Postcolonial Classics

[Basa Benejan]

PhirozeVasunia is a professor in the Department of Greek and Latin and in the Programme for Comparative Literature at University College London. Since receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1996, he has written extensively on colonialism and cross-cultural contact in Antiquity, as well as on the relationship between empire and the study of Classics. He is the author of such works as The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander and The Classics and Colonial India, and he has co-edited numerous volumes, including Classics and National Cultures (co-edited with Susan A. Stephens). In this interview, he discusses postcolonial studies, reception studies, and the future of the study of Classics.

If I could add one related point, I think that reception studies itself has not been slow to take up questions of empire, of colonialism, of Orientalism. Far from resisting these types of questions, scholars of classical reception have actually taken up these topics and explored them with quite a heavy degree of intensity and scholarship and detail and rigor.

This blog shares research stories about the Achaemenid ruins of Persepolis or Takht-i Jamshid in Iran. Many will come from my longterm project to trace and recontextualise architectural fragments from the site. This work has been supported (2009-2017) by the Soudavar Memorial Foundation, with additional assistance from the Iran Heritage Foundation, the University of London Central Research Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Fund at King's College London Lindsay Allen email lindsay dot allen at kcl.ac.uk

Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries, originating from 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.[1][2][3] 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.[4]

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.

The significance of the prefix "post-" in "postcolonial" is a matter of contention among scholars and historians. In postcolonial studies, there has not been a unified consensus on when colonialism began and when it has ended (with numerous scholars contending that it has not). The contention has been influenced by the history of colonialism, which is commonly divided into several major phases; the European colonization of the Americas began in the 15th century and lasted until the 19th, while the colonisation of Africa and Asia reached their peak in the 19th century. By the dawn of the 20th century, the vast majority of non-European regions were under European colonial rule; this would last until after the Second World War when anti-colonial independence movements led to the decolonization of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Historians have also expressed differing opinions in regards to the postcolonial status of nations established through settler colonialism, such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.[5] Ongoing neocolonialism in the Global South and the effects of colonialism (many of which have persisted after the end of direct colonial rule) have made it difficult to determine whether or not a nation being no longer under colonial rule guarantees its postcolonial status.[6]

Before the term "postcolonial literature" gained currency among scholars, "commonwealth literature" was used to refer to writing in English from colonies or nations which belonged to the British Commonwealth. Even though the term included literature from Britain, it was most commonly used for writing in English written in British colonies. Scholars of commonwealth literature used the term to designate writing in English that dealt with the topic of colonialism. They advocated for its inclusion in literary curricula, hitherto dominated by the British canon. However, the succeeding generation of postcolonial critics, many of whom belonged to the post-structuralist philosophical tradition, took issue with the "commonwealth" label for separating non-British writing from "English" language literature written in Britain.[8] They also suggested that texts in this category frequently presented a short-sighted view on the legacy of colonialism.[9]

Other terms used for English-language literature from former British colonies include terms that designate a national corpus of writing such as Australian or Canadian literature; numerous terms such as "English Literature Other than British and American", "New Literatures in English", "International Literature in English"; and "World Literatures" were coined. These have, however, been dismissed either as too vague or too inaccurate to represent the vast body of dynamic writing emerging from British colonies during and after the period of direct colonial rule. The term "colonial" and "postcolonial" continue to be used for writing emerging during and after the period of colonial rule respectively.[10]

The consensus in the field is that "post-colonial" (with a hyphen) signifies a period that comes chronologically "after" colonialism. "Postcolonial," on the other hand, signals the persisting impact of colonization across time periods and geographical regions.[9] While the hyphen implies that history unfolds in neatly distinguishable stages from pre- to post-colonial, omitting the hyphen creates a comparative framework by which to understand the varieties of local resistance to colonial impact. Arguments in favor of the hyphen suggest that the term "postcolonial" dilutes differences between colonial histories in different parts of the world and that it homogenizes colonial societies.[11] The body of critical writing that participates in these debates is called Postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial fiction writers deal with the traditional colonial discourse, either by modifying or by subverting it, or both.[12] Postcolonial literary theory re-examines colonial and postcolonial literature, especially concentrating upon the social discourse between the colonizer and the colonized that shaped and produced the literature.[6] In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said analyzed the fiction of Honor de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Lautramont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), exploring how they shaped and were influenced by the societal fantasy of European racial superiority. He pioneered the branch of postcolonial criticism called colonial discourse analysis.[13]

Another important theorist of colonial discourse is Harvard University professor Homi K. Bhabha, (born 1949). He has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, third-space, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence.[14] Western canonical works like Shakespeare's The Tempest, Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness have been targets of colonial discourse analysis. The succeeding generation of postcolonial critics focus on texts that "write back" to the colonial center.[12] In general, postcolonial theory analyzes how anti-colonial ideas, such as anti-conquest, national unity, ngritude, pan-Africanism and postcolonial feminism were forged in and promulgated through literature.[15] Prominent theorists include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Bill Ashcroft,[citation needed] Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Leela Gandhi, Gareth Griffiths, Abiola Irele, John McLeod,[citation needed] Hamid Dabashi, Helen Tiffin, Khal Torabully, and Robert J. C. Young.

The sense of identification with a nation, or nationalism, fueled anti-colonial movements that sought to gain independence from colonial rule. Language and literature were factors in consolidating this sense of national identity to resist the impact of colonialism. With the advent of the printing press, newspapers and magazines helped people across geographical barriers identify with a shared national community. This idea of the nation as a homogeneous imagined community connected across geographical barriers through the medium of language became the model for the modern nation.[16] Postcolonial literature not only helped consolidate national identity in anti-colonial struggles but also critiqued the European colonial pedigree of nationalism. As depicted in Salman Rushdie's novels for example, the homogeneous nation was built on European models by the exclusion of marginalized voices.[17] They were made up of religious or ethnic elites who spoke on behalf of the entire nation, silencing minority groups.[18]

Ngritude is a literary and ideological philosophy, developed by francophone African intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France during the 1930s. Its initiators included Martinican poet Aim Csaire, Lopold Sdar Senghor (a future President of Senegal), and Lon Damas of French Guiana. Ngritude intellectuals disapproved of French colonialism and claimed that the best strategy to oppose it was to encourage a common racial identity for native Africans worldwide.[19]

The "anti-conquest narrative" recasts the indigenous inhabitants of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers.[28] This depicts the colonised people in a more human light but risks absolving colonisers of responsibility by assuming that native inhabitants were "doomed" to their fate.[28]

In her book Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt analyzes the strategies by which European travel writing portrays Europe as a secure home space against a contrasting representation of colonized outsiders. She proposes a completely different theorization of "anti-conquest" than the ideas discussed here, one that can be traced to Edward Said. Instead of referring to how natives resist colonization or are victims of it, Pratt analyzes texts in which a European narrates his adventures and struggles to survive in the land of the non-European Other.[29] This secures the innocence of the imperialist even as he exercises his dominance, a strategy Pratt terms "anti-conquest." The anti-conquest is a function of how the narrator writes him or her self out of being responsible for or an agent, direct or indirect, of colonization and colonialism. This different notion of anti-conquest is used to analyze the ways in which colonialism and colonization are legitimized through stories of survival and adventure that purport to inform or entertain. Pratt created this unique notion in association with concepts of contact zone and transculturation, which have been very well received in Latin America social and human science circles.[citation needed] The terms refer to the conditions and effects of encounter between the colonizer and the colonized.[29]

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