John

MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Introduction + Chapter 1
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez
Introduction
 The book’s goal:
 To introduce you to the various ways that we
can approach for the first time literatures in
English produced by writers from countries with
a history of colonialism.
 To help you reconsider approaches to older,
more familiar literary works that appear not to
be related to the British Empire.
 To acquire new critical concepts which will help
you build and develop readings of the range of
literatures which preoccupy postcolonialism.
Introduction
 The book is NOT:
 It does not offer a full history of the various
literatures considered postcolonial.

 Pleasenote that the literary works

discussed by MacLeod are NOT the same
that we will be discussing in this class.
Postcolonialism
 Problems of the term:
 The activities often called «postcolonial» are
very different. (Is Ireland «postcolonial» in the
same way as Australia or Nigeria?)
 Postcolonial readings draw concepts from
many other critical practices (poststructuralism,
feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, linguistics).
 There is no single meaning to the term
«postcolonialism».
 But: we can identify the major topics and
different kinds of reading practices within the
field.
Postcolonialism
 We do NOT use the term with a hyphen:
 POST-COLONIALISM refers to a historical
period (after-
postcolonialism/independence/end of
Empire)
 POSTCOLONIALISM refers to forms of
representation, reading practices and values
ACROSS past and present, i.e., the periods of
colonial rule and national independence.
General instructions
 We need to take into account the cultural
specificity of writers when we read them,
 and consider the dynamic reationship
between a writer and the culture/s about
which they write.
 But there are also similar issues that
preoccupy readers, writers, and critics in
different areas.
 STOP & THINK: sections in the book to
review the ideas explored so far.
From Commonwealth to
Postcolonial
Chapter 1
Objectives
 To approach a flexible but solid definition
of the term «postcolonialism» by placing it
in 2 contexts:
 1. The historical experiences of
decolonisation (mainly the 20th century);
 2. Relevant intellectual developments in the
latter half of the 20th century, especially the
shift from «Commonwealth» to
«Postcolonalism.»
Colonialism & Decolonisation
 At
the turn of the 20th century, the British
Empire covered a vast area of the world.
Colonialism & Decolonisation
 At
the start of the 21st century, there
remains a small number of British colonies.
Colonialism & Decolonisation
 The 20th century has been the age of
decolonisation for millions of people who were
once subjects of the British crown.
 We use the term «British Empire» to refer to the
past: a historical period & set of relationships
no longer current.
 But Britain is still a colonial power, and the
legacies of both colonialism and
decolonisation remain fundamentally
important constitutive elements of the present.
Colonialism
 It
has taken many different forms and has
had different effects around the world.
But there are some general features:
 Relation to capitalism: Colonialism was first
and foremost part of the commercial
venture of the Western nations that
developed from the Early Modern period
(Denis Judd, Empire, 1996)
 Christopher Columbus
 Text: Lorna Goodison’s «Reporting Back to
Queen Isabella» (Supplying Salt and Light:
Poems, 2013)
Colonialism
 Theseizing of lands was motivated by the
desire:
 to create and control markets abroad for
Western goods,
 To secure the natural resources and labour
power at the lowest possible cost.
 Colonialism was a lucrative commercial
operation, bringing wealth and riches to
Western nations through the economic
exploitation of others.
 Therefore, colonialism amd capitalism share
a mutually supportive relationship.
Colonialism
 Sometimes used as a synonym of
IMPERIALISM. But:
 «Imperialism» is an ideological concept which
upholds the legitimacy of the economic and
military control of one nation by another.
 «Colonialism» is only one historical form of
practice resulting from the ideology of
imperialism.
 It concerns the settlement of one group of people
in a new location.
 Colonialism is over, but imperialism (the logic that
supports the exploitation of other, less powerful
nations) continues.
Decolonisation
 3 main periods:
1. The declaration of the American independence
(1776).
2. Late 19th-early 20th century: creation of the
dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa (known as SETTLER NATIONS:
large European populations displacing or
destroying the indigenous peoples of these
lands). Connection to «mother country» remains
in place.
3. Post-1945. (India/Pakistan 1947, etc.) Due to loss
of Britain’s status as world economic and
political power after WW2.
Commonwealth Literature
 Twoareas of intellectual study have
come to influence the emergence of
postcolonialism:
 «Commonwealth» Literature
 Theories of Colonial discourses
Commonwealth
Literature
Commonwealth Literature
 Term used by literary critics from the 1950s to
describe literatures in English emerging from a
selection of countries with a history of
colonialism
 It incorporated the study of writers from the
predominantly European settler communities,
as well as writers belonging to those countries
which were in the process of gaining
independence from British rule.
 Ex: R. K. Narayan (India), George Lamming
(Barbados), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand),
Chinua Achebe (Nigeria).
Commonwealth Literature
 The creation of this new category as a special
area of study was an attempt to identify and
locate this vigorous literary activity, and to
consider via a comparative approach the
common concerns and attributes these literary
voices might have.
 «Commonwealth» refers to the (British)
Commonwealth of Nations, a loose association of
nations originally part of the Empire that recognise
the British monarch as their head in symbolic terms
only. It has no constitution or legal authority, and
membership is not compulsory (ex: Ireland left in
1948)
Commonwealth Literature
 The first conference of Commonwalth
Literature took place at the University of
Leeds in 1964 and the Journal of
Commonwealth Literature has been
published since 1965.
 Many of the questions that interested the
first Western critics of Commonwealth
Literature concerned the relationship
between literature and the nation (cf.
Chapters 3 & 4).
 The writers were forging their own sense of
national and cultural identity.
Commonwealth Literature
 Many critics were preoccupied with
identifying a common goal shared
among writers from many different nations
that went beyond more «local» affairs.
Commonwealth Literature, wherever it
was produced, was assumed to reach
across national borders and deal with
universal concerns.
Commonwealth Literature
 How to measure this «universal» value?
 Because the texts were written in English,
they were to be evaluated by
comparison to the English literary canon.
 Commonwealth Literature, then, was
really a sub-set of canonical English
literatre, evaluated in terms derived from
the conventional study of English that
stressed the values of timelessness and
universality.
Commonwealth Literature
 Today this kind of critical approach that
makes secondary the historical contexts
that inform a work of literature is often
described as «liberal humanist.»
 For liberal humanists, the most «literary»
texts always transcend the provincial
contexts of their initial production and
deal with moral preoccupations relevant
to people of all times and places.
Commonwealth Literature
 Nowadays, postcolonial critics insist that
historical, geographical, and cultural
specifics are VITAL to both the writing and
the reading of a text, and cannot be
considered secondary or background.
Theories of Colonial
Discourses
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 They explore the
ways that
representations and
modes of perception
are used as
fundamental
weapons of colonial
power to keep
colonised peoples
subservient to
colonial rule.
Theories of colonial discourses
 Many writers have striven to demonstrate
how colonialism suggests certain ways of
seeing, specific modes of understanding
the world and one’s place in it that assist
in justifying the “superiority” of the British
colonisers. These ways of seeing are at the
root of the study of colonial discourses.
Theories of colonial discourses
 These theories call attention to the role
language plays in getting people to accept a
particular way of seeing. We call those forms
COLONIAL DISCOURSES (notice the plural).
 Colonial discourses form the intersections
where language and power meet.
 Language is not only a means of
communication: it transmits our world-view by
ordering reality into meaningful units.
 The meanings we attach to things tell us which
values we consider important, which
things/people are superior or inferior.
Theories of colonial discourses
 Colonialism is perpetuated in part by justifying
to those in the colonising nation the idea that
it is right and proper to ruleover other peoples,
 And by getting colonised people to accept
their lower ranking in the colonial order of
things– a process that we can call
COLONISING THE MIND.
 It operates by persuading people to
internalise its logic and speak its language; to
perpetuate the values and assumptions of the
colonisers as regards the way they perceive
and represent the world.
Theories of colonial discourses
 The cultural values of the colonised peoples
are considered unimportant, or even
“uncivilised” (and they must be “rescued”
from them).
 The British Empire did not rule by military and
physical force only. It remained powerful by
convincing both colonising and colonised
people to see the world in a particular way,
internalising the language of Empire as
representing the natural, true order of life.
 (Cf. Ngugi wa’ Thiongo on Language in
African Literature)
Theories of colonial discourses
 These colonial
discourses taught
colonised people to
look negatively upon
themselves, their
community and their
culture.
 This traumatic
process was studied
in the 1950s by the
psychologist Franz
Fanon.
Theories of colonial discourses
 Fanon:
 Experienced French colonialism & racism in
Martinique (where he was born & raised)
and in Algeria (where he worked)
 Wrote 2 important books:
 Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
 The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
Theories of colonial discourses
 Fanon’s theories:
 A black person is defined by the colour of their
skin.
 S/he is shown as peculiar, different, an
aberration.
 S/he is defined in negative terms by those in a
position of power.
 S/he must accept that s/he is not a human
subject, with wants and needs, but an object,
inferior and less than human, powerless.
 Fanon feels violated. Identity is something that
the French make for him, and in so doing the
commit a violence that splits his very sense of self.
Theories of colonial discourses
 Black Skin, White Masks:
 It explains the consequence of the formation for
the colonised subject who is forced into the
internalisation of the self as an “other.”
 The black person is everything that the
colonising French are not.
 What to do? You can try to accept the
education, values and language of France (the
“white mask” over the “black skin”).
 The end of colonialism should bring not just
political & economic change, but also
psychological change.
 READING: Merle Collins’ «What Ting is Dat?»
(1992)
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 In 1978 Edward W.
Said’s Orientalism was
published. It’s
considered one of the
most influential books
of the 20th century.
 Like Fanon, Said
explored how
colonialism created a
way of seeing the
world, but he paid
more attention to the
colonisers than to the
colonised.
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 Said’s Orientalism draws on Marxist theories of
power (Antonio Gramsci & Michel Foucault).
 It looked particularly at representations of
Egypt & the Middle East.
 It examines how the knowledge that the
Western imperial powers formed about their
colonies helped to justify their subjugation.
 Western nations like France and Britain spent an
immense amount of time producing knowledge
about the locations they dominated.
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 Rarely did Western travellers in these
regions ever try to learn much about, or
from, the native peoples they
encountered.
 Instead, they recorded their observations
based on commonly-held assumptions
abou t «the Orient» as a mythic place of
exoticism, moral laxity, sexual
degeneracy, etc.
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 These observations were presented as
scientific truths that functioned to justify
the very propriety of colonial domination.
Thus colonialism continuously
perpetuated itself.
 Colonial power was strengthened by the
production of knowledge about
colonised cultures which endlessly
produced a degenerate image of the
Orient for those in the West.
«La Odalisca» Mariano Fortuny 1861
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 The work of Fanon and Said inspired a
new generation of literary critics in the
1980s keen to apply their ideas to the
reading of literary texts.
 They learnt that Empires colonise
imaginations:
 Fanon shows how this works at a
psychological level for the oppressed;
 Said demonstrates the legitimation of
Empire for the oppressor.
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 Overturning colonialism is not just about handing
land back to its dispossessed peoples, returning
power to those who were once ruled by Empire.
 It is also a process of overturning the dominant ways
of seeing the world, and representing reality in ways
which do not replicate colonialist values.
 If colonialism involves colonising the mind, then
resistant to it requires «decolonising the mind»
(Ngugi’s phrase). This is very much an issue of
language.
 READING: John Agard’s «Listen Mr Oxford Don»
(1985)
Theories of Colonial Discourses
 Conclusion:
 Freedom from colonialism involves a change in
the minds, a challenge to the dominant ways of
seeing.
 People from all parts of the Empire need to refuse
the dominant languages of power that have
divided them into master and slave, the ruler and
the ruled.
 The ability to read and write otherwise, to rethink
our understanding of the order of things,
contributes to the possibility of change.
 We need to re-examine our received assumptions
of what we have been taught as «natural» or
«true.»
The Turn to «Theory» in the 1980s.
 The success of Edward Said’s Orientalism did
much to encourage new kinds of study. A new
generation of critics turned to more «theoretical»
materials in their work.
 This was probably the beginning of
postcolonialism as we understand it to day, and it
marked a major departure from the earlier,
humanist approaches which characterised
criticism of Commonwealth literature.
 Emerging in the 1980s were new forms of textual
analysis combining the insights of feminism,
philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology
and literary theory.
The Turn to «Theory» in the 1980s.
 Three forms of textual analysis became
popular:
1. Re-reading canonical English literature:
did past texts perpetuate or question the
assumptions of colonial discourses?
A. Looking at writers who dealt manifestly
with colonial themes.
Ex: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).
B. Looking at writers who did not openly deal
with colonial contents.
Ex: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)
The Turn to «Theory» in the 1980s.
2. Some critics used the poststructuralist
thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault
and Jacques Lacan to enquire into the
representation of colonised subjects in a
variety of colonial texts, not just literary texts.
 If the West produced knowledge about other
people in order to prove their inferiority, was it
possible to read these texts against the grain and
discover in them moments when the colonised
subject resisted being represented according to
postcolonial values?
 Ex: Homi Bhabha sees colnialist discourses as
ambivalent & unstable
 Ex: Gayatri Spivak discusssed whether it was possible
to recover the suppressed voices («Subaltern Studies»)
The Empire «writes back»
3. The third form of literary analysis brought
together some of the insights gained by
theories of colonial discourses with readings
of the new literatures from countries with a
history of colonialism.
 It argued that these texts were concerned with
«writing back to the centre,» i.e. actively
engaged in a process of questioning colonial
discourses in their work.
 The term «Commonwealth» was dropped.
 «Postcolonial» was preferred: it meant politically
radical, locally situated, rather than universally
relevant. Postcolonial literature were actively
engaged in the act of decolonising the mind.
The Empire «writes back»
 Main example of this approach: Bill
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin,
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(London: Routledge, 1989).
 They looked at the fortunes of the English
language in countries with a history of
colonialism, noting how writers were
expressing their own sense of identity by
refashioning English in order to enable it to
accommodate their experiences.
The Empire «writes back»
 English was being displaced by «different linguistic
communities in the post-colonial world» who were
remaking it. This worked in several ways:
 Writers were creating new «englishes» through several
strategies:
 Inserting untranslatable words into their texts;
 Glossing obscure terms;
 Refusing to follow standard English syntax and using
structures derived from other languages;
 Incorporating many different creolised versions of
English into their texts.
 The new «english» of the colonised places was
ultimately different from the language of the
colonial centre.
The Empire «writes back»
 The book made a valuable contribution
to literary studies in the field:
 It shifted the approach away from the
abstract issue of a text’s universal and
timeless value and towards a more
politicised approach which analysed texts
primarily within historical and geographical
contexts.
 But it has also been critiqued.
The Empire «writes back»
3 important criticisms:
 Gender differences. The book neglects gender
differences between writers. Men and women
do not live post-coloniality in the same way, and
this must affect a writer’s relationship to
language. (Ch. 6). Also class differences.
 National differences. The book does not
differentiate enough within or between writings
from different nations. Did colonialism affect all
areas in the same way?
 Is «writing back» really so prevalent? Do all
postcolonial writers write against colonial
discourses all the time?
The Empire «writes back»
 Theauthors collapsed together a diverse
and plural body of literatures from many
places, neglecting to think carefully about
the differences between the literatures
they examine.
Postcolonialism at the
millennium
 Inthe 1990s, postcolonialism has become
increasingly busy and academically
fashionable.
 Publication of:
 collections of essays;
 Guides to postcolonial theory;
 Readings of postcolonial literatures
 (See pp. 29-31 for more information)
Postcolonialism: definitions and
dangers
 Colonialism fundamentally affects modes of
REPRESENTATION. Language carries with it a
set of assumptions about «the proper order of
things.»
 Postcolonialism involves the CHALLENGES to
colonial ways of knowing, «writing back» in
opposition to such views. But colonial ways of
knowing still circulate and have agency in the
present. For example, internal colonialism of
Native groups.
 So: is the term postcolonialism still useful? It
might suggest that colonial relationships no
longer exist.
Postcolonialism: definitions
and dangers
 Remember:
 post-colonial= historical period;
 postcolonial= aesthetic practices.
 Therefore,POSTCOLONIALISM does not
define a radically new historical area. It
recognises CONTINUITY AND CHANGE.
Postcolonialism: definitions
and dangers
 POSTCOLONIALISM involves one or more of the following:
 Reading texts produced by writers from countries with a
history of colonialism, primarily those texts concerned
with the workings and legacy of colonialism in either the
past or the present.
 Reading texts produced by those that have migrated
from countries with a history of colonialism, or those
descended from migrant families, which deal in the main
with diaspora experience and its many consequences.
 In the light of theories of colonial discourses, re-reading
texts produced during colonialism; both those that
directly address the experiences of Empire, and those
that seem not to.
Postcolonialism: definitions
and dangers
 READING in postcolonial contexts is not a
neutral activity.
 How we read is as important as what we
read.
 Rethinking conventional modes of reading
is fundamental to postcolonialism.
 Our reading practices should contribute to
the contestation of colonial discourses.
John
MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Introduction + Chapter 1
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez