The Significance of Studying Postcolonial Literature

What Is Postcolonialism?

The term ‘postcolonialism’ widely refers to the representation of race, ethnicity, culture and human identity in the modern era, mainly after many colonised countries achieved their independence. It is connected with imperialism from the moment of colonization until the 21st century.

The distinguished scholar and poet M.A.R. Habib points out the intricate meaning of ‘imperialism’: “The word imperialism derives from the Latin ‘imperium,’ which has numerous meanings including power, authority, command, dominion, realm, and empire.” This word describes many interactions between ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised,’ the former word describing groups of people who were invaded and dominated during the age of modern colonialism, the latter those who did the invading and dominating.

At its height, the British Empire consisted of more than a quarter of all the territory on the earth’s surface: one in four people was a subject of Queen Victoria. ‘Postcolonial literature’ is what we call the literature produced in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Senegal and Australia after they gained their independence from British rule.

‘Postcolonial Studies’ is a field of humanities research born out of scholarly interest in postcolonial literature and art, as well as an interest in the complex relationships between the production of literature and art and the ‘postcolonial condition,’ or the state of affairs in the aftermath of Western colonisation. For example, Edward Said’s prominent book Orientalism is an assessment of Western representations of Eastern culture and falls under the label of ‘Postcolonial Studies.’

Key Postcolonial Theorists

There are four names that appear again and again as thinkers who have shaped postcolonial theory:

• Frantz Fanon
• Edward Said
• Homi Bhabha
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Though all these writers come from different lands, nationalities and social backgrounds, they all produced wonderful works of literary criticism and scholarship, many of which would certainly come under the label of ‘postcolonial literature.’

Postcolonialist Literature in English

Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe

One of the most influential novels of Postcolonialism is Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe, which explores the interaction between traditional African society and British colonizers. In this novel, the character Okonkwo struggles to understand and cope with the changes brought by Christianity and British control. Achebe’s novel examines various situations that occur post-independence in a fictional West African village.

The style of Things Fall Apart is simple and attempts to reflect the oral style of African storytelling. The book goes to lengths to artfully describe the richness and complexity of Igbo society, which helped the world gain an insider perspective on the African experience—it has sold over 8 million copies and been translated into 50 languages.

Achebe conveys through his novels how the British specter hanging over his country continues to weaken the possibility of greater unification. Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 for his literary merit.

Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee

South African novelist and Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee explores the themes of crime, revenge, land rights and racial justice post-apartheid South Africa. In most of his novels, he depicts his own alienation from his fellow Africans. Coetzee received his second Booker Prize for his novel, Disgrace (1999). The novel illustrates the endeavours of both colonizers and the colonized for harmony in post-apartheid South Africa.

Disgrace portrays colonialists as having left a gaping wound not only for the Blacks but also for the Whites as well. It is difficult for both groups to cope in the changing world of apartheid-free South Africa. On the one hand, the once-dominant Whites could not escape from the shadow of their previous hegemony in colonial times. On the other hand, the Blacks violated the Whites in an attempt to assimilate them into their culture and give them chances for redemption rather than resorting completely to hatred and exhibitions of authority.

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Therefore, when colonialist policies faded away, survival in post-apartheid South Africa made both the Blacks and Whites there culturally disoriented and helpless. Both groups cannot help but expiate their pasts and start on long and painful journies in search of identity. Both groups search for a new way to live in coexistence, equally and peacefully.

The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist, critic and poet born in Sri Lanka. He is best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient (1992), which features the interactions of characters of various nationalities during the last days of WWII.

The novel surveys many postcolonial themes, such as intersections between national and individual identity, which can cause dissonance in consciousness. It is set in a country house in Florence and describes the lives of a young woman and three men from various countries, including a badly burnt English patient dying in a room.

One of the greatest aspects of The English Patient is how the novel interrogates and deconstructs the identities of the main characters, all of whom are living in the liminal, “in-between” space of a Florentine country villa at the close of WWII. Each of the characters’ lives has been profoundly disrupted and upended by the war, and they are all experiencing various crises of identity, in which they shed or disassociate from their national identities and begin searching for what it means to exist in a post-WWII, postcolonial world.

All of the characters have been displaced from their homes, and their historical identities as members of colonialist or colonized peoples are flipped upside down in certain respects. For instance, the dying English patient, a member of the British Empire, is reduced to a phantom whose life is literally in the hands of the others at the villa.

In addition, Kip, a Sikh from India, was a military engineer in the British Army. He is a representative of a colonized people who is familiar with the colonialist mindset. His perspective as a hybrid in-between of Indian and British culture often blurs the lines of nationality in the novel.

He resents imperialism and his betrayal of Sikh culture, but there is no place for his resentment at the villa, leading to an inner ambivalence. Kip eventually reaffirms and regains his Sikh identity and returns to India.

Other Notable Postcolonial Authors

Some other significant writers in postcolonial literature are Ngugi wa Thiongo, Edwidge Danticat, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jamaica Kincaid and Li-Young Lee.

Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986) is a kind of multi-genre work that describes the various traditions of his people. It also presents how the British education system tried to destroy the local culture and its language, Gikuyu.

Silko, in his novel Ceremony (1977), celebrates various traditions and myths of the Laguna Pueblo and influence of white relations on local culture. It also shows how Native Americans hold a special position in postcolonial discourse.

A Small Place (1988) by Jamaica Kincaid

On par with male writers in postcolonial literature, there are renowned female novelists who have contributed to a great extent. Jamaica Kincaid mostly wrote about women’s experiences in addition to the effects of patriarchy and colonialism.

Her famous novel A Small Place (1988) is one of the postcolonial discourses in which she draws on her personal experience of living in the British colony of Antigua. Kincaid expresses her contempt for the British ways of colonization.

In her novel, she focuses on the English educational system, which attempted to turn natives into English subjects. Further, she points out that the native people tended to adopt the worst of foreign English culture while disregarding the best it had to offer.

Beath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Edwidge Danticat

The Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Her novel engages with many themes, including common postcolonial themes such as migration, sexuality, gender and history. In this novel, the protagonist, Sophie, struggles to develop an identity out of disparate Western cultures and languages, such as French and English, and also struggles to adapt to American life after she reaches Brooklyn, New York. The publication of this novel catapulted Danticat into a leading female voice of postcolonial literature.

Who Is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak?

One of the most prominent theorists of postcolonial literary theory is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who translated Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (1967) into English and wrote a lengthy and insightful accompanying preface. Her critical book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the “subaltern” from their discussions but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.

What Is the Subaltern?

The ‘subaltern’ is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist Italian intellectual, and was further popularized by the Subaltern Studies Group and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

Gramsci originally used the word as a sort of codeword, referring to people who were subject to the dominance of a ruling class. However, Spivak and others extended the term meaning through postcolonial discourse, with Spivak famously defining the term in the following fashion: ‘the reasonable and rarefied definition of the word subaltern that interests me is: to be removed from all lines of social mobility.’

The subaltern is essentially anyone in a lower social class who has been displaced or marginalized by a ruling, often imperial, power. In other words, if members of these classes have little or no access to the imperialist class or its institutions, they are considered subalterns.

Central Ideas in Postcolonial Literature

Postcolonial has many common motifs and themes like ‘cultural dominance,’ ‘racism,’ ‘quest for identity’ and ‘inequality,’ along with some peculiar presentation styles. Most postcolonial writers reflect and demonstrate many thematic concepts which are completely tied up with both ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized.’ They often depict White European colonizers as perpetuating racial discrimination through continued emphasis of their superiority over colonized peoples.

Subjugation of the Colonized

This was highly evident in South Africa when apartheid was incorporated into national laws. Among the most notable acts of this kind were ‘The Groups Areas Act,’ ‘Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act,’ ‘Immorality Act,’ ‘The Population Registration Act,’ ‘Bantu Authorities Act,’ and ‘The Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act.’ Each of these acts, created by the White ruling class, limited and restricted the colonized and discriminated against them. Both the writers Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee in their fiction have shown how apartheid destroyed South Africa emotionally, morally and economically.