"Who I am is a political question, but who I can be is a question that literature can help me to answer." -- Harryette Mullen
The term “Postcolonialism” refers broadly to the ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are represented in the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their independence. However, some critics use the term to refer to all culture and cultural products influenced by imperialism from the moment of colonization until today. Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions between European nations and the peoples they colonized. By the middle of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the world was under the control of European countries. At one time, Great Britain, for example, ruled almost 50 percent of the world. During the twentieth century, countries such as India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Australia won independence from their European colonizers. The literature and art produced in these countries after independence has become the object of “Postcolonial Studies,” a term coined in and for academia, initially in British universities. This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been developing ever since. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said’s critique of Western representations of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book, Orientalism, is a seminal text for postcolonial studies and has spawned a host of theories on the subject. (Definition taken from http://www.enotes.com/postcolonialism/31074.) Postcolonial theorists critically study both colonial texts and texts written after colonialism. One of the primary reasons postcolonial literature has become as popular as it has is due in large part to theorists such as Said, Spivak, Fanon, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, and others, who explain the significance of the literature in relation to history, politics, philosophy, and literary traditions and discuss its place in contemporary society. Many of these theorists and critics are themselves from postcolonial countries and so speak with the authority of experience. Said, for example, is Palestinian; Spivak is from Calcutta, India; Fanon is from Martinique, a French colony. In challenging how writers and others have represented colonial subjects, these theorists seek to empower themselves and the literary projects of postcolonialists in their attempts to reshape perceptions and thinking about formerly colonized people. (This text taken from http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-postcolonialism/mov.html.)
What postcoloniality and postmodernism (and postfeminism) may have in common is the reconstruction of history or rather the demonstration that history is a human construct, just like fiction. Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) wrote : "History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks. ... History loves only those who dominate her. It is a relationship of mutual enslavement." And who writes history ? Those who have the power to write it down, to shape it....The term "post–modernism" indeed first appeared in Latin America in the 1930s but it is generally agreed that, in its present–day connotation, it grew out of the collapse of the Western system of values, the denial of metaphysics but also the exclusion of "others" in Western thought like women, madmen or slaves. It is therefore no wonder that postmodernist fiction in Britain as anywhere else aims at revising the past (often the Victorian past) and correcting the future or "premembering the future" by engaging with the pleasures of anachronism.
“Identity poetics” as
concept and practice is the product of several distinct
movements and moments in the history of poetry. In each of these moments,
poets of a
particular social,
political or racial identity fashioned a subject position apart from the
mainstream, composed of both
aesthetic and socio-political affinities.