Postcolonial literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Categories: Postcolonial literature | Literary movements | Literary criticism | Colonialism

Postcolonial literature (or "Post-colonial literature", sometimes called "New English Literature(s)") is literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated in colonial empires, and the literary expression of postcolonialism.

Postcolonial literary critics re-examine classic literature with a particular focus on the social "discourse" that shaped it. For instance, in Orientalism, Edward Said analyzes the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Lautréamont, exploring how they were influenced by and helped to shape a societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Postcolonial fictional writers interact with the traditional colonial discourse, but modify or subvert it; for instance by retelling a familiar story from the perspective of an oppressed minor character in the story, for example Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which was written as a pseudo-prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Often the protagonist of a postcolonial work will find him/herself in a struggle to establish an identity, feeling conflicted between an old, native world that is being abolished by the invasive forces of modernity and/or the new dominant culture.

Postcolonial literature uses a wide range of terms, like "writing back", re-writing and re-reading, which describe the interpretation of well-known literature under the perspective of the formerly colonized. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the protagonist is renamed several times, and exploited in several ways.

Other authors use different analogies for the colonized, but also very different approaches. The "anti-conquest narrative" recasts indigenous inhabitants of colonised countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers.^[1] This depicts the colonised people in a more human light but risks absolving colonisers of responsibility for addressing the impacts of colonisation by assuming that native inhabitants were "doomed" to their fate.^[1]

1 Notable authors by region
2 Postcolonial literary criticism
3 See also
4 References
5 Further Reading
6 External links

Notable authors by region

In Africa, Chinua Achebe set the standards for African literature with 1958's Things Fall Apart. Ayi Kwei Armah in "Two Thousand seasons" tries to establishe a history for Africa from an African perspective.

In the Americas, Isabel Allende from Chile contributes to Latin-American literature and occasionally writes in a style called magic realism also used by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a certain way of vivid storytelling. The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood redesigned the Canadian writing in a postcolonial, identity-seeking perspective of Southern Ontario Gothic writing.

In Asia, the areas of postcolonial writing are the Muslim and the Indian literature. Meena Alexander is probably best known for lyrical memoirs that deal sensitively with struggles of women and disenfranchised groups.

In times before the decolonisation, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Brontë had been not "postcolonial" authors, but had had specific interest within postcolonial theory in part because postcolonial authors such as Chinua Achebe and Jean Rhys (among others) engage and rework their novels. The same happens to Shakespeare's The Tempest, which has a colonial setting, and his Othello with its racial dynamic. The figure of Adamastor in the epic poem Os Lusíadas by Luís de Camões also plays a large part in African literature, being reworked by authors such as Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and André Brink.

This section needs to be expanded with J.M. Coetzee Maryse Condé Cyril Dabydeen Tsitsi Dangarembga Raywat Deonandan Buchi Emecheta Athol Fugard Nadine Gordimer Bonny Hicks Kazuo Ishiguro Hanif Kureishi Doris Lessing Earl Lovelace Gabriel García Márquez Bharati Mukherjee V. S. Naipaul Michael Ondaatje Jean Rhys Salman Rushdie Bapsi Sidhwa Wilbur Smith Wole Soyinka Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Yvonne Vera Derek Walcott Kath Walker