POSTCOLONIALI

SM
11- Troy
WHAT IS POSTCOLONIALISM ● Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of 
Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to
reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various
forms of imperialism. Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming
colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination can come in the wake of
such changes, including new forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be
confused with the claim that the world we live in now is actually devoid of
colonialism.

● Postcolonialism (postcolonial theory, postcolonian studies, post-colonial theory) is a

specifically postmodern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and
analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism is
defined in anthropology as the relations between European nations and areas they
colonized and once ruled. Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories found amongst
history, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, film, political science, architecture,
human geography, sociology, Marxist theory, feminism, religious and theological
studies, and literature.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism
https://worldarchitecture.org/architecture-news/pgmgz/postcolonialism.html
 POSTCOLONIALISM
LITERATURE
Post colonialism literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries.[1] It exists on
all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and
consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and
cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A
range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in
perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.

Migrant literature and postcolonial literature show some considerable overlap. However, not all
migration takes place in a colonial setting, and not all postcolonial literature deals with migration. A
question of current debate is the extent to which postcolonial theory also speaks to migration literature
in non-colonial settings.
 CHALLENGING
STEREOTYPES
CHARACTERISTICS
A big mission of postcolonial
writers is to challenge these
stereotypes and show that they are
based on nothing but the biases of
the colonizers.
METANARRATIVE
postcolonial writers started pointing out that,
actually, there's more than one side to the story. In
fact, there are often loads of different sides to the
same story. A story that we take to be "true" or
"factual" is often just one point of view among
many. So in their own work, postcolonial writers
tend to play around with (jargon alert!)
metanarrative: they like to draw attention to the way
that stories—or narratives—are constructed, and
especially how they're always told from a certain
point of view or angle.
COLONIAL DISCOURSE
Colonial discourse, as you might guess,
is the collection of narratives, statements,
and opinions that deals with colonized
peoples—told from the perspective of
European colonizers, of course. One of
the goals of postcolonial writers is to
attack this colonial discourse and show it
up for what it is: a load of bull.
NATIONHOOD AND
NATIONALISM
Postcolonial writers are really interested in
nationhood and nationalism. A lot of these
writers are very patriotic. They write books
on behalf of their nations. Their work is often
nationalist, because postcolonial writers like
to highlight and valorize their nation's
cultural, political and social identity.
VALORIZATION OF CULTURAL
IDENTITY
In postcolonial literature, you'll also see this
valorization of cultural identity reflected in the
narrative style of a literary work. For example, a
lot of African postcolonial literature resembles
spoken language. So, one way that African
writers valorize their indigenous heritage is by
turning back to these oral narrative forms that
predated colonialism for inspiration.
REWRITING HISTORY
Postcolonial writers don't like this version of
history. It's a version that casts colonizers as
heroes, as rescuers who "saved" everyone from
ignorance and darkness. So postcolonial writers
set about writing history from their own
perspective, showing how colonialism was
actually a pretty violent, terrible thing. More
importantly, these writers also show how history
is a matter of perspective, and there are always
many perspectives: there is no one "true" history.
 GABRIEL GARCÍA
MÁRQUEZ
The book that made him super famous was none other
than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Well, Márquez
is the writer most closely associated with magical
FAMOUS WRITERS

realism. He developed and used the magical realist

style to express the "surreal" aspects of postcolonial
reality in South America. He found a whole new way
of expressing the unique nature of postcolonial reality,
with its unique jumble of cultures, identities, and
discourses. He won the Nobel Prize for his work.

CHINUA
ACHEBE
Chinua Achebe's such a big deal that people often call him
the "father of modern African literature." He was a Nigerian
writer who was one of the first to write a postcolonial novel
that said, basically, "screw you" to Nigeria's British
colonizers. It's called Things Fall Apart, and it was first
published in 1958. This work is a prime example of the way
in which postcolonial authors "write back" to the empire,
challenging its racist assumptions, its claims to cultural
superiority, and its economic exploitation of the colonized.
 JEAN
RHYS
Jean Rhys is an unusual postcolonial writer. People
like her were, at the time, called (white) Creoles. For
most of her life, she wrote in obscurity, making
almost no money. Then she published 
FAMOUS WRITERS

Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and shot to fame pretty

much overnight. She isn't afraid to stare the empire—
Britain, in this case—in the face and talk right back
to it. Her work is all about the underdog, and in Wide
Sargasso Sea, her main character is a victim of both
colonialism and patriarchy.

DEREK
WALCOTT
Walcott uses his poetry to rewrite colonial history
from the perspective of those who were the victims of
colonialism in the Caribbean. From the indigenous
Carib peoples who were violated by colonialism to
the African slaves brought over to work on
plantations, Walcott tells the kinds of stories that
colonization tried to wipe out. Of Walcott’s
approximately 30 plays, the best-known are Dream
on Monkey Mountain (produced
1967); Pantomime (1978), an exploration of colonial
relationships through the Robinson Crusoe story. The
Odyssey: A Stage Version appeared in 1993.
 The Empire
Writes Back
- Bill Ashcroft et al, 1989
- Debate on the relationships within
postcolonial works, study the mighty
forces acting on words in the
postcolonial text, and prove how
these texts constitute a radical
critique of Eurocentric notions of
language and literature.
- Franz Fanon, 1961
- Analyzed the postwar
decolonization movement
particularly in Africa and
Algeria
- Taking violence restores
people’s humanity

The Wretched
of the Earth
 01 HEGEMONY
02 HYBRIDITY
03 AMBIVALENCE
LITERARY 04 MIMICRY
TERMS
HEGEMO
NY
 Hegemony, the dominance of one group over another, often
supported by legitimating norms and ideas. ... The associated
term hegemon is used to identify the actor, group, class, or state
that exercises hegemonic power or that is responsible for the
dissemination of hegemonic ideas.

Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one

state within a confederation, is now generally understood to
mean domination by consent. This broader meaning was coined
and popularized in the 1930s by Italian Marxist 
Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why the ruling class was so
successful in promoting its own interests in society.
Fundamentally, hegemony is the power of the ruling class to
convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all.
Domination is thus exerted not by force, nor even necessarily by
active persuasion, but by a more subtle and inclusive power
over the economy, and over state apparatuses such as education
and the media, by which the ruling class’s interest is presented
as the common interest and thus comes to be taken for granted.
 Hybridity refers to any mixing of east and
western culture. Within colonial and postcolonial
literature, it most commonly refers to colonial
subjects from Asia or Africa who have found a
balance between eastern and western cultural
attributes. However, in Homi Bhabha’s initial
usage of the term in his essay “Signs Taken For
Wonders,” he clearly thought of hybridity as a
subversive tool whereby colonized people might
challenge various forms of oppression (Bhabha’s
example is of the British missionaries’
imposition of the Bible in rural India in the 19th
century.).

Hybridity
 AMBIVALEN
CE

• the ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another.  The
colonizer often regards the colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while
the colonized regards the colonizer as both enviable yet corrupt.  In a context of
hybridity, this often produces a mixed sense of blessing and curse. 

• A term first developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation

between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite. It also refers to a
simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or action
(Young 1995: 161). Adapted into colonial discourse theory by Homi K Bhabha,
it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the
relationship between colonizer and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent
because the colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the
colonizer. Rather than assuming that some colonized subjects are ‘complicit’
and some ‘resistant’, ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist
in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject. Ambivalence also
characterizes the way in which colonial discourse relates to the colonized
subject, for it may be both exploitative and nurturing, or represent itself as
nurturing, at the same time.
 
Mimicry in colonial and postcolonial literature is most commonly
seen when members of a colonized society (say, Indians or
Africans) imitate the language, dress, politics, or cultural
attitude of their colonizers (say, the British or the French).
Then colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to
‘mimic’ the colonizer, by adopting the colonizer’s cultural
habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is never
a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a
‘blurred copy’ of the colonizer that can be quite threatening.
This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since
it can appear to parody whatever it mimics. Mimicry therefore
locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an
uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonized.

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THANK YOU!
Jhon-liwis Bergonia
Mervin A. Delos Reyes
Irish Julianne Marial
Renalyn Sinadjan
Mary Sephia R. Smisek