Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 190 views

    Postcolonialism PDF

    Uploaded by

    Geli Gestido
    Postcolonialism can refer to 1) the historical period after decolonization in the mid-20th century, 2) an approach to dismantling colonial ways of thinking and producing knowledge, and 3) a trend in literary studies examining how Western canonical texts portrayed colonized peoples. It can also describe 4) a genre of literature with expected themes like challenging binaries and championing hybrid identities. Postcolonialism addresses the legacies of colonialism and ways knowledge production was used to justify colonial domination.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Postcolonialism PDF

    Uploaded by

    Geli Gestido
    190 views3 pages
    Postcolonialism can refer to 1) the historical period after decolonization in the mid-20th century, 2) an approach to dismantling colonial ways of thinking and producing knowledge, and 3) a trend in literary studies examining how Western canonical texts portrayed colonized peoples. It can also describe 4) a genre of literature with expected themes like challenging binaries and championing hybrid identities. Postcolonialism addresses the legacies of colonialism and ways knowledge production was used to justify colonial domination.

    Original Title

    postcolonialism.pdf

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Postcolonialism can refer to 1) the historical period after decolonization in the mid-20th century, 2) an approach to dismantling colonial ways of thinking and producing knowledge, and 3) a trend in literary studies examining how Western canonical texts portrayed colonized peoples. It can also describe 4) a genre of literature with expected themes like challenging binaries and championing hybrid identities. Postcolonialism addresses the legacies of colonialism and ways knowledge production was used to justify colonial domination.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    190 views3 pages

    Postcolonialism PDF

    Uploaded by

    Geli Gestido
    Postcolonialism can refer to 1) the historical period after decolonization in the mid-20th century, 2) an approach to dismantling colonial ways of thinking and producing knowledge, and 3) a trend in literary studies examining how Western canonical texts portrayed colonized peoples. It can also describe 4) a genre of literature with expected themes like challenging binaries and championing hybrid identities. Postcolonialism addresses the legacies of colonialism and ways knowledge production was used to justify colonial domination.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    Sarah Brouillette

    21L.488, Spring 2007


    Postcolonialism 101
    What does the term mean to you?
    1. Labels an historical epoch:
    - The period after the major movement toward decolonization in the former
    European colonies in Africa and India (mostly).
    - Raises the question, what is colonialism?
    - Long process most concentrated in the 19
    th
    -century: expansion of the major
    European powers into the rest of the world, establish foreign territories /
    settlements
    - Propelled by many things
    - Eg. capitalism - the pursuit of new markets for European products, new materials
    to create these products, new things to export:
    - Also religious arrogance; racist theories about the inferiority of other peoples,
    which in basic terms meant the white races vs. the other races.
    - Colonial peoples resisted this dominance; in the mid-20
    th
    century they started to
    successfully shrug it off.
    - India in 1947; soon followed by Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, a British colony,
    the first African nation to decolonize
    - So, then, our contemporary period is postcolonial. We are living in the world after
    colonialism.
    - South Africa was colonized by the Dutch and the British, as we learned; Canada,
    where Yann Martel comes from, was a British settlement; a settler society rather
    than a colony (whats the difference and why does it matter); Ireland, which well
    talk about when we discuss Roddy Doyle in coming weeks, was a British colony,
    and until very recently many people would have said that Northern Ireland still
    is. So the British have made a mark in all these areas
    - Problems with this idea?
    1. neo-colonialism
    2. persistence of legacies of postcolonialism
    3. new American Empire (Remains of the Day).
    2. An epistemology / approach to knowledge: a decolonization of
    certain kinds of thinking to go along with actual decolonization.
    - J. L. Grme, The Snake Charmer (1870)
    o Painting of a naked boy with a snake, a man playing the flute, and an
    audience of men. Muslim architecture in the background.
    o Spend a few minutes: write down 5 things you notice about this image
    - Painted in Constantinople in the late 1860s, part of the Ottoman Empire (itself
    modernizing at this time what is modern?)
    Cite as: Sarah Brouillette, course materials for 21L.488 Contemporary Literature: British Novels Now, Spring 2007.
    MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD
    Month YYYY].
    Sarah Brouillette
    21L.488, Spring 2007
    - Rigid binaries: exotic vs. domestic; rational vs. irrational; science vs. religion;
    enlightened vs. backward; correct vs. immoral or amoral; etc. [relates to
    characteristics of Enlightenment modernity].
    - Stemming from an idea popularized by Edward Said and his book Orientalism
    (1978): how certain kinds of European knowledge about the rest of the world
    made actual colonial domination possible
    - According to Said, the Occidental world, meaning the Western world, didnt
    represent the reality of the East but rather the romantic notion of the "Orient.
    The Middle East and Asia were viewed with prejudice and racism. They were
    depicted as backward and unaware of their own history and culture. Western
    writers and thinkers took on the task of filling this void that they themselves
    imagined, creating a culture, history, and future promise for them.
    - These forms of knowledge need to be dismantled; here there is some overlap with
    postmodernism, as scholars have pointed out that there was no unbiased
    representation of the colonized parts of the world: the act of writing about those
    worlds was always determined by political interest and causes and by the basic
    socialization of the people doing the writing.
    - Colonized peoples were doing this kind of thinking long before the actual
    postcolonial period, though; so in a way there were postcolonial ways of
    thinking long before actual decolonization
    - ie. Franz Fanon, who was writing while Algeria was still under French rule
    - So, to sum up #2, postcolonialism is a way of thinking about knowledge
    production, and how certain kinds of knowledge about other peoples can act as a
    prop to economic or military or physical domination. And producing alternative
    ideas about these colonized groups can be a very political thing.
    3. A trend in literary studies.
    - After Said especially.
    - He was writing from a position within the Western academy.
    - And writing not about native forms of knowledge produced by colonized
    people, but about the Western canon of literary texts and how it produced
    knowledge about the other parts of the world.
    - So the inequalities of colonialism carry on as a kind of arrangement of the
    production of knowledge.
    - The nexus for the production of deconstructing or countering discourses that
    challenge the dominance of colonialist thought or practice is the WEST.
    - This is an especially sore point for Marxists, who said hey wait a minute,
    colonialism didnt happen because of certain ideas that Europeans had about the
    rest of the world; colonialism happened because people in the West had more
    military might and more money and could therefore impose themselves on others
    more successfully.
    - It isnt ideas that make the world turn, it is economics.
    Cite as: Sarah Brouillette, course materials for 21L.488 Contemporary Literature: British Novels Now, Spring 2007.
    MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD
    Month YYYY].
    Sarah Brouillette
    21L.488, Spring 2007
    - So, in this definition of postcolonialism, it is a movement in the Western
    academy, something that happens after a bunch of people from formerly
    colonized nations move to the West and start writing about colonialism, and start
    talking about Western canonical texts that propped up colonialism
    - and eventually start talking about and teaching texts written mostly by other
    third world migrants to the first world, and sometimes by writers who continue to
    live in the third world.
    4. A certain kind of literature; a brand the reader will have
    certain expectations about before reading.
    - at first writers who were considered postcolonial wouldnt be writing with the
    knowledge that there was such a category
    - Salman Rushdies Midnight Children and Bharati Mukherjees Jasmine
    - now there are expected tropes and themes that these books will return to, and
    there is a niche within the publishing industry for just this kind of writing.
    - Products tagged postcolonial fiction on amazon.com
    - What are the characteristics of this literature? Well find out, but here are a few
    things:
    o Challenging binaries; championing hybridity and border-crossing of
    human identities
    o often about migrancy (the post-colonialism influx of formerly colonized
    peoples into the one-time colonial metropolitan centers)
    o often uses strategies from postmodernism to achieve its ends
    o But well talk much more about this in future weeks



    Cite as: Sarah Brouillette, course materials for 21L.488 Contemporary Literature: British Novels Now, Spring 2007.
    MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded on [DD
    Month YYYY].

    You might also like