Approaching English Literature Postcolonially PDF

APPROACHING ENGLISH L I T E R AT U R E P O S T C O L O N I A L LY ENGL 1310  OV E RV I E W 01 Edward Said's Orientalism 05 Colonialism and imperialism 02 John McLeod's Beginning 06 Commonwealth literature Postcolonialism 03 Three for...

APPROACHING ENGLISH L I T E R AT U R E P O S T C O L O N I A L LY ENGL 1310  OV E RV I E W 01 Edward Said's Orientalism 05 Colonialism and imperialism 02 John McLeod's Beginning 06 Commonwealth literature Postcolonialism 03 Three form of textual 07 Colonial discourses analysis 04 Post-colonial and 08 Homework postcolonialism E D WA R D S A I D ' S O R I E N TA L I S M "More than three decades after its [Orientalism] publication, it continues to be the reference par excellence in studies of relationship between the West and the Muslim world." (Ibtissam Bouachrine, 2014) "There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power." (Said, 1978) E D WA R D S A I D ' S O R I E N TA L I S M This dynamic is the main source of a clash of civilisations between the East and the West, grounded in cultural difference, hybrid identities and hegemonic power. The West's influence on the lives of those who are considered 'oriental' but located in Europe is thus profound but discreet in many ways. For instance, the use of English Language and assimilation to British culture. E D WA R D S A I D ' S O R I E N TA L I S M Said's work is controversial as it causes a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions between the East and the West, Muslims and non-Muslims, Orient and Occident as it explains. Reading Orientalism lead people to perceive the Orient is different and less dominant than Occident. However, the clash of civilisations and misconceptions are of limited value here. JOHN MCLEOD'S BEGINNING POSTCOLONIALISM Offers a more recent background to postcolonial studies. Provide historical and literary frameworks for writers from the commonwealth and postcolonial periods and revisits the concept of Orientalism to offer re-readings of English literature. JOHN MCLEOD'S BEGINNING POSTCOLONIALISM There are three forms of textual analysis that have become popular in the wake of Orientalism: "One involved rereading canonical English literature in order to examine if past representations perpetuated and questioned the latent assumptions of colonial discourse [...] Second, a group of critics who worked in the main poststructuralist thought Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan began to dwell in particular upon the representation of colonised subjects across a variety of colonial tests, and not just literary ones [...] The third form of literary analysis engendered by the turn to theory brought together some of the insights gained by theories of colonial discourses with readings of new literatures from countries with a history of colonialism. Using the work of Fanon and Said, and later Bhabha and Spivak, it became popular to argue that these literatures were primarily concerned with writing back." (p.26-28) P O S T C O L O N I A L I S M O R P O S T- COLONIAL 'Post-colonial' refers to a historical period or epoch - 'after colonialism', ''after independence' or 'after the end of an Empire' Its hyphenated form 'post-colonial' functions like a noun: it names something which exist in the world. P O S TC O LO N I A L I S M ''Postcolonialism' refers forms of representations, reading, practices, attitudes and values. These principally aesthetic phenomenon can circulate across the historical border between colonial rule and national independence. Postcolonialism does not refer to something that is tangibly is but rather denotes something one does. It can describe a way of thinking, a mode of perception, a line of enquiry, an aesthetic practice, a method of investigation. Thus postcolonialism is an adjective as it P O S T C O L O N I A L I S M & P O S T- C O L O N I A L Of course, it's not easy to put aside two realms, and in many ways the term 'postcolonialism' always exists somewhere in between noun and adjective, between reality and perception. 'once colonised countries' and 'countries with history of colonialism' rather than post-colonial countries But for Beginning Postcolonialism and this course we will use postcolonialism when speaking of historically situated representations, reading practices, COLONIALISM AND IMPERIALISM Colonialism and imperialism sometimes used interchangeably but in truth means different things. Colonialism is only one form of practice, one modality of control which results from the ideology of imperialism, and it specifically concerns the settlement of people in a new location. Imperialism is not strictly concerned with the issue of settlement, it does not demand the settlement of different places in order to function. Colonialism is over today but imperialism continues apace as Western nations are still C O M M O N W E A LT H L I T E R A T U R E 'Commonwealth literature' was a term literary critics began to use from the the 1950s to describe literatures in English emerging from a selection of countries with a history of colonialism. Incorporated the study of writers from the predominantly European settler communities, as well as writers belonging to those countries which were in the process of gaining independence from British rule, such as those from African, Caribbean and South Asian nations. C O M M O N W E A LT H L I T E R AT U R E R. K. Narayan (India) V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) Janet Frame (New Zealand) Chinua Achebe ( Nigeria) COLONIAL DISCOURSE 'Colonising the mind' is a process we can call by getting colonised people to accept their lower ranking in the colonial order of things. In other words, colonialism establishes a way of thinking. It operates by persuading people to internalise its logic and speak its language; to perpetuate the values and assumptions of the colonisers as regards the ways they perceive and represent the world. Colonial discourses form the intersections where language and power meet. COLONIAL DISCOURSE Language is more than simply a communication; it constitutes our worldview by cutting up and ordering reality into meaningful units. The meanings we attach to things tell us which values we consider are important, and how we learn or choose to differentiate between superior and inferior qualities. "Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other human beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (Ngugi wa Thing'o in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, COLONIAL DISCOURSE 'Language does not passively reflect reality, it goes a long way towards creating a persons' understanding their world, and it houses the values through which we live our lives. Under colonialism, colonised people are taught colonialist values and made to believe it is the best and truest value system and worldview. To be blunt, the Empire did not rule by military and physical force alone. It endured by getting both colonising and colonised people to see the world and HOMEWORK Please read Amin Malak's, Geoffrey Nash's and Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin's and find the relationship between postcolonialism and Muslim writings. Where do they intersect?