Postcolonialism

Some Issues in Postcolonial TheoryENGL 4F70, Contemporary Literary Theory, Brock
University
Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory

Copyright 1997, 1998 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with
attribution, for non-profit purposes.
As with all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change. If you
have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mail me.

Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in
previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing
countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses
particularly on
the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience
and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people
on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity
and reclaim their past in the face of that past’s inevitable otherness.
It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries
appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized
countries.
This page addresses some of the complexities of the post-colonial situation, in
terms of the writing and reading situation of the colonized people, and of the
colonizing people.

The literature(s) of the colonized
Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness.
There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness,
for instance:
otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every
other , every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and
includes the values and meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects
its power to define;
the western concept of the oriental is based, as Abdul JanMohamed argues, on
the Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding
opposites): if the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the
orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil. Simply to reverse this
polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and identity-destroying
power (all is reduced to a set of dichotomies, black or white, etc.);
colonized peoples are highly diverse in their nature and in their
traditions, and as beings in cultures they are both constructed and
changing, so that while they may be ‘other’ from the colonizers, they are
also different one from another and from their own pasts, and should not be
totalized or essentialized — through such concepts as a black
consciousness, Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This
totalization and essentialization is often a form of nostalgia which has its
inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of the colonized, and
it serves give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while
mystifying that of others; as John Frow remarks, it is a making of a
mythical One out of many…
the colonized peoples will also be other than their pasts, which can be
reclaimed but never reconstituted, and so must be revisited and realized in
partial, fragmented ways. You can’t go home again.
Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of
resistance as subversion, or opposition, or mimicry — but with the haunting
problem that resistance always inscribes the resisted into the texture of the
resisting: it is a two-edged sword. As well, the concept of resistance carries
with it or can carry with it ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity,
individuality, etc., which ideas may not have been held, or held in the same
way, in the colonized culture’s view of humankind.
On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that
to produce a literature which helps to reconstitute the identity of the
colonized one may have to function in at the very least the means of
production of the colonizers — the writing, publishing, advertising and
production of books, for instance. These may well require a centralized
economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a
hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions.
The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a
concept foreign to the traditions of the colonized peoples, who (a) had no
literature as it is conceived in the western traditions or in fact no
literature or writing at all, and/or b) did not see art as having the same
function as constructing and defining cultural identity, and/or c) were, like
the peoples of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different
geographical/political/economic/cultural world. (India, a partial exception,
had a long-established tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a highly
balkanized sub-continent with little if any common identity and with many
divergent sub-cultures). It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid
identity, which is created or called forth by the colonizeds’ attempts to
constitute and represent identity.
The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or
convey in the cultural traditions of colonized peoples.
There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving
how a colonized country can reclaim or reconstitute its identity in a language
that is now but was not its own language, and genres which are now but were
not the genres of the colonized. One result is that the literature may be
written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized
people or area, which language use does not read like Standard English and in
which literature the standard literary allusions and common metaphors and
symbols may be inappropriate and/or may be replaced by allusions and tropes
which are alien to British culture and usage. It can become very difficult
then for others to recognize or respect the work as literature (which concept
may not itself have relevance — see next point).
There other are times when the violation of the aesthetic norms of western
literature is inevitable,
as colonized writers search to encounter their culture’s ancient yet
transformed heritage, and
as they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so
pressing that the normal aesthetic transformations of western high
literature are not relevant, make no sense.
The idea that good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced at a
point in a culture’s history, and therefore for a particular cultural usage
not be good literature at all, is difficult for us who are raised in the
culture which strong aesthetic ideals to accept.
The development (development itself may be an entirely western concept) of
hybrid and reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven, disparate, and
might defy those notions of order and common sense which may be central not
only to western thinking but to literary forms and traditions produced through
western thought.
The term ‘hybrid’ used above refers to the concept of hybridity, an important
concept in post-colonial theory, referring to the integration (or, mingling)
of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures
(“integration” may be too orderly a word to represent the variety of
stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt
themselves to the necessities and the opportunities of more or less oppressive
or invasive cultural impositions, live into alien cultural patterns through
their own structures of understanding, thus producing something familiar but
new). The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the
cross-fertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and
dynamic, as well as as oppressive. “Hybridity” is also a useful concept for
helping to break down the false sense that colonized cultures — or colonizing
cultures for that matter — are monolithic, or have essential, unchanging
features.
The representation of these uneven and often hybrid, polyglot, multivalent
cultural sites (reclaimed or discovered colonized cultures searching for
identity and meaning in a complex and partially alien past) may not look very
much like the representations of bourgeois culture in western art,
ideologically shaped as western art is to represent its own truths (that is,
guiding fictions) about itself.
To quote Homi Bhabha on the complex issue of representation and meaning from
his article in Greenblatt and Gun’s Redrawing the Boundaries,

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational.
It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted
in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the middle
passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage out of the civilizing mission,
the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the
Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within
and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial
histories of displacement — now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of
global media technologies — make the question of how culture signifies, or
what is signified by culture , a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to
distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across
diverse cultural experiences — literature, art, music, ritual, life, death
— and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as
they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social
systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation —
migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation — makes the process of
cultural translation a complex form of signification. the natural(ized),
unifying discourse of nation , peoples , or authentic folk tradition, those
embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The
great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you
increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of
tradition.

The literature(s) of the colonists:
In addition to the post-colonial literature of the colonized, there exists as
well the postcolonial literature of the colonizers.
As people of British heritage moved into new landscapes, established new
founding national myths, and struggled to define their own national literature
against the force and tradition of the British tradition, they themselves,
although of British or European heritage, ultimately encountered the
originating traditions as Other, a tradition and a writing to define oneself
against (or, which amounts to the same thing, to equal or surpass). Every
colony had an emerging literature which was an imitation of but differed from
the central British tradition, which articulated in local terms the myths and
experience of a new culture, and which expressed that new culture as, to an
extent, divergent from and even opposed to the culture of the “home”, or
colonizing, nation.
The colonizers largely inhabited countries which absorbed the peoples of a
number of other heritages and cultures (through immigration, migration, the
forced mingling of differing local cultures, etc.), and in doing so often
adapted to use the myths, symbols and definitions of various traditions. In
this way as well the literature of the hitherto colonizers becomes
‘post-colonial’. (It is curiously the case that British literature itself has
been colonized by colonial/postcolonial writers writing in Britain out of
colonial experiences and a colonial past.)
In this regard a salient difference between colonialist literature
(literature written by colonizers, in the colonized country, on the model of
the “home” country and often for the home country as an audience) and
post-colonial literature, is that colonialist literature is an attempt to
replicate, continue, equal, the original tradition, to write in accord with
British standards; postcolonial literature is often (but not inevitably)
self-consciously a literature of otherness and resistance, and is written out
of the specific local experience.
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