Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C. L. Innes The Cambridge Introduction To Postcolonial Literatures in English Cambridge Introductions To Literature 2007
C. L. Innes The Cambridge Introduction To Postcolonial Literatures in English Cambridge Introductions To Literature 2007
, between the
late 1960s and the early 1970s. The rst Black Studies programme was coordi-
nated at San Francisco State College in 1968 by Nathan Hare, a sociologist and
founding editor of The Black Scholar. By 1973 hundreds of Black Studies pro-
grammes had been established in predominantly white colleges and universities.
Booker Prize, Britains most prestigious awardfor a contemporary work of ction,
was established in 1969. It is awarded annually to any full-length novel written
in English by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth
or
the Republic of Ireland. Since 2002 the prize has been sponsored by the British
investment company Man Group, and the award is now ofcially named the
Man Booker Prize. Inclusion in the longlist and/or the shortlist of the prize is
also considered to be highly prestigious.
Civil Rights (Movement) Civil rights are the rights of eachcitizento liberty, equal-
ity, freedom of religion and speech, and equal protection under the law. In the
United States the Civil Rights Movement refers to the African American strug-
gle to abolish racial discrimination and expand black peoples civil rights, and
especially to the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. from the mid-1950s
to the 1960s.
Colonialism The extension of a nations power over territory beyond its borders
by the establishment of either settler colonies
and
the actor Stephen Rea. The project was intended as a cultural intervention
in the political tensions in Northern Ireland. The company opened with the
premiere of Friels play Translations (1980), and grew into a larger cultural
and political project when Seamus Deane, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney
and Tom Paulin joined its board of directors. Field Day published a series
of pamphlets, and also published the three volumes of the Field Day Anthol-
ogy of Irish Literature (1991) with Deane as general editor; two more vol-
umes, which collected Irish womens writings, were added to the series in
2002.
Globalization generally means the rapid growth of worldwide networks and inter-
dependence, of cross-border exchanges of people, ideas, trade and capital. Jan
Aart Scholte points out that this term is also used loosely to describe a variety of
concepts such as internationalisation, liberalization, universalisation, Western-
isation/modernisation, and deterritorialization (Globalisation: A Critical Intro-
duction (London: Palgrave, 2000),156).
Harlem Renaissance The African American literary and cultural revival which
blossomed in the 1920s, mainly in Harlem, north Manhattan, and is noted for
a dynamic outpouring of writing, music, art and social criticism. Originally
known as the New Negro Movement, it was triggered by the ow of black
American migrants fromthe rural South to northern cities, where a newAfrican
American identity was sought, and was redened, through artistic expressions.
The Renaissance faded during the Great Depression but it had a great impact on
other black movements which followed it, such as negritude
, the
legend tells of human protagonists, thought to be real and historical, and pro-
vides a body of true and ctitious stories collected around them.
Magic realism Aliterarygenre whichfreelyfuses supernatural, imaginaryor myth-
ical elements withrealistic representations of ordinary events. The termwas used
to describe the works of some Latin American writers, such as Gabriel Garca
M arquez (Colombia) and Julio Cort azar (Argentina), and the technique is often
applied to postcolonial writers such as Wilson Harris
.
Metaphor/metaphoric A gure of speech which connects, and substitutes, one
word, idea, concept, etc., with another by analogies or assumed resemblances.
Metaphor has an afnity with the idea of translation, sharing the same etymol-
ogy of to transfer, or to carry across.
Metonymy/metonymic In metonymy, which etymologically means a change of
name, a word, concept or thing represents (or serves as a name for) something
else, on the basis of shared contexts, established associations, and/or spatial and
temporal contiguity. As a gure of speechwhichat once indicates part andwhole,
identity and difference, metonymy is important in Homi Bhabhas
analysis of
colonial discourses, in particular in the articulation of such concepts as fetish,
mimicry
and stereotype.
Mimicry A site of ambivalence in colonial discourse, identied and characterized
by Homi Bhabha
.
Multicultural A term which describes the policy or ideal of encouraging different
ethnocultural groups within a society to coexist harmoniously without losing
their distinctive cultural identities. Multiculturalism as a social policy was rst
adopted in Canada in the 1970s and quickly gained currency in other English-
speaking countries.
Myth Originally derived from the Greek muthos (plot, story, narrative), myth is
a story about gods or other supernatural beings, often featuring demigods or
rulers of divine descent. A collection of myths constitutes a mythology, which
illustrates and provides explanations of the origin of the world, rituals and belief
systems. Recent literary and cultural criticism often uses the myth to refer to
the complete system of signs and structures which a society uses to express its
cultural values.
Nation language A language, or a variant of a language, which is thought to best
represent the national identity of a nation. The term was coined by (Edward)
Kamau Brathwaite
.
Postcolonial/Post-colonial The hyphenated and nonhyphenated terms are not
always used consistently, but in general the nonhyphenated postcolonial refers
to the consequences of colonialism from the time of its rst impact culturally,
politically, economically. Thus Postcolonial Studies takes in colonial literature
and history, as well as the literature and art produced after independence has
been achieved. Post-colonial with a hyphen tends to refer to the historical
period after a nation has been ofcially recognized as independent and is no
longer governed as a colony.
Postmodernism This term, widely debated since the 1980s, is used to articulate a
rupture and/or culminationpoint inthe paradigmof modernismandmodernity
andbroadly to describe the period, mentality andcultural attitudes whichfollow
modernism. The denition of postmodernism therefore differs according to
how one denes modernism and how and when one locates the supposed
rupture. Postmodernism is usually associated with concepts such as the end of
grand narratives (Francois Lyotard), the loss of the real and meaning, cultural
relativism, pastiche and multiple points of view.
Poststructuralism A term used to designate a wide range of critical approaches
since the late 1960s, whose major theorists include Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, though none of these formally
identied themselves with the term. Whereas structuralism identied recogniz-
able patterns and codes in language, literature and culture, poststructuralism is
said to have gone beyond structuralism and to have initiated radical critiques of
language and systems of signication. Main themes of poststructuralisminclude
240 Glossary of terms used
the decentring of the subject, the death of the author, the concept of discourse
,
intertextuality
and Naturalism
.
Sati (also spelt suttee, sattee, sutee, etc.) The Hindu custom of burning widows
alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands. The term literally means virtuous
wife and, strictly speaking, is the name for the widows who submitted them-
selves to this ritual. The custom was formally banned in 1829 by Lord William
Bentinck, the Governor-General of the East India Company. This abolition was
rst imposed only in the Bengal Presidency, but was shortly after extended to
other areas of India.
Settler colonies A colony which includes a relatively large and permanent pop-
ulation of European settlers, protected by their country of origin. As the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica (1877) put it, A colony in the fullest sense of our usage
of the term can arise only where the European colonist may look on his
adopted habitation as his permanent home, where he can found a family and
rear his children in robust health. The diverse physical conditions and dif-
fering origins and circumstances of the territories in the British Empire gave
rise to different forms of the settler colony, as well as different ways of ruling
them.
Slave colonies are colonies built by slave labour. The West Indies and many other
parts of the Americas developed as slave colonies. In the British dominion slave
colonies technically ceased to exist in 1834 with the abolition of slavery.
Subaltern Studies Aproject whichwas begunin1982 by a groupof historians as an
attempt to rethink Indianand South Asiancolonial historiography fromthe per-
spective of the subaltern. The concept of the subaltern is drawn from the work
of Antonio Gramsci and is used to point to those who have been excluded from
the dominant national and colonial history owing to their inferior position,
due to, for example, their class, gender, race, ethnicity or religion. Important
contributors to Subaltern Studies include Ranajit Guha, who edited the rst
six volumes of Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society (1982
2000) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak