Postcolonialism:
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of a native people and its lands.
So, the term ‘postcolonialism’ is not the same as ‘after colonialism’ ,as if colonial values are no longer to be reckoned with. It does not define a radically new historical era, nor does it herald a brave new world where all the ills of the colonial past have been cured. Rather, ‘postcolonialism’ recognises both historical continuity and change.
Postcolonial theory:
Postcolonial theory addresses the following issues:
Colonialism’s strategies of representation of the native.
The epistemological underpinnings of colonial projects (colonial histories, anthropology, area studies, cartography)
The feminization, marginalization and dehumanization of the native.
The psychological effects of colonialism on both the colonizer and the colonized.
The role of apparatuses such as education, English literature, historiography and art and architecture in the execution of the colonial project.
How postcolonial Literature change our mind discourse:
After studing postcolonial literature, our perspective about the West totally changed. Before the understanding of postcolonial literature, we think that Europe is a well manner country and full of civilization. We have a great desire to go and live there.
But when we read postcolonial literature with the perspective of postcolonial theorist like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha, we come to know the reality.
Postcolonial theorist exposed the mask of West. For a long time, they ruled over Asia, Africa and many other poor countries on the name of civilization.
They entered in these countries with the slogan that we came here for your civilization. But postcolonial theorist exposed their reality. They have their own lust of power. They gathered money, ivory and gold from these countries and back to their homes. They destroyed their ancestors literature by calling it poor literature.
They imposed their own culture, values, language and power on these countries with power and dismantle their original culture and values.
After all, we can clearly understand their Delima after reading the theory of Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said.
Key theorists:
Edward Said
Homi k. Bhabha
Gayatri Spivak
Edward Said:
To describe the us-and-them "binary social relation" with which Western Europe intellectually divided the world—into the "Occident" and the "Orient"—the cultural critic Edward Said developed the denotations and connotations of the term Orientalism (an art-history term for Western depictions and the study of the Orient). This is the concept that the cultural representations generated with the us-and-them binary relation are social constructs, which are mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each other, because each exists on account of and for the other.
Orientalism(1978):
Edward Said’s “Orientalism” refers to the sum of west’s representation of the East. It is the production of ideas, knowledge and opinions about the orient--ideas which were preliminary to governance, military conquest and political control over the geographical territory of the orient. Orientalist knowledge came first, political control later.
As Said outs it:
“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the
Orient, the East, "them”).
Shape of Orientalism:
Orientalism construct binary divisions.
Orientalism is a western fantasy.
Orientalism is legitimating.
There is ‘latent’ and ‘menifest’
Gayatri Spivak:
In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term Subaltern, the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cautioned against assigning an over-broad connotation; that:
“subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for The Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern---. . . so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern”.
— Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa (1992)
Known for harnessing deconstructive critical thought, feminism and Marxism for postcolonial purposes.
Can the Subaltern speak—spivak worries about the inability of subaltern to represent themselves.
She argues that since the subaltern can not speak for herself because the ‘double bind’ of colonialism and patriarchy silence her, any intellectual project must seek to make visible the position of the marginalized.
She also argues that the appropriation of the marginalized into single ‘discipline’ such as postcolonial studies condemns them to perpetual marginality, always the subject the subject of somebody else’s discourse.
Homi k. Bhabha:
Bhabha believes that colonial discourse is conflictual, ambivalent and full of contra dictions.
The contradictory psychie relations between the colonizer and colonized moving, for Bhabha, between fear and desire of the other—prevent any stable and unchanging identities for the colonizer and colonized.
The colonizer can construct his identity only through the stereotypes of the other i.e, the identity of the colonizer is dependent upon the relationship with the oppositional native/other.
Steorotypes indicate a fractures nature of colonial power.
Key Terms in Bhabha’s theory:
Ambivalence:
Ambivalence of colonial discourse can be seen in contradictory representation of the colonized. Colonized subject is simultaneously beyond comprehension and yet completely controllable as a subject of colonial power.
Mimicry:
Bhabha’s concept of mimicry elaborates the unstable nature of colonial discourse. Colonial power requires that native should adopt the forms and habits of colonial master.
Hybridity:
Hybridity is fundamentally associated with the emergence of post-colonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. It is the second stage in the history of hybridity, characterized by literature and theory that study the effects of mixture (hybridity) upon identity and culture. The principal theorists of hybridity are Homi k. Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, whose works respond to the multi-cultural awareness that emerged in the early 1990s.
Conclusion:
To conclude we can say that postcolonialism realized that even though the colonial era has finished yet, but the practices have not come to an end and now has turned it face into neo-colonialism.
In postcolonial perspective, literary works emerged to unveil subjugation, injustice, violence, discrimination, inequality, to sound the marginal and subaltern people, so that from postcolonial productions yielded social and political products.
Postcolonial Literature is a kind of literary work which describes realistic experience of what really happens around uss and to remind don’t just shut our eyes. It is believe that one vice could lead into a betterment for our future and society.
