Postcolonialism: History, Culture, and Literature

Postcolonialism primarily concerns itself with the study of First World countries.

Decolonization involves reconstituting the native cultures.

Postcolonial literary criticism undermines the universalist claims of literature.

Postcolonial criticism intends to enforce imperial ideology and colonial domination.

Main influences of postcolonialism include neocolonising process and late capitalism.

Postcolonial critics reinterpret and examine the values of literary texts by focusing on the contexts in which they were produced.

Diaspora refers to people who are firmly rooted in one location and live in the memories of their 'Imagined homelands'.

The concept of 'Hybridity' or 'Syncretism' refers to the migrant's attempt to combine the culture of origin with that of the host country, without abandoning either.

Double Consciousness is a major concept formulated by W.E.B. Du Bois, representing the split consciousness of being completely one identity without any division.

The Exotic Other represents a fascination with the inherent dignity and beauty of the primitive/undeveloped other.

Structuralism emerged as a trend in the 1950s and rejected Sartre’s existentialism.

Structuralism emphasizes finding the commonalities within genres to discover universal features in narratives.

The essence of Structuralism is the belief that things should be understood in isolation, independent of larger structures.

Structuralism offers a single unified approach to human life that embraces all disciplines.

Structuralism primarily focuses on how human behavior is determined by cultural, social, and psychological structures.

Structuralism focuses on the interpretation of the individual literary work rather than understanding the larger structures which contain them. (True/False)

According to structuralism, units in language are words and rules are the meanings of those words. (True/False)

Structuralism believes that the underlying structures which organize rules and units into meaningful systems are generated by sense perception. (True/False)

Meaning in structuralism is identified by the identification of the sign with an object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality. (True/False)

Structuralism notes that relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, which leads to metonymy and metaphor. (True/False)