Post-Colonial Literature and Theory

• Post-colonial literature originated from former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and India
• Writers often use English and focus on themes like the struggle for independence, emigration, national identity, allegiance, and childhood.

Post-colonial Theory Basics

• Literary theory that examines literature from former or current colonies
• It also addresses literature from colonizing countries about colonies or their people
• Key concepts: otherness and resistance
• Edward Said's "Orientalism" (1970s) is considered a foundational work
• Analyzes how writers from colonized countries express and reclaim their cultural identities
• Examines how colonial powers used literature to justify colonialism by portraying colonized people as inferior
• Attempts at a single definition have been controversial.

Issues Explored by the Theory

• Focuses on literature from colonized countries and colonizing countries
• Highlights how colonizing cultures distort the experiences, realities, and inferiority of colonized people
• Explores how literature by colonized people aims to articulate identity and reclaim the past
• Considers how colonizing countries appropriate the language, images, scenes, and traditions of colonized countries

Otherness Complexities

• Includes both identity and difference
• It integrates the colonizing culture's values, even while rejecting its power
• Abdul Jan Mohamed argues that the Western concept of the Orient relies on a Manichean allegory
• This allegory divides the world into mutually exclusive opposites (West: ordered, rational, masculine, good vs. Orient: chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil)
• Colonized people are diverse in nature and traditions
• They should not be totalized or essentialized through concepts like black consciousness or aboriginal culture
• Totalization often stems from colonizers' nostalgia
• Colonized people are different from their pasts, which can only be revisited in fragmented ways

Resistance

• Built around resistance as subversion, opposition, or mimicry
• Resistance always incorporates the resisted into its texture
• The idea of resistance may carry Western ideas about human freedom, which might differ from the colonized culture's views
• Producing literature to reconstitute the identity of the colonized may require using the colonizers' means of production like writing, publishing, and advertising

National Identity

• The concept of a national or cultural literature is often foreign to colonized people's traditions
• Colonized people lacked a concept of literature, as conceived in Western traditions
• Colonized people did not see art as constructing cultural identity
• The resulting identity is a hybrid creation shaped by the colonizers' attempts to define it

Language and Genre

• Reclaiming identity in a language that was not originally their own is difficult
• Literature may be written in the vernacular of a colonized area, differing from Standard English
• Allusions and tropes may be alien to British culture
• This can make it difficult for others to recognize the work as literature

Aesthetic Norms

• Violations of Western aesthetic norms occur as writers engage with their culture's transformed heritage
• Writers address pressing social issues, rendering Western aesthetic transformations irrelevant
• Hybrid cultures challenge Western notions of order and common sense, including literary forms

Hybridity

• Hybridity integrates cultural signs and practices from colonizing and colonized cultures
• This assimilation and adaptation can be positive, enriching, and dynamic
• Hybridity breaks down the false idea that cultures are monolithic

Representation

• Representations of reclaimed cultures may differ from those of bourgeois culture in Western art
• Culture functions as a transnational and translational strategy for survival
• Postcolonial discourses are rooted in histories of cultural displacement like slavery, migration, and refugee movements
• Distinguishing between symbols and the social specificity of meaning within specific contexts is crucial
• Cultural translation is a complex form of signification
• Discourses of nation, peoples, or folk tradition cannot be readily referenced
• There is increased awareness of culture as a construct and tradition as an invention

Literature of the Colonizers

• Literature also exists in the postcolonial literature of the colonizers
• When people of British heritage moved into new landscapes, and established new founding national myths
• They encountered the originating traditions as Other, a tradition to define themselves against
• Colonies developed literature that imitated but differed from the British tradition
• It articulated local myths and experiences
• Cultures were expressed to an extent as divergent from and opposed to the culture of the "home" or colonizing nation
• Colonizers often absorbed diverse heritages and cultures, adapting myths and symbols from various traditions
• British literature has been "colonized" by writers from colonial backgrounds writing about colonial experiences

Colonialist vs Post-colonial literature

• Colonialist literature attempts to replicate the original tradition
• Post-colonial literature is often self-consciously a literature of otherness and resistance from local experience.

Explore Post-Colonial Literature which originated in former British colonies and focuses on themes like independence and national identity. Post-colonial theory examines literature from former or current colonies. Key concepts include otherness and resistance.