Post-colonial Criticism (1990s-present)

[Nikky Schreier]

Postcolonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized).

Rather than glorifying the exploratory nature of European colonists as they expanded their sphere of influence, Achebe narrates the destructive events that led to the death and enslavement of thousands of Nigerians when the British imposed their Imperial government. In turn, Achebe points out the negative effects (and shifting ideas of identity and culture) caused by the imposition of western religion and economics on Nigerians during colonial rule.

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, religion, and culture and how these elements work in relation to colonial hegemony (western colonizers controlling the colonized). (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)

An intellectual movement utilizing the methods of structural linguistics and structural anthropology. Where linguists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, study the underlying system of language rather than concrete speech events, and where anthropologists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss, examine cultural phenomena in terms of the underlying formal systems of which they are manifestations, structuralist literary critics, such as Roland Barthes, seek not explication of unique texts but an account of the modes of literary discourse and their operation. The border separating such study of the structures of literature from semiotics, the study of signs, is nebulous and frequently crossed. (Handbook to Literature)

Language as expressing absence. You use a word to represent an absent object but you cannot make it present. The word, then, like the unconscious desire, is something that cannot be fulfilled. Language, reaching out with one word after the other, striving for but never reaching its object, is the arena of desire. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)

The most insistent and vigorous historicism through most of the twentieth century has been Marxism, based on the world of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, of class warfare. Economics, the underlying cause of history, was thus the base, and culture, including literature and the other arts, the superstructure. Viewed from the Marxist perspective, the literary works of a period would, then, reveal the state of the struggle between classes in the historical place and moment. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)

Like Marxist criticism, feminist criticism derives from firm political and ideological commitments and insists that literature both reflects and influences human behavior in the larger world. Feminist criticism often, too, has practiced and political aims. Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interest, thoughts and actions of men, feminist thought endeavors both to extend contemporary attention to distinctively female concerns, ideas and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times. (The Norton Introduction to Literature)

A study of the intersections between humanity and nature including focuses on the pastoral, the frontier, gender position, ethnicities, communities, urbanites, industrialization and technology. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)

Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown of sign-signifier), and psychoanalysis (Lacan). (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice. (Literary Theories and Schools of Criticism)

Heavily influenced by film critique, neoformalism suggests that art and literature seek to defamiliarize the beholder so to defamiliarize the beholder/reader within the context of the work. (Handbook to Literature)

Focuses on the literature produced by both the colonizers and the colonized Explores the effects of colonization, including social, economic, political, religious effects, and specifically, explores the suffering of colonial cultures . The Post Colonial Critic (1990s-present).

Focuses on the literature produced by both the colonizers and the colonized Explores the effects of colonization, including social, economic, political, religious effects, and specifically, explores the suffering of colonial cultures . The Post Colonial Critic (1990s-present)

Post-colonial criticism also questions the role of the western literary canon and western history as dominant forms of knowledge making. The terms "first-world," "second world," "third world" and "fourth world" nations are critiqued by post-colonial critics because they reinforce the dominant positions of western cultures populating first world status. Power, Hegemony, and Literature

Authors included in the canon often reinforce colonial hegemonic ideology, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Western critics might consider Heart of Darkness an effective critique of colonial behavior. But post-colonial theorists and authors might disagree with this perspective: "...as Chinua Achebe observes, the novel's condemnation of European is based on a definition of Africans as savages: beneath their veneer of civilization, the Europeans are, the novel tells us, as barbaric as the Africans. And indeed, Achebe notes, the novel portrays Africans as a pre-historic mass of frenzied, howling, incomprehensible barbarians..." (Tyson 374-375).

Is this text written by the colonized or the colonizers? Who are the colonized and who are the colonizers? How are they depicted? What effects of the colonial oppression are presented in this text? Questions a Post Colonial Critic Would Ask

How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression? What does the text reveal about the problems of post-colonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity? .

Postcolonialism (also post-colonial theory) is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s, as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism, developing a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.

As an epistemology (i.e., a study of knowledge, its nature, and verifiability), ethics (moral philosophy), and as a political science (i.e., in its concern with affairs of the citizenry), the field of postcolonialism addresses the matters that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives from:[1]

Postcolonialism is aimed at disempowering such theories (intellectual and linguistic, social and economic) by means of which colonialists "perceive," "understand," and "know" the world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society, and economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.[citation needed][2]

Understanding the complex chain of political and social, economic, and cultural impacts left in the aftermath of colonial control is essential to understanding post-colonialism. A wide range of experiences are included in post-colonial discourse, from ongoing battles against colonialism and globalization to struggles for independence. The long-lasting effects of colonialism will be faced by them, such as identity issues, structural injustices, and the elimination of indigenous knowledge and customs.

At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies) generally represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.[4]

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