Literatura Postcolonial

Post-colonial studies: The key concepts. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.

Subaltern: other, not in power.

Close reading analysis:

1. Read the piece on your own, without external sources.

2. Underline the fragments that you consider important.
3. Write down the comments or questions that come to your mind.

Narrative texts: author, period, type of text (novel, short story…), title and book cover,
structure opening lines, location and time, story and plot, narrative pace (flashbacks, flash-
forwards…), themes, characters, narrator, POV (intellectual stance of the author), tone/mood,
language/style (formal, vernacular, dialogue), rhetorical figures, closing lines, meanings and
interpretations, what does the text say to you in particular.

Poetry: author, literary school and period, type of poem, title, structure, opening lines, location
and time, themes, rhyme rhythm and meter, POV, tone/mood, rhetorical figures closing lines,
meanings/interpretation, what does it tell you… NO narrator, poetic voice.

Free verse: No fixed meter.

Blank verse: No fixed rhyme or no rhyme pattern at all.

Tongue and language, its importance in shaping a person as does a mother and the
implications of it being a non-native language, the question what is your mother tongue,
English or another.

Aliteration of the M sound, anaphora, epiphora, enjambment (encabalgamiento), play on

words.

Power: something that a force exerts over something else. Every time there is a power, there is
a resistance.

Cultural Hegemony: using power in such a way that the colonized is grateful for it.

Triangular slave trade.

Why an Empire?  Resources, economic growth, cultural hegemony, military power, poverty.

M. Nourbese Philip: Afro-Caribbean. Main issue of the poem, the relation with the English
language. She criticizes the fact that slaves were forced to renounce their original language in
favor of the language of the oppressor. The Black Atlantic.

Philippe tries to voice the trauma of colonization. The titles of her works underline the
importance of voice. Philip’s ambivalence towards the English language. Idea of linguistic
appropriation: conveying in a language that is not one’s own your own spirit.

Binarism: division of the world in binaries.

Official languages in the Caribbean: Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Haitian Creole and
Papiamento.
Ironic title: Discourse on the Logic of Language: attacks Logic, the binary conception of the
colonizer, insistence on language and its ambivarence.

Colonial discourses justifying slavery.

Intrahistory: The history of ordinary people. Hisrory vs herstory, Grand Recit vs Petites
Histoires.

For French Feminists like Helene Cixous or Julia Kristeva, there are two realms of language:

1. Semiotic: the pre-linguistic sphere, which is related to the mother-child bond, the
body, disorder, matrilineality, etc.
2. Symbolic: Tied to the linguistic sphere, the law of the father, reason, order,
patriarchy…

They argued about bringing both aspects together.

Themes: Colonialism (edicts), motherhood, the poetic voice’s ambivalent relationship with the
English (it’s both father and mother tongue) language, origins (what is my mother tongue),
conflict with English, importance of the mother (annotation in the margins, constant mention
of mothers, related to the separation of families during slavery) multiculturalism (different
forms of English, presence of English tradition).

Rhetorical figures: Alliteration, enjambment, anaphora, mesodiplosis, epiphora,

personification of the tongue, parallelism, antithesis, chiasmus (a dumb tongue, tongue dumb),
rhetorical questions, irony, play on words, oxymoron, lowercasing, (use of English using a
lower case). Allusion to dub poetry in dub-tongue. Parody of legal documents and discourses.
Use of both free and black verse.

Rhetorical figures

Play on words. remembers and re-members. Play of different fonts (different lyrical voices).
Accumulation. Alliteration of the sound /s/. Heart races (race) Anaphora. Parallelism.
Rhetorical question. Personification (the smallest cell remembers; heart races). Epanadiplosis

Metaphors: the title (universal humanity), home (Africa and memories), Sappho’s tremble
(verses), the again and again / of forget (the repetition of racist crimes that are punished that
are pushed into oblivion).

Allegory: the whole poem is an allegory of colonization: persecuting African people, depriving
them of their language, torturing them.

Allusion: to the end of the Spanish-Aztec war. English colonization became more prominent
then.

Themes

Multicolonization (different languages). - Universal Grammar. The man (opressor) vs The

victims (a native, a Black, a woman, a child). Different discourses. Scientific point of view vs
emotional point of view. Language as having a voice. Feminism. White-skinned. The body. The
fact that language is innate. Eurocentrism. Violence - shooting. Memory. The importance of
one’s lived experience, as well as the body. The limits of language and its discourses. Ordeal
(calvario). The loss of a language and its reinvention. Hierarchical inversion. The continuity of
racial crimes and their oblivion. Rape. Woman’s culture.
Point of view and tone

Still hopeful about making a language yours. Meanings and interpretations. Rewriting history.
Sappho. The mother of all poets. Lesbian poets. A criticism of binarism.

God’s word: Christ and logos. Implies that the world is ruled by the reason of man
(phalogocentrism).

Linguistic appropiration: “conveying in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is not
one’s own”. Quote by Raja Rao.

Artistic discourse filling in the gaps left by historians: feeling, atmosphere, description of the
ordeals…

Academia.edu: website for free articles.

Fish-haired woman (Merlinda Bobis): History takes place in Luzon, northern Philippines. The
Philippines are considered a part of the “global south”. “Total War” (1987-89). As the rain
washes the corpses to the river, lemongrass grows and attracts fireflies, which scare away the
fish that the military needs to survive.

Subaltern memories: oral narratives by individuals whom the ruling classes consider unable to
produce historical records. Diaries, novels, films, etc. produced by those on the other side,
subaltern to official memory. Considered to show an emotional conception of historical
accounts.

Historical discourse as a literary genre: Historians like Mercedes Yusta urge historians to
incude memories and testimonies.

Other attempts to contest historical discourses: Testimonio, feminist replies to the War Story
paradigm, ethical witnessing and postmemory (how the children of the traumaticed relate to
that trauma).

Characters: Estrella, Tony, Ramón, Pay Inio, the magical nature that works as an ally of the
defeated in order to give the dead a proper burial.

Reification: Use of an object to refer to people (tinsel to refer to military men).

Tony: Initially reifies Estrella but when he finds out the details of her past he has a mental
breakdown. Tony is an unbeliever and cannot comprehend Estrella’s task. He tries to bring her
with him to Australia. He is later killed by the soldiers and Estrella tells this story in his honor.

Estrella: subaltern protagonist, woman, non-white, refers to herself as a freak of nature. She is
on the boundary of reality and magic and mediates between the villagers and the military. The
villagers worship her almost like a saint or virgin. She doesn’t have a heart of stone, she suffers
but tends not to show it.

Themes: nature, love, care, gender violence, trauma, war, memory, history, the ethics of care.
The story puts forward care relationships as an alternative way to fight against injustice. It
praises women as caretakers and how men can and should be caretakers too in the case of
Estrella and Tony.

Genre: Magic realism. Defies the binary opposition between reality and fantasy.
Orientalism: Writing, active, meaning that it changes the reality of the people it affects.

Representation vs Performance: Agency. Performance has agency.

Epistemology: refers to knowledge and the different ways we have of knowing the world.

Use “quotation” instead of “quote”. In line/On page.

Passage (page 20)

1. Rhetorical figures in the passage from page 20.

Aliteration of the sounds b and m. Personifications: hum of memory, coaxing a fish. Scalp
pushing out and stretching. Metaphors: rivers, Winter love in the tropics, blue fingers.
Sinesthesia: Seeing the breath. Oxymoron: Winter love. Simile, hyperbole, symbol: as luminous
as the moon on the river.

His chill half-ebbed into… - Metaphor of sex beyond just physical contact, there is a mutual
understanding-

3. To Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths, decolonization is the process of revealing and

dismantling colonialist power in all its forms”. What instances of power does Bobis
decolonize and how.

The story criticizes several forms of colonization in several forms: the m16 rifle, gender
hierarchy, Spanish words… Specially mental colonization. Patriarchal violence, intellectual
hierarchy, economic colonization (in Australia there are choices but in Iraya they only eat what
the river can provide).

The story also emphasizes several forms of fighting against colonization: faith, magic,
spirituality (the beliefs that the village maintains), love, breaking gender stereotypes. The body
is a symbol of union, it joins the living and the dead and is also her protector. The soldiers
don’t kill her because they need her to perform this task.

How do you interpret the story’s ending?

The soldiers discover the nature of her hair and what exactly makes it grow. Now they know
when she is being hurt by painful memories. These memories manifest her suffering to the rest
of the world by making her hair grow and the soldiers become aware of this and will possibly
exploit this in the future, which is why she describes the memories as “betraying her”.
However, the fact that she says that from that point onward she would “never leave her heart
on the shore again” could be seen as a vow to herself, as her promise to be open with her
feelings and drop the façade of the Fish-haired Woman who doesn’t cry, thus regaining her
identity as Estrella.

How will the story continue? Write 5 to 10 lines.

Estrella will continue to live and reclaim her identity as Estrella and not the Fish-haired woman.
Her hair becomes physical evidence of her suffering for the people who might not believe her.
She will continue to take bodies out of the water, and she will suffer, but not quietly. She will
also live to tell her story. Once the war is over, her hair will remain as proof of what has
happened, instead of being a tool for others to use.
Can the subaltern speak?

History is written by the victors. If no one listens to the oppressed, do they have a voice?

Difference between subject and individual: for Atthusser, a subject is an individual with
ideology able to generate a discourse.

Orientalism: The processes by which the Orient was, and continues to be, constructed in
European thinking. Scholars and popular thought. As well as a form of academic discourse it
was a style of thought based on “the ontological and epistemological distinction between the
Orient and the Occident”.

Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient: “dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, setting it, ruling over
it… In short, as a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
orient.

Orientalist discourse, for Said, is more valuable as a sign of the power exerted by the West
over the Orient than a “true” discourse about the Orient.

Althusser: Ideological and state apparatuses: all those that have an impact on the subject. EX:
education, police, the military…

“The White Man’s Burden: It requests the US to gain control of the Philippines by the force of
colonialism. It is a moral obligation for Western (White) countries to civilize non-white
cultures. Civilizing mission. Manifest destiny. Progress, Otherness, Chauvinistic nationalism.

Summary: Orientalism constructs binary oppositions, it is a Western fantasy, institutional,

literary and creative, it is legitimating and self-perpetuating, it produces stereotypes of the
orient as timeless, strange, feminine, degenerate.

Ambivalence and mimicry in colonial discourses: Homi Bhabha: the “colonized subject” is a
radically strange creature whose bizarre and eccentric nature is the cause of curiosity and
concern (yet attempts to domesticate it and lessen its radical otherness).

Sahrawi Poets

Situation on the Western Sahara: Occupied by Morocco in the 1970s after Spain left the
territory. Most of the Sahrawi population live under Moroccan occupation, in refugee camps
or in exile in other countries like Spain, Cuba or Algeria.

Most Sahrawi are of Berber origin and speak a variant from Arabic called Hassaniya and
Spanish. Before Spain occupied it, the Sahrawi were nomadic shepherds and later worked in
the phosphate mines of the territory.

1934: Officially occupied by Spain.

1963: Spain discovers what was, at the time, the greatest phosphate reserve in the world.

1973: Creation of the Frente Polisario to fight for the Sahara’s independence.

1975: Spain left Western Sahara and the territory was occupied by Western Sahara and
Mauritania.

1976: Morocco’s army occupies WS illegally and the Frente Polisario proclaims independence.
1980-1987: Moroccans build a wall separating the territory of the SADR and the occupied
territory.

1991: The war is supposedly ended, but the Sahrawi continue to suffer under Moroccan
oppression, who do not allow demonstrations of any kind.

Importance of family and oral tradition, but nowadays 90% of the population is literate. They
receive university education mainly in Cuba, Algeria and Spain, but they still lack many basic
amenities and healthcare.

Haul: “Art of the word”. A form of music that uses few instruments. An important mark of
Sahrawi identity.

Konstantina Isidoros: The Jaima (tent) is both a domestic and political space, where woman
count as much as men.

Sahrawi women and feminism: European women have to have a non-eurocentric perspective.
Woman are not an homogeneous group, so intersectionality is important (taking into account,
race, religion, sexual orientation, social class…).

Poetry of resistance: Sahrawi poetry oozes with political activism and spirituality. 2 main
themes:

1. Resistance to the oppression of being occupied and exiled.

2. Defense of their cultural and political identity.

Spanish, and the fact that they were occupied by Spain is also used by the Sahrawi people as a
fact that reinforces their own identity against the Moroccan attempts to claim them as their
own. Importance of the use of virtual platforms to disseminate their poetry.

Influences: poets like Byron, Shelley or José Martí.

Children of the Sun and Wind: Oxymoron: Pillows of stone. Anaphora: We. Personification:
Scare off the silence, lap of eternity. Metaphor: The woman (metaphor of the sun or sunlight),
The boy (the moon). Symbol: the dawn (hope). Alliteration of the S sound. Enjambment.

Interpretation: In this poem, the poetic voice expresses a sense of continuity and perhaps
stillness of their situation via the use of certain phrases (we are still living, we continue to
sleep, we chase the same clouds), but also expresses in the end a certain hopefulness, as they
wait for the dawn (symbol of hope) to return and start their fight again.

The flower: Paralelism in the last stanza (I, I, I…). Metaphor of childhood: memories of lullabies
and Ivory dolls. Enjambment. Metaphor: Years of concrete. (time living in cities). The rain
(sadness). Personification: a flower throws shade. Hyperbole: Scorching sips.

Interpretation: In this poem, the poetic voice talks of their experience returning to the land
where they lived their childhood after years of living in cities. There they are overtaken by
sadness after witnessing the grave of a civilian soldier.

Tiris

Metaphor: black statues referring to the black rocky formations of the Tiris. Enjambment.
Interpretations: Here, the author describes the Tiris, in Southern Sahara. The land is
characterized by the white sand and black rocky formations, and describes it as a free land
without master, despite the passivity of some of the people living there.

Decolonization: the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms,
even those that remain after political independence is achieved. The process of political an
cultural brokerage involved in early decolonizers in a profound complicity with the imperial
powers from which they sought to emerge as free agents.

Their general attitudes and practices were imbued with the cultural and social values they had
been taught to regard as those of a modern, civilized state. Political independence did not
necessarily mean a wholesale freeing of the colonized from colonialist values, for these, along
with other models, persisted in many cases after independence.

Many programs of decolonization have been attempted. Some seek to revive and revalue local
languages (a return to indigenous languages can restructure attitudes to the local and the
indigenous cultures). We cannot assume that these cultures remain untouched. The forms that
they employ reflect an energetic engagement with dominant practices.

Only the most extreme forms of decolonization suggest that precolonial cultures can be
recovered in a pristine form by programs of decolonization. Other authors assume a
transnational identity, but are often dismissed as not contributing to a decolonizing process.

Three phases of post-colonial literature: adopt, adapt and adept.

Adopt: Literature adopts the standard form and accepts the principle of universal validity.

Adapt: The subject matter is adapted from the standard form to the subject matter’s culture.

Adept: The colonized culture declares cultural independence and the writer reshapes the form
to their cultural standards

Main areas of concern of post-colonial criticism:

1. A rejection of the universal significance of literature.

2. The tainted language of the colonizers and the idea of language in general.
3. Emphasis on double or hybrid identities.
4. Stress on cross-cultural interactions.

Things fall appart: The first novel which spoke from the interior of the African character,
rather than portraying the African as an exotic, as the white man would see him. 3 parts:
description of family, customs and society, European colonialism and Christian missionaries.
The wider Igbo community.

Language choice: literary significance. Cultural ambiguity and contestation, neutral narration,
cross-cultural misunderstanding and consequences when a belligerent culture or civilization,
out of arrogance and ethnocentrism, invades another culture or civilization. African point of
view. The repression of the Igbo language at the end of the novel contributes greatly to the
destruction of the culture.

Colonial domination, clash of cultures (not necessarily fighting), disintegration of the self and
Igbo culture due to the influence of an external culture.
Amalia Ortiz

Ortiz makes up a character called La Madre Valiente, a refugee mother who goes across the
US-Mexico border trying to add sympathizers to her cause of ending injustice.

2 big tendencies of immigrants when they arrive to a country: Assimilation vs Segregation.

“To identify as Chicanxs means that we are both Mexican and American. The either/or
paradigm ends in a hierarchy; the both and one implies HYBRIDITY. The label “latino” and
“Hispanic” encompasses more ethnicities than Mexican-American.

Homo-linguistic translations: Taking pieces from other poems and adapting them.

Ethnicity: an ethnic quality or affirmation resulting from racial or cultural ties.

Mestizo: A person of hybrid indigenous American and European ancestry.

Race: Has no official biological taxonomic significance. We are all Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Nor is
there scientific basis for any racial or ethnic hierarchy. “Ethnicity” or “culture” should be used
instead.

The decolonization of the mind (Gloria Anzaldúa): As a conquered people, Mexicans and
Chicanxs were and are taught to believe that they are inferior because they have indigenous
blood, believe in the supernatural, and speak a deficient language.

Chicanxs: Colonized twice, first by the Spaniards and then by the Anglos. Republic of Texas,
Annexation of Texas, Mexican-American war, Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) where the
Mexicans gave up a large portion of territory.

Us-Mexico border: The Bracero Program: Program ran between the 40s and 60s consisting of
importing temporary contract laborers from Mexico to the United States.

Chicano movement (1960s-70s): M.e.ch.a (Movimiento estudiantil chicano de Aztlán). It

acknowledge and took pride in their Mexican heritage. Demanded that while America
admitted historic and persistent patterns of racial inequality in legal, political, educational and
social opportunities for Mexican-Americans.

La frontera the llama: Personification, Antithesis (to the north and the south), Symbolism,
parallelism, alliteration, metaphor (school shootings), rhetorical questions, refrain, code-
switching.

Interpretations and meanings: Criticism of the lack of ethical values of America and Mexico.

Re membering herstory: Play on words, metaphor, simile.

Strange fruit: collective metaphor for people, drugs, etc. personification:

Works: Look how to cite sources. Thesis statement, conclusions, explicit connection to class
topics and discussions.

Enrique Dussel: the cultures of globalization.

Colonization of South Africa: Unofficial colonization (Invasions and migrations from antiquity),
official colonizations (since 16th century: Portuguese, Dutch, English…) Internal colonization
(1961-1994 apartheid, white Afrikaner rule).
Apartheid: legal racial segregation and white supremacy. 1910: territorial segregation by
forcing black Africans to live in reserves, limiting their ownership of land and forbidding them
from working certain jobs. Black Africans, English speaking whites, and Afrikaners. 3 races:
white, black and colored (mixed-race).

Die Antwoord: Cookie Thumper, babies on fire.

Priddy Ugly: 30 minutes to Soweto.

Arab World: countries that speak Arabic. The Maghreb: The most western side of the arab
world, from Mauritania to Libya (sometimes includes Egypt).

Islamic fundamentalism: Those who oppose western influence and seek to institute Sharia law,
eliminating the difference between law and religion.

Lebanon: Small country between Jordan and Syria. Majority Arab, small Armenian percentage.
Religion: almost half Christian and half Muslim. Civil war (1975-1992). Problem with legal age
to get marry, prosecution of same-sex relations…

Fatima Mernissi: Positive view of Sheherezade. A political hero, wise woman, symbol of the
arab world… Teaches that a woman can rebel by developing her brain.

Joumana Haddad: First woman to write for a major newspaper. Pioneer in the Arab world.
Spent 14 years in a catholic school. Self described “brave and sassy erotic writer”. Half
autobiography and half essay.

Orientalism: Term coined by Edward Said. Accuses the West of creating the binary opposition
west-east in order to construct the East as an “other” in order to dominate, restructure and
have power over it.

Women’s agency (Diana Meyers): An account of their capacity for individualized choice and
action.

Do women do what they actually want to do or what they are expected to do?

3 ways in which women can exert agency:

1. Acting in solidarity with feminism.

2. Point out contradictions in gender norms.
3. Telling stories to express how women sense themselves in the present, reinterpret the
past and plan for the future.

Stylistic analysis of the prose section of I killed Sheherezade, including rhetorical figures,
tone and points of view.

The constant repetition of killing Sheherezade expresses the writers frustration and anger.
Metaphor, hyperbole, symbolism (Sheherezade and Lilith), anaphoric construction, rhetorical
questions, vocatives, parallelism, capitalization, enumeration, simile. Tone: Angry, frustrated,
sarcastic, interjections, bad words.

Litotes: answering with a negative.

Rhetorical figures, themes, meanings and interpretations of Geology of the I.

Paralelism, enjambment, anaphora, metaphor, simile, personification (sad hole), antithesis,
(disappointments and triumphs), synecdoche, mesodiplosis.

Themes: Identity, love, family, trauma. Individual freedom in the formation of identity.

Suniti Namjoshi: Fables. Short stories intended to impart a moral lesson. Influenced by Hans
Christian Andersen. Since fables often teach social roles, Namjoshi’s fables intend to revise
these fables from a feminist perspective in order to break with patriarchal tradition/archetypes
and construct new feminine models.

Motif: element that repeats within a certain story or throughout history. Ex: The damsel in
distress.

Main themes: gender, sexism, racism, classism, human rights, homophones.

Inspirations: Sanskrit and European mythologies. Diaspora.

Namjoshi innovates fables in three main ways: Inclusion of female protagonists (human and
animal), absence of a moral and the use of humor.

When used smartly, humor is going to be tolerated by those in power and can be used to
criticize them.

The ways of feminist rewriting: Rescuing female authors from the past or rewriting stories,
theories, etc.