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Key Concepts of Postcolonial Criticism

Hisham M Nazer1

1. Usually draws example from the literary works of African

Americans, aboriginal Australians and India.
2. Postcolonial criticism is both a subject matter and a theoretical
framework. As a subject matter it analyzes literature produced by
cultures that developed in response to colonial domination. Takes
into account both the colonisers and the coloniseds response. If a
strictly and exclusively postcolonial literary work is analyzed by any
theoretical framework, it will still be considered postcolonial
criticism. Now as a theoretical framework, postcolonial criticism
attempts to understand political, social, cultural and psychological
operations and the colonialist and the anticolonialist ideology.
3. Decolonization often has been confined largely to the removal of
British military forces and government officials. What remained
behind is the deeply embedded cultural colonization. This left the
ex-colonies with a psychological inheritance of a negative selfimage.
1 Hisham M Nazer (b. 1987), a lecturer of English Language and Literature at Varendra University, is a
trilingual poet from Bangladesh, a literary and philosophy theorist, an occasional short-story writer and an
amateur photographer. A T. S. Eliot scholar, and has worked on a dissertation on T. S. Eliot and Dante,
supervised by the department of English, University of Rajshahi. In the same department he is now pursuing his
M.Phil degree on cultural studies and post-colonial theory. A prolific writer, published worldwide and nationally.
His works have appeared in literary journals/magazines/anthologies from Austria, Greece, Belgium, France,
USA, UK, Canada, Romania, Philippines, India and Bangladesh. Independently he has also taught Western
philosophy to Rajshahi University under-grad students for 6 years when he was still a student there himself.
Worked as a sub-editor for two literary magazines- Shasshwatiki (print journal, Bengali, Bangladesh) and The
Browsing Corner (Multi-lingual e-zine, India).
Websites:
http://vu.edu.bd/english_department/hisham-mohammad-nazer
https://hishamianism.wordpress.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30442542@N05/
Follow his works here:
https://varendra.academia.edu/HishamNazer
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/hisham.m.nazer

4. Colonialist ideology/discourse- colonizers assumption of their own

superiority which they contrasted with the alleged inferiority of
native people. Their belief in their own metropolitan status.
5. Eurocentricism. Colonizers saw themselves at the center, as the
proper self. Natives associated with the Other/Demonic
other/Savage.
6. Postcolonial criticism rejects universalism; the universal themes as
were depicted and standardized by English literature.
7. First World- Britain, Europe and the United States. Second Worldwhite population of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and southern
Africa. Third World- India, Africa, Central and South America and
Southeast Asia. Fourth World- indigenous populations like Native
Americans or the aboriginal Australians.
8. Frantz Fanon maintains that the first step for colonialised people in
finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past. The
second step is simply eroding the ideologies of the colonialist.
Theres one extreme standpoint too where authors write in their own
local language, like Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo. But theres
this problem of gaining entrance in the publishing industry which is
very much English-oriented.
9. From Saids Orientalism:
To the Western mind the Orient is surrogate/underground self. This
reflectsa) East is the projection of those negative aspects of
themselves that Westerners do not choose to acknowledge.
Example: Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, where the Arab
merchant is saved by the young De Lacey, a European, and
whom the Arab subsequently betrays.
b) Again East is the exotic, the mystical and the seductive.
c) Homogenous mindset of the East. No individuality. Actions
determined by instinctive emotions.
10.
Yeats treatment of Istanbul in his two Byzantium poems.
Torpor, sensuality and exotic mysticism. As if Yeats is trying to
regain contact with the earlier, mythical, nationalistic Ireland.
11.
Characteristic of postcolonial criticism-

a) An awareness of representation of the non-European as

exotic or immoral Other.
b) Language. Colonisers language is permanently tainted, and
that to write in it involves a crucial acquiescence (liking) in
colonial structure (as language too was a colonising tool).
c) Double/hybrid/unstable identities. Examples- Yeats being a
member of Protestant ruling class of Ireland (colonising)
and a citizen of British-ruled Ireland (colonised). Chinua
Achebe writing about African villagers sitting in a city.
Also Bhabhas idea of unhomliness, a crisis Diasporas go
through.
d) Adopt, Adapt and Adept. Accepting European models.
Applying the European form to the African (or any
colonised country) subject matter. Remaking of the form
and a declaration of cultural independence.
12.
Takes elements from post-structuralism and deconstruction.
Binaries, shifting, polyvalent, contradictory currents of signification
within text.
13.
What postcolonial critics doa) Reject universalism.
b) Examine the representation of other cultures in literature.
Whether a work of literature is silent or does mention the
issues of colonialism.
c) Foreground questions of cultural differences and diversity.
d) Celebrate Hybridity and cultural polyvalency.
e) Develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial
literature, of power relation and potential change.

Debates
1. A group of critics argue that the postcolonial term should be reserved
for the Third and Fourth World writers, that to the white colonies
Britain was much more like a mother country than anything else.
The common grounds like race, language and culture. But another
group want to include them because any anticolonial resistance
force/response is important for postcolonial criticism.
More

2.
3.
4.

5.

importantly because they had to bring out this resistance from an

almost imperceptible distinction between the colonizer and the
colonized (as they shared various features).
Colonialism isnt a thing of the past. It still continues in other forms.
Neocolonialism exploits the cheap labour.
Cultural Imperialism. One culture taking over another.
Postcolonial criticism itself is a form of cultural imperialism as
almost all the theorists, including those who were born in former
colonies, are educated in European Universities and belong to elite
intellectual class rather than to subaltern class.
Cultural Hybridity, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction.

Postcolonial Criticism and Literature

1. Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness with its apparent anti-colonialist
take is actually, as pointed out by Chinua Achebe, a colonialist text
as Conrad depicts the natives in miserable condition and uses the
image as the standard of savagery where Europeans have taken
themselves down to.
2. Bhabha suggestiona) Literature can be studied in terms of the different ways
cultures have experienced historical trauma.
b) Literature can be seen as the study of the ways in which
cultures define themselves positively by othering groups.
c) Analyze world literature by examining the representation of
migrants, political refugees and colonized people. Story of
people whom history has ignored. Historical reality is not
something that happens just on the battlefield. It affects
personal lives too.
3. Colonial counter-discourse. According to Helen Tiffin subversive
characteristic of post-colonial texts doesnt only lie in constructing
or reconstructing the national cultural identity but also in re-reading
and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record.
Example- Jane Eyre, subverted by Jean Rhys. Bertha Mason,
Rochesters former (mad) wife is depicted differently in Rhys novel.
J. M. Coetzee subverted Robinson Crusoe.

4. The issue of colonialism in Shakespeares Tempest.

5. Saids criticism of Austens Mansfield Park.

From the Yale lecture of Paul Fry

1. Is coloniality always an issue when one country dominates over
other/s? German Orientalism takes so much from French
Orientalism, which had no colonial interest.
2. Is it always nationalism or a transnational interest in globalization?
Does it have anything to do with the economic interest of
globalization?
3. Recently its much more a globalization than nationalisation,
although with the Bush/Obama-foreign-policy the nationalism
returns to the scenario.
4. Saids Orientalism and Woolfs Femaleism. Vast body of
information. West writes about orients and men write about women.
5. Criticism of the treatment of woman in literature by man, and then
theres this other kind of criticism that focuses only on the womans
voice in a work of literature. Saids idea aligns with the first kind as
Orientalism is the treatment of the others by the West. Bhabhas
ideas align with the second kind as he only focuses on the
colonized/subaltern.
6. Saids Orientalism works very much in the historical moment of
what we call structuralism. That is to say, its primary concern is
with the binary oppositiona mutual and interdependent binary
oppositionof central self and decentralized other. In that case
defining the otherness of the other subsequently and covertly defines
the selfhood or in this case the Western.
7. Bhabha takes with respect to the binarism of structuralism a
deconstructive attitude. His idea of double consciousness (multi
perspectives).
8. Is Orientalism a myth? Can all the things that are written by the West
on Oriental ways be wrong? West devalues the object of its attention.
9. Theres only representation of the Orient, not description.
Representation is bound to be biased.

10.
There are two kinds of imposition- one that is forced and the
other that happens obliquely for the circulation of certain ideologies.
Circulation and exposure. The later is called hegemony (or Power
by Foucault) which Said picks up for his arguments.
11.
Through the representation of the Orient the West shows its
own modern intellectual position. Their judgement defines their own
intellectual traits.
12.
The slave does all the works and helps the master to progress.
Therefore the position of the master is actually determined by the
efforts of the slave, which is another way of saying- the slave
controls the master.
13.
To summarize point 11 and 12 in Saids voice- We know
ourselves negatively as the not other. A structuralist idea of binary.
14.
Bhabha
criticises
this
binarism
(even
Hegelian
binarism/dialectic). His key idea ambivalence (mixed feelings or
emotions). The general colonising force attitude and the attitude
harvested by knowledge (which turns into hatred) about the land
colonized.
15.
Submission and acquiescence (sly civility). Hybridity.

Works cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural
Theory. Viva Books. Third Edition, India, 2011.
Fry, Paul. Yale Lecture- Post-Colonial Criticism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UarXGSuyyrw
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: a User-Friendly Guide.
Routledge. Second Edition, United States, 2006.