption that literary texts exist above and beyond their historical
contexts. It situated texts in history by exposing how their ideological and historical context influence the
production of meanings in literary texts and how literary representations have the power to influence the
historical moment.
2) The analysis of colonial discourses identify how much the best of Western culture go fast in the history of colonial
exploitation and dispossession.
3) The attention to the machinery of colonial discourses can be a way of resistance to colonial representations and
realities that remain after the end of formal colonisation.
“Orientalism” by Edward Said
Orientalism is a theorisation of how colonial discourses might operate in a particular historical and colonial context.
Said’s book is a study of how Western colonial powers of British and France ruled North African and Middle Eastern
lands from the 18th century. The “Orient” refers to these places. “Orientalism” refers to the sum of West’s
representations of the “Orient”.
Among other things Said looks at how Orientalism persisted in Western media report of Eastern despite the
decolonisation and the persistence of Orientalism representations highlights even more that colonials couldn’t
disappear just with the independence.
The Orient is conceived as being everything that West is not: it’s alter ego. The Orient is described in negative terms
to buttress the sense of superiority of the West: it is a place of ignorance and stupidity while West is the global seat
of knowledge and learning. In “Orientalism” there is an unequal dichotomy: the West is in a superior rank and the
Orient is “its other” in an eternal subservient position. In introduction to “Orientalism” Said wrote that the Orient
has been important to define the West its contrasting idea. West gained identity by making Orient his surrogate.
Said’s fundamental argument is that Orient is the result from West’s dreams and assumptions about what this
different place contains. Orientalism is a fabricated thing, a series of images that become Orient’s reality for those of
the West that imposes upon the Orient their visions.
They find their way to create institutional and academic infrastructures where opinions and views about Orient
circulate as legitimate knowledge. The Orient became something suitable for study in the academy to creates
theories of development and revolution. This underlines how Orientalism help West formulate their own knowledge
of the world.
Orientalism also made possible new forms of representation and genres of writings that celebrated Western
experience abroad such as adventures popular in the Victorian period.
Orientalist representations justify Western’s colonial domination of foreign lands.
Said also distinguished between: a latent Orientalism (it describes dreams and fantasies about Orient) and a
manifest one (it refers to the examples of Orientalist knowledge that produced different historical events). But while
manifestations of Orientalism may be different, their bases will be the same.
The West is considered a place of historical progress and scientific development while the Orient is considered
unchanging and regarded as primitive. So that for a Western traveler, traveling to Orient would be like moving back
in time. Orient is also considered bizarre, strange, place of mysticism and curiosity for writers and artists: this
peculiarity fascinated and horrified West in equal measure.
Oriental people often appeared in Western representations as examples of stereotypes (like the violent Arabian, the
lazy Indian, the sexually obsessed African) and they became general negative representation typical of Orientalism:
this homogenising is one of the key elements of Orientalism. Similarly, oriental male is displayed as luxuriousness
and the female as exoticised, depicted nude and presented as immoral and a creature of sexual pleasure. There is
also a gendering opposition between West and Orient. The East is seen as more feminized, passive, exotic and the
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West is more masculine: dominant, heroic, rational. Even more, travel to Orient may seems to be going to a place
where moral codes did not function and where they could indulge in sexual excess. All to say that Oriental people
needed to be made civilised by the West which could justify this way its colonial domination.
Orientalism made a great impact so that it was for years site of controversy and criticism. One major criticism
concerns its capacity to make assumptions about those representations over a long period of history. Some critics
think that Said’s discourse on colonialism's totalising and not answering the historical and geographical difference in
real world: John MacKenzie said that Said’s book is ahistorical because he didn’t face distinctive historical moments
and other important factors. But, we have to say that Said trusts too much in the existence of a transhistorical
Orientalism and he privilege latent Orientalism aver manifest. More, Orientalism didn’t stop to examine how
Orientalist peoples may have contested colonial discourses and this is the major failing of the book: he ignores the
Oriental resistance against the West. So, his work is work is in danger of being just as Orientalist as the things he
described by not considering alternative representations made by those subject to colonialism.
We also have to consider another thing: Said refers to Oriental men and women in a certain way, but was it really
that way how wester usually referred to those Oriental people? Sara Mills thought that this could have been the
results of the tensions between the discourses of colonialism and the discourses of gender.

Ambivalence and ‘mimicry’ in colonial discourses

Dennis Porter argues that texts con bring different ways of seeing Orientalism, Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom for example seems to depart from an Orientalism position but then he articulate an alternative way of
thinking about differences between East and West.
Such questions on the stability of the colonial discourse preoccupied Bhabha, who’s writing is often very difficult to
comprehend at a first reading because of his complex style. But, his works is really important and to read them it is
demanded a new kind of intellectual writing and reading. Like Said, Bhabha said that colonial discourses are
characterised by statements which want to legitimate the colonial settlement of other lands and peoples. On one
hand, the discourse of colonialism would have it that the Oriental figure as “the other” and beyond Western
comprehension, culture and civilisation; on the other, it wants to reduce the sense “otherness” of colonised people
making Western understand them through a project of constructing knowledge; but, Bhabha also noticed that
colonial discourses make colonised at the same time “other” and yet clearly “visible”. Using those stereotypes, they
make the unfamiliar something easier to understand and reduce the distance between the two worlds using
Western modes of representation, but at the same time they maintain a sense of difference and distinction. Also,
this is why the colonisers are fascinated and frightened by colonised at the same time: colonised are perceived as
domesticated but also wild and mysterious. The repetitions of the colonial stereotype is an attempt to secure the
colonised in a fixed position but also, an acknowledgment that this can never be achieved. Bhabha’s “discourse of
colonialism” differs from Said’s “Orientalism” because it is characterised by ambivalence and repetition and in trying
to make the colonised both similar to and “other”, he ends up failing. Bhabha describes mimicry (imitation) as one of
the most effective strategies of colonial power: in colonised locations, British authorities required natives to work on
their behalf and teach them English (ex. British in India needed to create a class of Indians capable of accept English
opinions, morals and intellect). Hearing their language coming through the mouth of colonised, coloniser face the
worrying of resemblance. Bhabha invites us to think about the ways in which colonial discourses can break down
while trying to secure their primary aims.
Colonial discourses and Rudyard Kipling: reading “The Overland Mail”
Kipling was born in India, educated in England but spent much of his time in his home country that was also Britain’s
largest colony. He travelled a lot and his work speak often of the countries he visited and the people he met.”The
Overland Mail” concerns the transportation, by Indian runners, of those letters to British exiles in India who are
residing in the Indian hill stations (places to rest). This poem makes interesting remarks of Indian landscape where
the Indian runner move to carry mail, and also the subject is in part the Indian runner himself: the colonised subject.
So, it is one of the most joyful support to the imperial power, with the postal service as a microcosm of the Empire.
We can notice that the landscape is empty, depopulated; we reach the calm of the British just in the hill while India
seems wild and out of control: as Said suggested in Orientalism, where there is Western civilisation there is daylight
but a sinister darkness is otherwise. All the work is based on asymmetrical oppositions: these seems to support
Said’s argument that Orientalism divides the world in two opposing sides. The main characters of the poem are the
robber (even if it seems a marginal figure) that is also an Indian and and the Indian runner. The runner has no other

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purpose than deliver the baggages; only his service to the Empire makes him admirable and important. In the figure
of the robber, we can notice the concept of “the other”: the colonised that exist as “the other” to the West while the
runner is the domesticated colonial subject. But, the runner himself is an ambivalent figure in the poem, both
praised and commanded, congratulated and disciplined; his presence is vital to the exiles but he also creates
anxieties which emerge in the repetition of the speaker’s commands. Read in this way Kipling seems to celebrate the
colonised subject because of the anxieties that results from the fear of his capacity of disobedience.

Ch. 3 Nationalist Representations

The idea of nation seems to have is origin in Western world because it was considered a fundamental part of the
imperialist expansion. But borders between nations are constructed, crossed and defended by groups of people, so
nations are designed by people and build on particular foundations. A nation is fist of all an imagined political
community where individuals come to think their are part of a collective, so central to the idea of nation there are
notions of collectivity and belonging that become the emotive foundation of this organisation. Furthermore, the
sense of belonging is the result of traditions, narratives, rituals and symbols: these elements create a sense of a
shared history and common origins. The flag and the national anthem are part of the invention of tradition in which
all nations participate. Also, the nation have its own history that legitimate is existence and celebrate its present
identity (Independence day in US - 4 July). Bonded to this, the existence of heroic figures of the nation: great
leaders, scientists, martyrs; all them make people share a sense of common past. Same is for some particular places
of the nation that have been made to mean: they create a sense of community, a feeling of ownership which links
the people to those landscapes.
A defining feature of the nation is the standardisation of one unitary language that all members can understand and
with which communicate. It is such a powerful assumption the bond between nation, people and a national
language. Benedict Anderson talk about an imagined community of the nation in the novels: he notes that most of
the time characters are bounded by space and time and they don’t even meet all of their nationals. Furthermore,
often when we meet characters in the novel, they are presented simultaneously even if they are performing
separate activities or we don’t even know about their existence. This simultaneity also work in the form of the daily
newspaper: they provide news talking about events that occurred more or less at the same time but a reader will
feel more connected to an event that occurred in a location close to him (also, Anderson explains that the act of
reading is also something of a ritual in the imaging of nation’s community). Tu sum up: nation make the individuals
imagine their simultaneity with others.
One other element fundamental to nationalist representation is the construction of otherness: every definition of
identity is in relation to something else, something perceived as other. The drawing of borders between nation is
fundamental to make a distinction between a group and other.

The myth of nation has been the most powerful weapon against colonialism: it create many independence
movements and served many of their intellectuals and leaders. The anti-colonial nationalisms promised a new
independence for colonised: many of these movements took inspiration from each other and it happened also that
peoples from the same lands were divided or people from different lands were put together because Western
powers reorganised those lands, so they cooperated in order to establish once again their original borders. For these
reasons settler nationalism were not too remote from colonialist discourses in which the interests of indigenous
inhabitants were not taken into account in construction of the nation. In those colonies where indigenous people
organised themselves into anti-colonialist movements, differences of tribe and cast were suspended but not
surpassed, and those divisions were the reasons why the liberation of their nation against the imperial domination
would be a complex situation.

Negritude was the most powerful way to make those people feel linked: its aim was to unite people living in
different places through a sense of shared origins. It has been influential in Africa, Caribbean and America as a mode
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to enable people feel part of a collective. Today it is associated most at the work of two francophone writers:
Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. Césaire and Senghor found themselves identified as “négres” so, outraged at the
colonialist and Orientalist attitudes held by the French towards their colonised subjects, they wrote presenting the
conditions of being black as profoundly valuable. While colonial discourses represent black peoples as primitive and
degenerate, having no culture, the negritude writers wrote on the laudable qualities of black people and cultures.
Colonial discourses are almost always racist discourses: they evoke blackness as the visible sign of the colonizer’s
degeneracy. In the 19th century we had a hierarchy of races based upon skin colour with the white Europeans as the
most civilised and black Africans as the most savage. Negritude was an attempt to rescue and reverse blackness from
its definition always in negative terms, so it was reconstructed as something positive and valuable. At the heart of
Negritude there was the celebration of blackness but this was much more than the colour of the skin. For Senghor,
Negritude was a project to return a sense of dignity. In pursuing these arguments, Senghor talks about qualities that
can be founded in all people of black African descent, whether they lived in Africa or elsewhere. He wanted to
embrace their characteristic with pride and dignity. Cesaire’s notion of negritude was a little different to Seghor’s: he
descended from the African slaves, he never lived in Africa and could not know it like Senghor. The recovery of an
African past as a source of values and renewal was more problematic for a black people in the Caribbean.
Consequently, Cesaire version of Negritude was about people united more by their shared experience of oppression
than by their essential qualities. To sum up, the long term aim of negritude was the emancipation of the entire
human race, from the sorry conditions of colonialism.

Franz Fanon was an important figure of post-colonialism. In postcolonial studies, his work has been significant as
giving a way to conceptualise 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.
Fanon emphasised the responsibility of writers and intellectuals to forge new forms of national culture as part of the
contribution to the development of the people’s national consciousness. The national consciousness is the most
elaborate form of culture and its construction is dependent on cultural activities while the national culture was the
aesthetic expression of such hopes: they are historical and dynamic things made by those people under particular
conditions. Fanon worked closely with nature and the dynamism of national consciousness; he rejected the nostalgic
celebration of a mythic African past and preferred to talk about the relationship between past and present. But
Fanon’s ideas were influenced by Marxist notions of revolution, so in theorising the resistance to colonialism he used
a critical attitude to the African past and also to the idea of “Negro”.
So, in his work he focus on the operation of colonialism in an African context and he begins with a critique of
Negritude and the native intellectual: with this term he refers to those writers of the colonised nation who have
been educated under colonial power: he does that because he think that in this way, these intellectuals are in
danger of being identified more with the bourgeoise of the colonised nation then with the indigenous. He also said
that we could create an abstract notion of pan-Africa just ignoring the different conditions of Africans in different
locations. Intellectuals have a vital role about it but to create a national culture we pass three phases:
1) the assimilation: the intellectual tries to imitate the dominant trends
2) the intellectual recall his indigenous soul
3) the fighting phase: the intellectual becomes involved in people’s struggle against colonialismSo, the intellectual
needs to learn from the people in order to modify and reform the traditional culture and then create a new
national consciousness. Nationalistic victory is nothing if they don’t secure the future of national consciousness
and transform the nation once independence is realised.
Neo-Colonialism: is the existence of a nation subservience to the interests of Europe, but sup-
ported by the indigenous elite even if colonialism is formally ended. This class is neocolonial, con-
tinue acting in the way colonialists did. They don't govern in the interest of people and the nation remains
economically dependent on the West. Fanon condemned those that he saw as betrayers of people, so he warns that
the achievement of independence is just a beginning and intellectuals have the important role of maintaining the
vigilance.
Ngugi’s “A Grain of Wheat”
This work concerns the achievement of Kenyan independence and sum what we have just seen: a writer contribute
to the forging of national consciousness participating with the people’s struggle; the process of forging national
symbols; the challenge of independence and the danger of neocolonialism. Ngugi’s first focus is on people not their
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leaders: he speaks for the people and to the people. This novel raises all issues relevant to the myth of nation and
the coming independence. We can see Ngugi as a native intellectual that also made critiques of nationalist politics. In
his work there is hoe for a better future for the nation.

Ch. 4 The Nation in Question

Although the myth of nation might function as a valuable resource in uniting people in opposition to colonialism, it
often does so by ignoring the diversity of those individuals he wants to homogenise. The nation is first a Western
idea which emerged at a certain moment in Western history due to specific economic circumstances. Chatterjee
reminds us that the origins of the nation have much to do with the pursuit of human ideals identified as the
European “Enlightenment”. European forms of nationalism are part of the same process which saw the rise of
industrialism and democracy. The sense of Western nations as representing the very best in human progress and
civilisation, becomes a way of legitimating colonial expansion in moral terms. Colonialism can be justified with
recourse to nationalism as a liberal crusade to conquer ignorance and savagery of others. Chatterjee’s narrative of
Indian nationalism focuses on three important phases in which nationalism is derived from Western thought but, it is
transformed and turned to new anti-colonial purpose:
1) the moment of departure: anti-colonial nationalist movement accept that European culture possesses
attributes which make them equipped for progress and power.
2) the moment of manoeuvre: embrace popular or folk culture in order to gain mass support for the elite’s
attempt to take over control of modern forms of technological economic power from colonisers.
3) the moment of arrival: nationalist emerged as unified, coherent and rational discourse. They say that
modern attitudes are linked to popular consciousness and enjoy the support of the people. Chatterjee’s attention to
the problematic relations between nationalist elites and the masses requires attention because of the impact upon
the ways in which the nation is represented. Following Fanon, anti-colonial nationalism can result in the
replacement of a Western ruling class with a Western-educated indigenous. Nationalist struggle tend to celebrate
the activities of the individual members of the elite and do not recognise the role played by less privileged
individuals. All constructions of racial difference are based on human inventions not biological fact. There exists no
objective criteria by which human beings can be grouped into races. Racial differences are political constructions
which serve the interests of certain groups of people. Skin colour has predominantly been the primary sign of racial
difference. Our perceptions of them are constructed for political purpose: race is the result of this social and
historical process of racialisation. Racism is the ideology that upholds the discrimination against certain people. Race
and ethnicity are concepts used to propose a common bond between individuals but race priorities physiological
features, ethnicity tends to involve a variety of social practices, rituals and traditions. They both are not synonymous
but they can be used for discrimination.
Balibar distinguished between internal and external racism:
External racism is a form of xenophobia, when groups of people locate outside the nation are discriminated for their
race.
Internal racism is directed at those who live in the nation but they are viewed as not belonging to the community. It
can result in its most extreme form in the extermination of radicalised individuals or oppression of radicalised
groups.
The effect of racist ideologies is to produce a sense of national identity gained through the exclusion and denigration
of others.
The metaphoric association between woman, mother and nation is familiar to may nationalist discourses where the
nation has been identified as a female. Nationalism is very frequently a gendered discourse: several feminist critics
used women as icons of the nation, nationalistic representations that reinforce the image of the passive female who
depends on active males to defend her honor. Also, the process of liberation is considered an exclusively male
success, which ignores the contributions made by millions of women. The representation of the nation as a mother

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threatened by foreign aggression, often appear in terms of sexual violation. Historically, men and women experience
national liberation differently: women do not reap equal benefits from decolonisation for reasons of gender
inequality. Women’s contributions are too quickly forgotten after independence.
Women historically have been positioned:
- as biological reproducers: their duty is to to produce children.
- as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups: the act of reproduction does not threaten group identity at a
symbolic level. It is a taboo for women to have sex with men of a different social class.
- as participating in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity: they are the primary educators of children.
- as signifiers of national differences: women are icons, mother-figures of the nation.
- as participants in national, political, military and economic struggles
Nationalist representations are unstable constructions which cannot produce the unity they promise because the
idea of nationalists is to convert the many into one. In so doing, they engage with two modes of representation:
pedagogic and performative. The pedagogic discourse claims a fixed origin for the nation and asserts a sense of a
continuous history which links the people to previous generations. It is pedagogic because it warrants the authority
of the nation as the central political and social unit. The people are the object of pedagogical discourse. On the other
hand, nationalist discourses are performative. It refers to the ways in which nationalist icons and popular signs must
be continuously rehearsed by the people in order to keep secure the sense of “deep horizontal commandership”.
People are subjects of nationalist discourses involved in the “reproductions” of its signs and traditions. So, we find
the nation as a “fixed originally essence" and also as “a socially manufactured of a fixed origins”.
The pedagogical representation of people as objects constructs an idealised image of unity and coherence in the
past, but the pedagogical ideal of the homogenous people can never be realised because the performative necessity
of nationalist representations opens opportunity just for those within its borders. Bhabha represents nationalist
discourses as fragile, split and contradictory rather then benevolent and inclusive.

In many parts of the British empire, english was the primary language of government and administration and was
used in the education of colonised subjects. After independence many colonial nations inherited economic,
governmental and educational institutions, several of which were often administered in english. The english
language is a part of this colonial inheritance; its existence as a language of colonial power has complicated its status
as the language of the independent nation. The english language is one of several European languages which has
became a national language in once colonised countries. Yet, many writers and critics have been keen to
differentiate their usage of english from its standard form. One solution: re-working of english under its new
conditions forcing it to change from its standard into something new. Bill Ashcroft has theorised this process that
explores how all language texts are produced and depends upon the moment of textual production and the place
where texts are produced. Ashcroft’s arguments that english is changed into english through its use in new environs
and the newly created english may remain a mode of internal colonialism for native peoples whose language and
values are dismissed as provincial to the nation. Indian literature in english is often read as a national literature
particularly in Western universities despite the fact that it is produced by an english-speaking minority.
This creates a situation were only literary documents produced in english are national documents, the others are
regionals, so that english emerged as the language of national integrations and bourgeoise civility. There are a
multitude of different languages in India, but this remain marginalised if only english texts are considered to be
constitutive of the norms and limits of Indian national culture. Ahmad claims that the continuing predominance of
english in India and administrative and cultural levels, are best described as neo-colonial: in fact, english language
continues to serve the interests of the educated elite and not the people as a whole. English interrupts the creation
of a national consciousness after independence. Some postcolonial writers have challenged the idea that some
languages are not appropriate to certain places. We must never forget to take into account the specific linguistic
conditions of different locations. Indigenous languages perished with the indigenous people while the languages of
African slaves, shipped across the Atlantic to work on the plantations, were discouraged by the colonial authorities.
Today, English remains one of the predominant languages of education and power but its form has been changed by
its users. English language with different kind of rhythms, sounds, syntax and forms of expression. This is “nation
language" and one of its main functions is the articulation of an appropriate register or voice in which Caribbean
experiences can be fully represented. “Nation language” is the language of the people who are finding different ways

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of giving voice to their experiences; 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.

Ch. 5 Re-reading and re-writing English literature

Meenakshi Mukherjee has defended post colonialism has it makes us reinterpret some of the old canonical text from
Europe, from the prospective of our specific historical and geographical location.
All canonical text refers to the canon of english literature: the writers and their work. 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, such as Britain, asserted their cultural and moral superiority. Education is a crucial apparatus of the state by
which values are asserted as the best or the most true. Colonialism uses educational institutions to augment the
perceived legitimacy and the property of itself. The study of english literature became the study of models of moral
worth to the extent to the english literature seemed first and foremost about morality. This weaving together of
morality with a specifically english literature had important ideological consequences. So, the teaching of english
literature, particularly in Indian context, was complicit with the maintenance of colonial power. For many countries
with a history of colonialism English literary texts have become considered as complicit in the colonising enterprise
itself.
Achebe denounced Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the grounds that it proved Conrad was a real racist: he
denounced his dehumanising representation of Africa and that this novel was falsely presented as of exceptional
literary value.
But, generally, the received literary classics can become resources for other writings to articulate postcolonial
positions who use them as a point of departure. So, while many writers reveals how a classic can be guilty of
colonialism, they also make a new way of facing with them. At the same time, very few writers take the easy option
of dismissing classic texts because they seem complicit in colonialist ways.
Postcolonial literary criticism has affinities with other studies of recent years that concerned with reading literary
texts in relation to their historical and cultural context. “Context” refers to something more than the historical
background: it is used to suggest the knowledge in circulation at the time the text was written and the ways in which
people conceived their reality in the past.
Colonialism operates discursively by asserting knowledge about race, gender, differences in culture and colonialist
representation tend to support a view of the world which justifies the legitimacy of colonialism. Reading text, in
relation to its context, involves doing two things at the same time:
- identifying how such contexts are made present or absent in the text
- exploring how the text may intervene in the debates of its day and approve or resist dominant views of the world.
We must not forget that literary text are always mediations: they actively interrogate the world and take positions in
relation to prevailing views of seeing. To read a text in its historical and cultural context is to consider the ways it
dynamically and dialogically manage (si occupa) the problems it raises.
For many post colonial critics, reading a “classic” of literature written at the same time of colonialism often involves
exploring his relationship with many of the problems and assumptions fundamental to colonial discourses. Just
because the main theme of a text is not colonialism and it is not set in a colonial location, it doesn’t follow that such
text are free from realities of the British empire.

Reading text contrapuntally: is one of which remains conscious of both the metropolitan history narrated and those
other histories against which the dominating scours acts. To sum up it have to take account of the process of the
imperialism and that of resistance to it.

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 Ch. 6 Postcolonialism and feminism
Postcolonialism and feminism share the mutual goal of challenging forms of oppressions and are strictly linked. By
using them together we can maintain a sense of tensions and, at the same time, a connection.
The feminist reading practices are involved in the contestation of patriarchal authority.
Patriarchy: refers to those systems which invest power in men an marginalise women.
Feminism: a set of ideas which recognise that women are subordinate to men and seek to address imbalances of
power between the sexes.
Like colonialism, patriarchy manifests both in concrete ways and at the level of the imagination; it also asserts
certain representation systems that create a certain order of the world presented as normal and true; it exists in the
middle of resistances to its authorities.
“First World” feminism and “Third World” women relate to a system of ways of mapping the global relationships of
the world’s nations which emerged after the Second World War. The “First World” is referred to the rich,
predominantly Western nations. The “Second World” denoted the Soviet Union and the “Third World” consisted in
the former colonies economically under-developed and dependent for their economic fortune.
This mapping of the world has remained influential in many discourses.
In terms of feminism and post colonialism, “First World” feminism is an unhappy generalisation that avoid the
variety of feminism and the debates about them.
Feminism in: “Imaginings of Sand”, “Jane Eyre”, “My Place” and “Wide Sargasso Sea”
Double colonisation: refers to the ways in which women experienced the oppression of colonialism and, at the same
time, of the patriarchy. But, we also to consider that double colonisation affects colonised and also colonising
women in various ways but, of course, they weren’t in the same position. The Easter woman is conceived as an
exotic creature, heterosexual male desire; the Western woman, on the contrary, is the one who represent the moral
and civil standards of the society. Western women were also seen as complicit with colonial discourses. For
colonised women, in many “Third World” colonies, Western patriarchal values have had a profound effects on
indigenous gender roles: Hazel Carby argues that British colonies interrupted indigenous familial and community
structures and imposed its own models. This have had a significant impact on gender roles in indigenous
communities, whose established traditions and social systems were broken, sometimes to the detriment of women.
He suggests that indigenous gender roles could be more equitable than the sexist gender stereotypes from the
colonising culture.
Katrak has argued that Mahatma Gandhi’s resistance to British colonial rule in India used gendered representations
for the purposes of Indian women from their patriarchal subordination to men. Gandhi appropriated images of
passive women to promote his campaign of “passive resistance” to British colonial rule, only for the purposes of
breaking colonial authority. Postcolonialism, like colonialism is a male centred and patriarchal discourse in which
women’s voices are marginalised. Western of “First World” feminism has been criticised by postcolonial critics
because of the lack of attention to the problems suffered by women with links to countries with a history of
colonialism. Western feminism is criticised for the Orientalist way it represents the social practices of other races as
barbarous, from which black and Asian women need rescuing by their Western sisters. So, it fails to take into
consideration the needs of these women. The horror about the arranged marriages of Asian. In advocating an end,
Western feminists do not consider Asian women’s views. 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. “First World” feminist is often mistaken in considering that her gender authorises her to
speak for “Third World” women. Feminists must learn to speak to women and not for women; they must be willing
to learn the limits of their methodologies through an encounter with women in different contexts. The category of
“Third World” women is an effect of discourse rather than an existent reality.

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 Ch. 7 Diaspora Identities
British Empire was an international affair. Through colonisation, people voyaged out from Britain settling around the
world in different places. But significant too were the voyages in by colonised people from around the world who
travelled to the major European empires. Often these voyages took place as plantation owners taking slaves to put
work as servants in their homes. The European empires changed life in colonised countries, then Europe too was
changes forever by its colonial encounters. The advent of European colonialism augmented the voyages in ad out of
Europe and the people who have settled there. The existence of African people in Britain can be traced back to and
indeed before Elizabethan times. In the context of the British Empire, there is now a well-established field of study
concerning the writings of those colonised peoples who became located in Britain during the colonial period. As a
consequence of the postcolonial critique of the relations between culture and imperialism, such cultural endeavours
(sforzi) are much more well known to students. In addition, decolonisation had major consequences for the
migration of people from once colonised countries to the European cities. Many cultural texts have been created as
a consequence of these migrations and took the themes of migration and diaspora. The former colonising nations
have experienced the arrival of many peoples from once colonising countries who have established new homes at
the old colonial centres. In Britain some colonial peoples were recruited by the government to cope with labour
shortages. Others arrived to study or escape political and economic difficulties in their native lands; some followed
the family members who migrated before them.
James Clifford noted that the term diaspora ha become: “loose in the world for reasons having to do with
decolonisation, immigration and other phenomena that encourage multi-locale attachment and travelling within and
across nations”. The term once referred specifically to the dispersal of Jews, but is now more likely to evoke a
plethora of global movements and migrations.
It is tempting to think of diaspora peoples as migrant peoples and indeed many living in diasporas certainly are.
However, generational differences are important. Children born to migrant peoples in Britain may claim to British
citizenship, but their sense of identity borne from living in a diaspora community can be influenced by the “past
migration history” of their parents or grandparents that makes them forge emotional and cultural bonds with more
than one nation even if they’ve never lives in. this is one reason why it is more accurate to talk about diaspora
identities rather than migrant identities; not all of those who live in a diaspora or share an emotional connection to
the old country, have experienced migration. The experiences of migrancy and living in a diaspora have animated
much recent postcolonial literature, criticism and theory with the fact that postcolonial studies can appear to
prioritise diasporic concerns. The literature produced by diaspora writers has proved popular in Western literary
criticism. Similarly, in the work of academics the new possibilities (new ways of thinking about individual identities)
and problems, given by the experience of migrant and diaspora life, have been easily explored. Such work has been
resourced by critics who discover a new way to understand contemporary human existence.
But diaspora peoples often remain ghettoised and excluded from feeling they belong to the new country and suffer
their cultural practices to be discriminated.
Naipaul’s memoir “Prologue to an Autobiography”; he came from a family descended from Indian migrants to the
Caribbean. He records an incident occurred in 1932, when Indian labourers were promised the passage back to India
from Trinidad by the government once their contracts had expired. The ship returned to Trinidad and collected more
immigrant Indians. Migration alters how migrants think about their home and host countries. The Trinidad os an
illusion: viewed from India, it seemed a place of opportunity, but they experienced miserable working conditions.
And also India changed into something illusory, a dream. Naipaul’s example help us understand how migration
results in the idea of the home country becoming split from the experience of returning home and the challenges of
belonging which this inevitably creates. He invites us to think about migrant as constructing certain ways of seeing
that impact upon both migrants and their descendants in a number of ways. For migrant and diasporic peoples,
home is a complex idea: they occupy a displaced position, dislocated from a past homeland that can only ever be
imagined but not fully grounded in their present location. Migrants envision their existence in terms of fragments.
Although migrants may pass through the political borders of nations, such norms and limits can be used to exclude
migrants from being accommodated inside the imaginative borders of the nation. The dominant discourses of race,
ethnicity and gender may exclude them from being recognised as part of the nation’s people. For these reasons and
others, many diasporic writers have been keen to point out that home can no longer be relied upon as a stable and

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stabilising concept. To be a migrant or to live in a diasporic location is to live beyond old notions of being “at home”.
Migrants can share both similarities and differences with their descendants and the relationship between
generations con be complex rather than forming a neat contrast. Descendants of migrants can suffer similar
experiences to their parents or grandparents. The position that both migrants and their children are deemed to
occupy is: living in between different nations, feeling neither here nor there. We might think of the discourses of
nationalism, ethnicity or race as examples of models of belonging which attempt to root the individual within a
clearly defined and homogenised group. But these models no longer seem suited to a world where the experience
and legacy of migration are altering the ways in which individuals think of their relation to place and how they may
lay claim to lands that are difficult in terms of “home” or “belonging”. To live as a migrant may also evoke the fact to
live in a world of immense possibility with the realisation that new knowledges and ways of seeing can be
constructed out of myriad combinations. The grounded certainties of roots are replaced with the transnational
contingencies of routes.
The “in-between” position of the migrant, his or her errant, the impartial perceptions of the world of and ‘not of’
every place, have been used as the starting point for creating new dynamic ways of thinking about identity which go
beyond older static models such as national identity and the notion of “rootedness”. One enthusiastic exponent of
this line was Bhabha, that in Location of Culture talks about new ways of thinking about identity born from ‘the great
history of languages, landscapes of migration and diaspora. Bhabha describes these new forms of postcolonial
identity, making slippage between migrant and postcolonial. This text addresses those who live on the margins of
different nations, in-between contrary homelands such as migrants and diasporic people. For Bhabha, living at the
border requires a new ‘art of the present’, embracing the logic of the border and using it to rethink the dominant
ways we represent things like history, identity and community. For Bhabha, the border is the place where
conventional patterns are disturbed by the possibility of crossing. Bhabha suggests that imaginative border-crossings
are as much as a consequence of migration as the physical crossing of borders. The border is a place of possibility
and agency for new concepts and ideas. So, the imaginative crossing at the “beyond” offer ways of thinking about
communal identity that depart from old ideas. Standing at the border, the migrant is empowered to intervene
actively in the transmission of cultural inheritance or tradition rather than passively accept. The migrant is
empowered to act as an agent of change. The subject becomes produced from the process of hybridisation. The
concept of hybridity has proved very important for diaspora peoples. Hybrid identities are never total and
completing themselves remain perpetually in motion. Bhabha suggests that literature concerning migrants,
decolonised, could take on the task of a housing the received ways of thinking about the world and discovering the
hybridity, the difference that exists within. Cultural differences are figured as unrepresented Bhabha’s attention to
the border, the “beyond” considers the opportunity for new hybrid forms of knowledge.
Bhabha’s work represents one example of how critical thoughts had attempted to build new forms of postcolonial
knowledge that are energised by the experiences and by migration. Stuart Hall is keen to conceptualise migrant and
diasporic cultures in terms of motion, multiplicity and hybridity. In asserting a common black experience created a
singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural differences between
the different communities. But, in a second moment, these unifying modes become contested from within the black
community as individuals begin to question the existence of believing in an essential black subject. In other words,
black artist and writers, no longer worked on behalf of the black community because that composite community
cannot be easily homogenised. This creates a challenge for the black community: Hall’s work shows that for
historical and cultural reasons the construction of a generalised black community served an important political
purpose despite the fact that we might want to question some of the assumptions upon which these representations
rest. By focusing on a variety of contemporary cultural representations of black people, Hall calls attention to the
ways in which the generalising images of a diaspora community or typical subjects may not be representative of all
those who would consider themselves as living in a diaspora.
Avtar Brah talked about the “diaspora space”: an intersection of borders where all subjects and identities become
contested where the accepted and the transgressive mix. This space is not some kind of post-modern playground
where all kinds of identities are equally valuable and available as if in a multicultural supermarket. If the experience
of diaspora communities in Western nations may be one of segregation and ghettoisation rather then border-
crossing and cultural exchange than, the need to rethink how cultures interrelate becomes even more urgent, in
order to demolish the divisive ways of thinking that keep us in place and displaced in the first place. The act of

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reconceptualising identity and culture in diasporic is one way of exposing all people to a new sense of themselves
and their communities.

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