Revisiting Key Debates

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Anglophone World Literature
 Learning Outcomes & Weekly Content


 To become familiar with Anglophone World
Literature and what it entails.

 To revisit key debates in postcolonial literary studies;

i.e. Bhabha, Fanon, Said, etc.

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Anglophone World Literature
 Introducing Anglophone World
Literature I

 Anglophone World Literature is primarily focused on the aesthetic,
economic, historical, political and social dimensions of European
colonial rule from the 18th to the 20th century.

 The study of Anglophone World Literature is composed of a large

range of works by writers from around the world. Global modernity,
modernism and postmodernism are often interlinked. Anglophone
World Literature may also be approached through the prism of
Postcolonial theory. The use of the prefix “post” defines chronological
landmarks, but also a new perspective in the approach of culture and
humans‟ vision of global changes. Postcolonial theory emerged in the
Anglophone world academies in the 1980s as part of a greater wave in
humanistic studies along with feminism and critical views in cultural
studies. Aesthetic representation, forms of political rule and everyday
life, ethics, globalization and global modernity are some of the
questions alongside issues concerning justice, human injustice,
perceptions of the Other, and human rights.
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Anglophone World Literature
 Introducing Anglophone World
Literature II

 In the process of exploring Anglophone World Literature, it is
essential to enhance our comprehension and knowledge of
postcolonial criticism. The theoretical approaches of Bill Ashcroft,
Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Bob Hodge, Vijay Mishra,
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have
greatly influenced the way we approach novels, as well as the
political and social framework; especially, in the 20th century.

 These are some names that you have encountered in this degree so
far and they have all undoubtedly offered key debates in critical
approaches to the study of the legacies of Empire and colonialism.
We will revisit in this module some critical essays drawn from
Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Chandra Mohanty, Stuart Hall, and
Edward Said, for the purpose of directly examining how critical
theory can be connected to literature.
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Anglophone World Literature
 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Frantz Fanon I

 In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon examines
quite early the cultural consequence of colonialism through
psychiatry, culture and national movement. P. K. Nayar (2013)
considers that Fanon presents the postcolonial humanism. Fanon
was an active member of the Algerian National Front and his work
places the emphasis on the racial relations, the psychiatric disorders
of the colonized, and calls for a move towards universal values.
Fanon‟s work is based on Marxism and psychoanalysis.

 In his work, Fanon predicts that the national governments would

assume the role of the oppressor and adopt a sterile formalism. His
analysis goes beyond the antagonist dualism of black versus white,
to suggest a sense of self and of identity in the colonial situation. It
is challenging to identify how through the novels, according to the
perspective of Fanon, it is presented the lack of clear identity for the
colonized.
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Anglophone World Literature
 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Frantz Fanon II

It is worth noting a summary of Fanon‟s analysis; Nayar resumes in an
eloquent way Fanon‟s approach:

“Fanon‟s major insight, in my view, lies in his detailed examination of

the intersection of the individual and the social, the personal with the
political, where the black man‟s neurosis is traceable to his racialized
social, economic and political conditions under colonialism. His
psychoanalytic readings are almost always embedded in an analysis of
the social:
 the family;
 material conditions (unemployment, poverty, violence);
 psychological factors induced by the environment (humiliation,
alienation);
 the crises of the nation (the community‟s crisis in colonialism, the
return to tribalisms, the loss in folkoric beliefs)” (6).
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Anglophone World Literature
 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Homi Bhabha I

 Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) argues
that Frantz Fanon presents an overall approach to Black
Skin, White Masks, focusing on the importance of
indigenous cultural traditions and the retrieval of their
suppressed stories. Bhabha stresses the celebratory
romance of the past and the tendency to homogenize the
history of the present.

 An important insight is summarized in the phrase: “The

study of the world literature might be the study of the way
in which the cultures recognize themselves through their
projections of the „otherness‟” (Bhabha, 42).
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Homi Bhabha II

In The Location of Culture, Bhabha resumes the essence of Fanon‟s Black Skin, White Masks:

“„What does the black man want?‟ Fanon insists and in privileging the psychic dimension
he not only changes what we understand by a political demand but transforms the very
means by which we recognize and identify the human agency. Fanon is not principally
posing the question of political oppression as the violation of a human essence, although he
lapses into such a lament in his more existential moments. He is not raising the question of
the colonial man in the universalist terms of the liberal – humanist […] Fanon‟s question is
addressed not to such a unified notion of history nor to such a unitary concept of man. It is
one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely
historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative or realistic perspective that
provides a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of
the individual or collective psyche. Such a traditional sociological alignment of Self and
Society or History and Psyche is rendered questionable in Fanon‟s identification of the
colonial subject who is historicized in the heterogeneous assemblage of the texts of history,
literature, science and myth. The colonial subject is always „underdetermined‟ from
without, Fanon writes. It is through image and fantasy – those orders that figure
transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious – that Fanon most proudly
evokes the colonial condition.” (42, 43)

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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Homi Bhabha III

 According to Homi K. Bhabha, the myth of Man and society is undermined in the colonial
situation. The locals are enslaved by their inferiority and the white man by his superiority. Fanon
asks for a psychoanalytic explanations in order to explain the colonizer‟s avowed ambition to
civilize or modernize the natives.

 “‟What is often called the black soul is a white man‟s artefact,‟ Fanon writes. This transference
speaks otherwise. It reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself: its split
representations stage the division of the body and soul that enacts the artifice of identity, a
division that cuts across the fragile skin – black and white – of individual and social authority‟‟
(Bhabha, 44).

 Bhabha analyses the fantasy of the native to occupy the master‟s place and at the same time keep
the slave‟s avenging anger. There is not a clean division between black skin and white masks. The
essence concerns the difference of personal identity, the psychoanalytic problem of identification,
and the coincidence and non-coincidence of individual interest or instinct and general will.

 Fanon‟s approach reveals the unconscious fantasy, the phantoms of racist fear and hate, the
ambivalences of identification to antagonistic identities of political alienation and discrimination,
the masquerade of Western Man towards an existentialist humanism that is banal and beatific.
The analysis concerns the questions of mask and identity, freedom and impression of ourselves‟
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Chandra Talpande Mohanty I

 In her famous paper „‟Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses‟‟ (1984) Chandra Talpande Mohanty expresses her
implication in the feminist theory and examines Western feminist discourse.
Women are presented in scientific, legal discourse, as the Other. In the
Western culture, one identifies the women as historical subjects and their
representation in hegemonic discourse.

 “In other words, only in so far as "Woman/Women“ and “the East“ are
defined as Others, or as peripheral, that (Western) Man/Humanism can
represent him/itself as the centre. It is not the centre that determines the
periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the centre”
(Mohanty 353).

 Chandra Talpade Mohanty‟s analysis focuses on the fact that women are
usually considered as a coherent group having the same interests and
desires universally and cross-culturally, their methodological approach is
applied universally, and there lies the construction of the „average third
world woman.‟
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Chandra Talpande Mohanty II

 “Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in
concrete, historical and political practice and analysis”(Mohanty339).

 Chandra Talpade Mohanty explains that what unifies women globally is the
desire to withstand oppression in all its shapes and forms, always
considering class, culture, and/or geographical borders. She advises that to
achieve feminist solidarity one needs to avoid reference to singular,
monolithic, and generic terms, such as „Third World Woman‟, because it
leads to another form of oppression. She also argues that Western feminism
cannot escape the economic and political privileges of the „First World‟ and
should therefore be cautious not to replicate the power relations between
them and the „Third World‟. Therefore, when Western feminist scholars
analyse and interpret the figure of the so-called „Third World Woman‟ they
should do so with caution. Finally, overgeneralizations describing Western
women as liberated, educated, etc. (and „Third World Women‟ as silenced
victims, etc.) are best avoided, considering that the struggle of women still
continues in the West, where serious social injustice is still at large (i.e.
domestic violence, sexual abuse, etc.).
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Edward Said I

 Edward Said (1935-2003) was one of the most prominent and
controversial intellectuals of his time. His work Orientalism
(1978) has marked the field of postcolonial studies and his
writings focus on the material contexts of the test and the critic.

 Being a distinguished academic and American citizen, Edward

Said explores the ways in which the West exerted power over
the oriental world. Even the fact that his own identity was
Palestinian, demonstrated the paradox in the construction of
identity in the modern world. His work Orientalism (1978) and
his overall approach, demonstrate the nature of identity in a
globalized world framework. According to this approach, texts
maintain a wide web of affiliations with the world.
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Edward Said II

 One of the main postcolonial criticism and theory texts in the 20th century is
Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said, through the theory of Foucault. The
author exploits the notion of humanistic critique, as he defines it, to open up
the fields of struggle in order to stop the imprisoning labels and
antagonistic debate that inhibit understanding and intellectual exchange,
away from reductive polarizations.

 The main concept is that, what is called Orient, is actually a European

invention linked with exotic beings and landscapes along with remarkable
experiences. The image of the Orient to Western Europe is its cultural
contestant and the place of recurring image of the Other. Edward Said
claims that the notion of orientalism survives even implicitly in
anthropological, historic, philological, and social studies. The notion of
orientalism penetrates the work of novelists, poets, political theorists, and
administrators. Thus, European culture gained its strength and identity
against the Orient, and as a consequence, orientalism is conceived as a
cultural and political fact.
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 Critical Debates in Postcolonial Literary
Studies: Edward Said III

 According to Edward Said, the study of Orientalism concerns the
rethinking over the centuries considered chasm between the West and the
East. The aim is not to deny the cultural difference, but to put under
question the hostility, the opposed essences, and the adversarial
knowledge. This development in the postcolonial studies invites us to
revisit the cultural works and to re-examine the binary dialectic between
the East and the West. This approach calls for reformulation of historical
and social experiences that considered the Orient as irrational and
primitive in comparison to the Eurocentric values.

 Through this approach, the literary text is composed of political, social and
cultural aspects constructing its worldliness. Edward Said puts forward the
struggle between different and contesting representations, introducing a
new approach in the relation between texts and our view of the world. His
work Orientalism presents the way in which texts construct the Oriental
reality.

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 The Empire Writes Back I


 The term postcolonial suggests the notion of national culture
after the departure of imperial power and has been used to
distinguish between the periods before and after the
Independence of a country (colonial versus postcolonial). In The
Empire Writes Back (1989), Bill Ashcroft et al. use the term
„postcolonial‟ to indicate the cultural process, starting from the
colonisation process until nowadays, considering also that it is
the most appropriate term to describe the new cross-cultural
criticism and its effects on contemporary literature.

 This notion concerns the literatures of African countries,

Australia, Canada, Bangladesh, India, Caribbean Countries,
Pakistan, etc. The literature of the United States, due to its
current position and geopolitical role, has not been integrated
in this notion.
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 The Empire Writes Back II


 Postcolonial literatures have special distinctive regional
characteristics and emphasize their differences in comparison
to the imperial centre. During colonisation there was an
immersion in the imported culture, an attempt to be more
„English than the English‟ while in the postcolonial society the
tendency was to separate the study of language from the study
of literature. The English language in the peripheries was
shaped by the oppressive discourse of power as a variety of
regional usages in comparison to a normative code.

 Ashcroft et al. present the example of the Indian writer Raja

Rao and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe who have to
overcome the gap of the linguistic displacement of their pre-
colonial language. The English language is used to describe the
physical and geographical context on their lands.
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 The Empire Writes Back III


 The complexities and the cultural provenance of postcolonial writing lead
to the emergence of postcolonial literary theory, as the theories of style and
genre, universal features of language, value systems, as questioned by the
works in postcolonial writing. There is the need to describe the differences
within the cultural traditions as well as the common features shared.

 It is therefore imperative to identify the range and nature of postcolonial

works, and to present in a detailed way the theories presented in order to
analyse the specific traits of these works. The literature, philosophy, and
art in postcolonial societies are neither adaptations nor continuations of
European works.

 According to Ashcroft (233) there has been a dismantling and postcolonial

subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses in the
framework of a dialectical relationship between the grafted European
cultural systems and an indigenous ontology recreating an independent
local identity.
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 Week 1 Tasks


Once you complete studying Week 1 – Topic Overview
please also address the following:

 Read the provided Primary texts, taking notes;

 Go over the provided Further reading material;
 Participate in the weekly Discussion Forum,
exchanging thoughts and ideas with classmates;
 Watch the related videos.

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 References


Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literatures. Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, 1986. Originally
published 1952.

Nayar, P. K. Frantz Fanon. Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.

Talpade Mohanty, Chandra. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship

and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3, 1984, pp. 333-358.
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