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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Postcolonial Theory

Introduction, general overviews.

• Anticolonialism
• Postcolonialism
• Postcolonial Theory’s Interventions
• Affiliations and Alliances
• Critics and Criticism
• Modernity, Transnationalism, and Globalization
• Postcolonial Politics and Ethics
• Postcolonialism versus Decoloniality and Anticolonialism in Latin America
• New Directions in Postcolonial Theory

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• Abdul R. JanMohamed
• Cosmopolitanism
• Edward Said
• English Colonial Discourse and India
• Frantz Fanon
• Global South
• Gloria E. Anzaldúa
• Homi K. Bhabha
• Settler Colonialism

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Postcolonial Theory by J Daniel Elam LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0069

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

There are a number of good introductions to postcolonial theory. Unique to postcolonial theory, perhaps, is that while each introductory text explains the field and its interventions, alliances, and critiques, it also subtly (or not) argues for a particular variety of postcolonial criticism. Loomba 2005 gives an overall sense of the field, and the theoretical relationships between colonialism and Postcolonialism . Given that postcolonial theory has repeatedly come under attack from outside (and from within) the field, these introductions often argue for the necessity of the field, seen most vibrantly in Gandhi 1998 and Young 2003 . Additionally, there have been a number of very helpful edited volumes, each of which take place at key points in the field’s history, that keep important texts in circulation where they might not otherwise be available; among these remain Williams and Chrisman 1994 and Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks 2000 . Because so much postcolonial theory is built on or responds to colonial texts, Harlow and Carter 2003 , a two-volume set of colonial documents, is a necessary resource to scholars at all levels. Young 2001 , an understated “historical introduction” to postcolonialism, is an invaluable resource. For students interested in psychoanalytic or psychological approaches to postcolonial theory, Hook 2012 is a good resource.

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds. The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

This collection, though frequently overlooked, is a valuable resource of essays about postcolonial theory at a moment of alleged crisis. The volume includes essays that argue for the expansion of postcolonial studies to new contexts, as well as critiques of the theoretical underpinnings and commitments of the field. Noteworthy essays include those by Walter Mignolo, R. Radhakrishnan, Daniel Boyarin, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Naficy.

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction . New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Gandhi’s introductory text to postcolonial theory is useful for undergraduates, but it is also a helpful resource for anyone working within the field at any stage. The short book covers the emergence of postcolonial theory in the US and UK academic worlds, its subsequent debates and fissures, and possibilities for its political affiliations. The book is mostly neutral in its approach but does offer critiques of certain postcolonial theorists and theoretical trajectories.

Harlow, Barbara, and Mia Carter, eds. Archives of Empire . 2 vols. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Harlow and Carter’s two-volume work is the most extensive collection of legal, philosophical, scholarly, and literary original source materials relating to European colonialism. The collection includes Hegel’s writing on Africa, T. B. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” and Charles Dickens’s image of the “noble savage,” among many others. This is a crucial resource to scholars in postcolonial theory, which has drawn on, responded to, or discussed these key texts.

Hook, Derek. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid . London: Routledge, 2012.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203140529

Hook’s book is a very good introduction to the relationship between postcolonial theory and psychology (and psychoanalysis). Drawing on works by Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and others, Hook analyzes anticolonial, postcolonial, and critical race theory approaches to and critiques of psychology. The book is a good introduction to postcolonial theory, especially for students in the social sciences, and does a good job illustrating the contributions of anticolonial and postcolonial critique to psychology.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism . London: Routledge, 2005.

Loomba’s volume offers a lucid synthesis of postcolonial theory, both as it emerged from colonial rule as well as within the US/UK academy. The book does a particularly good job aligning the historical and theoretical components of the field. Loomba is also interested in the field’s commitment to other forms of political theory, especially feminist thought. The book is ideal for undergraduates. Originally published in 1998.

Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory . New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

This edited volume remains the most widely available source for many important influential essays that are foundational to the field but difficult to find, some of which are listed here ( Senghor 1994 , cited under Anticolonialism ; Hall 1994 , cited under Affiliations and Alliances ). In other cases, it offers a good selection of longer texts for undergraduate classes, like those by Aijaz Ahmad, Cesaire, and Said. The book also includes good examples of early postcolonial literary criticism.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction . London: Blackwell, 2001.

This sweeping account of the emergence of Postcolonialism not only offers a phenomenal introduction to anticolonial thought, but it illuminates the ways in which postcolonial theory is directly indebted to anticolonial thought. Young also argues for understanding anticolonial thought and postcolonialism as inherently transnational by foregrounding its circulation across the “tricontinental” world (South America, Africa, and South Asia; a term first coined by Fidel Castro) in the 20th century.

Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonial Theory: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780192801821.001.0001

Young’s primer to postcolonial theory is perfect for scholars new to the field. It provides an overview of the field’s theoretical and political commitments, while also demonstrating how postcolonial theory can be used to examine texts and politics. In the guise of a neutral text, it is actually a vibrant defense of the field and a reconceptualization of its origins. It is also, therefore, an excellent manifesto for the field.

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Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature

• © 2011
• Robert Spencer 0

University of Manchester, UK

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Revising an Australian Mythos

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• English literature
• William Butler Yeats
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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: sound upon silence.

Robert Spencer

Competing Cosmopolitanisms

Cosmopolitan criticism, late yeats: ‘beating upon the wall of the irish free state’, j.m. coetzee and the ‘war on terror’, refuse to choose, or, how to read the satanic verses, ‘listening for the echo’: representation and resistance in timothy mo’s the redundancy of courage, back matter.

'This is an exciting and important new work in the field of postcolonial studies, one that is able to offer a significant intervention in ongoing debates around the idea of 'cosmopolitanism.' It has an extremely strong sense of the field and the work that has already been done on the topic and a very clear sense of its own relationship to that work.' - Priyamvada Gopal, University Senior Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge, UK

'Cosmopolitan Criticism...is lucidly-written, substantial and thought-provoking work which announces the arrival of a lively new voice in Postcolonial Studies.' - Bart Moore-Gilbert, New Formations

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Book Title : Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature

Authors : Robert Spencer

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305908

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Literature Collection , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-230-23166-5 Published: 28 April 2011

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-349-31209-2 Published: 01 January 2011

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-30590-8 Published: 28 April 2011

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : IX, 228

Topics : Postcolonial/World Literature , Literary Theory , Cultural Theory , British and Irish Literature , Middle Eastern Literature , African Literature

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Home › Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies

Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 14, 2020 • ( 0 )

Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s—together with such other counterdiscourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies. Postcolonial (mostly literary) studies is one of the latest “tempests” in a postist world replacing Prospero’s Books (the title of Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film) with a Calibanic viewpoint. The beginning of this new project can be approximately located in the year 1952, when the academy was still more attendant to works such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and in anticipation of Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero (1953). In other words, the project of validating modernism, a project so heavily indebted to “primitive” (other) cultures and, directly or indirectly, to colonialism, was on the verge of being institutionalized. In the meantime, the connection between colonialism, modernism, and structuralism has been fairly well established and has provoked a similar awareness of the considerably more problematic correlation between the postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial.

It was precisely during this decade of the 1950s that a great shift occurred. This was the period of the end of France’s involvement in Indochina (Dien Bien Phu), the Algerian war, the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya, the dethroning of King Farouk in Egypt. It was the time when Jean-Paul Sartre broke with Albert Camus for reasons intrinsic to colonial studies, namely, opposing attitudes toward Algeria. In 1950 Aimé Césaire’s pamphlet on colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme , appeared. Two years later, Fidel Castro gave his speech “History Shall Absolve Me,” and Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks . In London the Faber and Faber publishing house, for which T. S. Eliot was a reader at the time, issued Nigerian Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinker , which led to “curiosity” about Anglo-African writing. It was the year the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “Third World,” a term scrutinized ever since. Some see this term as derogative (mainly in the Englishspeaking world), while the term has become a staple in the French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking worlds.

Also in the 1950s, the founders of colonialist discourse, Fanon, Césaire, and Albert Memmi, published their works, which became foundational texts of colonialist discourse some decades later. In 1958 the Western narrative paradigm in which an author-anthropologist fabricates the other was seriously questioned in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart , which clearly illustrates the sensationalism and inaccuracy of Western anthropology and history. The 1960s then saw major developments in the critical formulation of the problematic, with the appearance of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), including Sartre’s preface, which legitimized for many the issues raised and postulated the Western “Manichean delirium” (good versus bad, black versus white, etc.). In Fanon’s book Western racism is seen as a form of scapegoating that permits the West to cling to its power and leads to violent reaction by the colonized. A year before, the Caribbean novelist George Lamming had given us his Calibanic reading of a classical text, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest , in The Pleasures of Exile (1960). The 1970s then saw further increases in colonialist studies with Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” essays (1971 and 1986) and Edward Said ‘s Orientalism (1978), which most likely is the central text in the establishment of PCS. While Said could still deplore that the literary establishment had declared the serious study of imperialism off limits, the 1980s established the centrality of the colonialist debate with its focus on how imperialism affected the colonies and how the former colonies then wrote back in an attempt to correct Western views.

“To be colonized,” according to Walter Rodney, “is to be removed from history.” And Memmi, defining the situation of the colonized, claims that “the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history” ( Colonizer 91). Postcolonial writing, then, is the slow, painful, and highly complex means of fighting one’s way into European-made history, in other words, a process of dialogue and necessary correction. That this writing back into history becomes institutionalized precisely at the moment when postmodernism questions the category of history should make us think about the implications of postmodernism in relation to the postcolonial.

The designation “postcolonial” has been used to describe writing and reading practices grounded in colonial experience occurring outside of Europe but as a consequence of European expansion and exploitation of “other” worlds. Postcolonial literature is constituted in counterdiscoursive practices. Postcolonial writing is also related to other concepts that have resulted from internal colonialization, such as the repression of minority groups: Chicanos in the United States, Gastarbeiter in Germany, Beurs in France, and so on. It is similarly related to women voicing concern and frustration over colonialization by men, or a “double” colonialization when women of color are concerned. Among the large nomenclature, which includes so-called Third World literature, minority discourse, resistance literature, response literature (writing back or rewriting the Western “classics”), subaltern studies, othering discourse, colonialist discourse, and so on, the term “postcolonial” (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not) has gained notoriety in recent years and clearly has replaced “Commonwealth literature” or “Commonwealth studies.” It may even be on its way toward replacing “Third World literature” or “studies.”

PCS is not a discipline but a distinctive problematic that can be described as an abstract combination of all the problems inherent in such newly emerging fields as minority discourse, Latin American studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, Third World studies (as the comparative umbrella term), Gastarbeiterliteratur, Chicano studies, and so on, all of which participated in the significant and overdue recognition that “minority” cultures are actually “majority” cultures and that hegemonized Western (Euro-American) studies have been unduly overprivileged for political reasons. The Australians Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their influential The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) define “postcolonial” “to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (2). This undoubtedly makes PCS an enormously large field, particularly since these critics see literature as offering one of the most important ways to express these new perceptions. In other words, PCS is the study of the totality of “texts” (in the largest sense of “text”) that participate in hegemonizing other cultures and the study of texts that write back to correct or undo Western hegemony, or what Gayatri Spivak has called “our ideological acceptance of error as truth” ( In Other 109). The emphasis, therefore, is bound to be on the political and ideological rather than the aesthetic. By no means, however, does this exclude the aesthetic, but it links definitions of aesthetics with the ideology of the aesthetic, with hegemony, with what Louis Althusser has termed the Ideological State Apparatus, and connected with these issues, it obviously has to question the genesis of the Western canon. In other words, PCS is instrumental in curricular debates and demands a multicultural curriculum. It also perceives the former disciplines as participating in the colonizing process and is therefore bound to cross borders and be interdisciplinary. We cannot disconnect postcolonial studies from previous disciplines, nor can we attribute a definable core to such a “field.” Cultural and postcolonial studies are deliberately not disciplinary but rather inquisitive activities that question the inherent problems of disciplinary studies; they “discipline the disciplines,” as Patrick Brantlinger said about cultural studies.

In a way, cultural and postcolonial studies are what comparative literature always wanted or claimed to be but in reality never was, due to a deliberate and almost desperate clinging to Eurocentric values, canons, cultures, and languages. The closest parallels in the many debates within the field of comparative literature from the 1950s and 1960s are those involving the French comparatist René Etiemble, who pleaded for an open and planetary comparativism that would address questions of coloniality and examine literatures outside the EuroAmerican center. No discipline is unaffected by the colonialist paradigm, and every discipline, from anthropology to cartography, needs to be decolonized.

Frantz Fanon/New Frame

The word “postcolonial” shows up in a variety of journal titles since the mid-1980s but is used as a full title in a collection of interviews with a leading Indo-American critic, Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), as a subtitle to the book by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), and again in a subtitle by the Canadian and Australian critics Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (1990), thus showing clearly the preoccupation with the term in discourse from British Commonwealth countries. Benita Parry, one of the leading critics of the various attempts to come to terms with the colonialist formation, still speaks of colonial discourse. The term was probably used for the first time by Australian Simon During in his 1985 Landfall essay. Max Dorsinville had used “post-European” already in 1974, while Helen Tiffin used “commonwealth literature” still in 1984 but switched to the new term by 1987. By now, and largely due to Australian efforts, the terms “postcolonial literature” and “postcolonial culture” are well established.

This shift in terminology clearly is due to a wave of various postist constructions, such as “postindustrial,” “poststructuralism,” “postmodernism,” “post-Marxism,” and even “postfeminism.” However, it hardly can make sense to speak of, say, South African literature as postcolonial, even though it has many or most of the characteristics we associate with postcolonial literature. Needless to say, the term has a jargonizing quality and lacks precision. Postist terminology in general is to be understood as a signpost for new emphases in literary and cultural studies, indicative of the long-felt move from the margin (minorities) to the center that is also the major contribution of Derridean Deconstruction . Both came into being in the wake of developments since Charles de Gaulle’s referendum and the new emphasis on countries that had gained flag-independence in the 1960s. Robert Young points out that it is significant that Sartre, Althusser, Derrida, Lyotard, and Hélène Cixous were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of the war (1).

Though seldom identical with the other “post”— postmodernism—PCS is nevertheless involved in a broad network of conflicting attempts at intervention into the master narrative of Western discourse. It is part of postal politics and a series of inventions and interventions that the Western post(al) network suddenly seems to be assimilating. The urge of postmodernism is to incorporate or coopt almost everything, including its oppositional other. Even the postcolonial paradigm is not free of such absorption, so that one can already speak of the postmodern colonialization of the postcolonial. To preserve in this multifarious network some unitary sense without falling prey to homogenizing tendencies that underlie most theories, one may assume that the postcolonial critics and writers basically claim that the term “postcolonial” covers the cultures affected by the imperial process; in other words, postcolonial critics inevitably homogenize as “imperialist” critics did before them. The difference is that they typically profess an awareness of the problematics to a degree the others did not.

We can single out various schools of postcolonial criticism, those who homogenize and see postcolonial writing as resistance (Said, Barbara Harlow, Abdul Jan- Mohamed, Spivak) and those who point out that there is no unitary quality to postcolonial writing (Homi Bhabha, Arun P. Mukherjee, Parry). Among the key terms and main figures associated with postcolonial discourse one often finds the following: “Orientalism” (Said); “minority discourse” (JanMohamed); “subaltern studies” (Spivak and Ranajit Guha); “resistance literature” (Harlow); “The Empire Writes Back” (Tiffin, Ashcroft, Stephen Slemon, During); “Third World literature” (Peter Nazareth, Fredric Jameson, Georg M. Gugelberger); “hybridity,” “mimicry,” and “civility” (Bhabha). Generally speaking, the term “postcolonial” is used when texts in various forms of English are explored and when Canada and Australia are brought into the debate, while “Third World literature” is used more by those who approach the problem from a comparative point of view. Marxists also tend to use the term “Third World,” while nonMarxists often accuse them of using pejorative language.

Diana Bryden ( Past the Last Post 193) distinguishes postcolonial criticism by such writers as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin ( Empire Writes Back ) from that developed by the U.S.-based Jameson, Henry Louis Gates, and Spivak. The main dividing line at present appears to be a postcolonial discourse by those who come from a EuroAmerican literary and critical background (Jameson, Harlow, Gugelberger), those who come originally from so-called Third World places but reside in the West (Spivak, Said, JanMohamed, Bhabha, Nazareth), and those from Third World countries adamantly opposed to the homogenizing tendencies of some of these critics (Mukherjee, Aijaz Ahmad).

Another way of ordering this manifold discourse could be via reference to the foundational texts: Fanonists such as JanMohamed, Said, Bhabha, and Parry; Calibanic critics such as Retamar and José David Saldivar founding their discursive practices on José Marti’s concept of “Our America”; empire-ists such as Tiffin and Ashcroft; and Marxist deconstructionists such as Spivak.

https://literariness.org/category/postcolonialism/

https://literariness.org/category/cultural-studies/

PCS is foremost a shift in emphasis, a strategy of reading, an attempt to point out what was missing in previous analyses, and an attempt to rewrite and to correct. Any account of PCS will have to come to terms with the (equally problematical) concept of postcoloniality. Kwame Anthony Appiah has said that “postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Westernstyle, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” (348). In other words, PCS is not really performed by those who have been colonized and gained problematical flag-independence, nor is it the discourse that pushes former marginalized subjects into the center, as is often assumed in the many canon debates. PCS is a dialogue leading to the significant insight that the Western paradigm (Manichean and binary) is highly problematical. In other words, PCS does not necessarily imply the change that Western and nonWestern intellectuals foresee but remains constituted in a particular class of well-educated people who should not confuse their theoretical insights with change. Though it is a correcting instrument that believes in facilitating change, no change is likely to occur with academic debates. Postcolonial discourse problematizes one face of the response to former Western hegemonic discourse paradigms, but it does not abolish anything; rather, it replaces one problematic with another. As Parry states, “The labour of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony” (55).

While postmodern literature tends to postulate the death of history, postcolonial writing insists on the historical as the foundational and all-embracing. Similarly, postmodernism refuses any representational quality, though the representational mandate remains strong in postcolonial writing and at times even relies on the topological. Postcolonial critical activity is “the deimperialization of apparently monolithic European forms, ontologies, and epistemologies” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 153). If postmodernism is identified with the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson), postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism. In a sense it is the only true counterdiscourse we are left with, truly “past the last post.”

In conclusion, we must reemphasize that despite apparent similarities between postmodern and postcolonial modes of writing (particularly in cross-cultural texts by, for example, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Gabriel García Márquez), the postmodern aestheticization of politics only appears radical (a kind of radical chic-ism) but is essentially conservative and tends to prolong the imperial, while the postcolonial frequently appears conservative or is bound to use a conventional mimetic mode (related to realism and its many debates) but is essentially radical in the sense of demanding change.

Bibliography Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (1990); Aija Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,”‘ Social Text 17 (1987); Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (1986); Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989); Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984), “The Other Question,” Screen 24 (1983); Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990); Max Dorsinville, Caliban Without Prospero (1974); Simon During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism,” Landfall 39 (1985); Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990); Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (1961, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, 1968), Peau noire, masques blancs (1952, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, 1967); Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban” and Other Essays (trans. Edward Baker, 1989); Henry Louis Gates, ed., Race, Writing, and Difference (1986); Georg M. Gugelberger, “Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World Literature,” New Literary History 22 (1991); Rana jit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow, The Africa That Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (1970); Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (1987); Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986); Abdul JanMohamed, “Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-hegemonic Discourse,” Boundary 212-13 (1984), Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (1983); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965); Arun R Mukherjee, “Whose PostColonialism and Whose Postmodernism?” World Literature Written in English 30 (1990); Peter Nazareth, The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility (1978); Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978), “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985), “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989); José David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991); Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, eds., After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing (1989); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (ed. Sarah Harasym, 1990); Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Critical Approaches to the New Literatures in English (ed. Dieter Riemenschneider, 1989); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Postcolonialism: Literary Applications of a Decolonizing Tool

• December 2022
• International Journal of Linguistics Literature & Translation 5(12):69-75
• 5(12):69-75

• University of Hassan II of Casablanca

• School of Humanities, Mohammedia, Hassan II University . Casablanca . Morocco

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Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn)

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Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction describes how people around the world have increasingly challenged the idea that Western perspectives are the only ones that count. It examines the history of that challenge, outlining the ideas behind it, and exploring how the histories and cultures of the world can be rethought in new, productive directions. This VSI situates the discussion in wide cultural and geographical contexts. It draws on examples such as the situation of indigenous peoples, of those dispossessed from their lands, Algerian raï music, and global social and ecological movements. This new edition also includes updated material on race, slavery, decoloniality, and the postcolonial politics of gender and sexualities.

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