The Introduction to Post Colonial Literature

Introduction to Post Colonial Literature:

Post-colonial literature is a body of literary writing that responds to the intellectual discourse of European colonization in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and other post-colonial areas

throughout the globe. Post-colonial literature addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country and of a nation,

especially the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated colonial people and it also is a literary critique of and about post-colonial literature the undertones of which carry, communicate and justify racialism and colonialism. The contemporary forms of post-colonial literature present literary and intellectual critiques of the post-colonial discourse by endeavouring to assimilate post-colonialism and its literary expressions.

Post-colonial literary criticism re-examines colonial literature, especially concentrating upon the social discourse between the colonizer and the colonized, that shaped and produced the literature.

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said analyzed the fiction of Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Lautreamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse) and explored how they were influenced and how they helped to shape the societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fiction writers deal with the traditional colonial discourse, either by modifying or by subverting it or both.

An exemplar postcolonial novel is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys, a predecessor story to Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, a literary variety wherein a familiar story is re-told from the perspective of a subaltern protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, who, within the story and the plot is a socially oppressed minor character who is renamed and variously exploited. As such, in post-colonial literature, the protagonist usually struggles with questions of Identity- social identity, cultural identity, national identity, etc. usually caused by experiencing the psychological conflicts inherent to cultural assimilation to living between the old, native world and the dominant hegemony of the invasive social and cultural institutions of the colonial imperialism of a Mother Country.

The "anti-conquest narrative" recasts the natives (indigenous inhabitants) of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers. 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. Though the term postcolonial literature has taken on many meanings, the following four subjects are important for discussion:

1.Social and cultural change or erosion: It seems that after independence is achieved, one main question arises-what is the new cultural identity?

2.Misuse of power and exploitation: Even though the large power ceases to control them as a colony, the settlers still seem to continue imposing power over the native. There still remains questions of independence and from whom. The rat race for power accelerates.

3. Colonial abandonment and alienątion: This is generally vital to examine individuals and not the ex-colony as a whole. The individuals tend to ask themselves in this new country, where do I fit in and how do I make a living?

4. Use of English language literature: It is debatable whether the target of post-colonial studies, i.e. the analysis of post-colonial literature and culture can be reached neglecting literary works in the original languages of post-colonial nations.

In a broad sense, postcolonial literature is writing which has been affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. In India's case, this includes novels, poetry and drama which were written both during and after the British Raj which came to a formal conclusion with Indian Independence in August 1947. Although writing from India and other formerly colonized countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica, Pakistan and Singapore have distinctive features, postcolonial literature has some significant concerns. They are as follows:

1) Colonialism was a means of claiming and exploiting foreign lands, resources and people. Enslavement, indentured labour and migration forced many indigenous populations to move from the places that they considered “home". Postcolonial literature attempts to counteract their resulting alienation from their surroundings by restoring a connection between indigenous people and places through description, narration and dramatization.

2) During colonization, the indigenous cultures of those countries subjected to foreign rule were often sidelined, suppressed and openly denigrated in favour of elevating the social and cultural preferences and conventions of the colonizers. In response, much postcolonial literature seeks to assert the richness and validity of indigenous cultures in an effort to restore pride in practices and traditions that were systematically degraded under colonialism.

3) Colonizers often depicted their colonial subjects as existing "outside of history" in unchanging, timeless societies, unable to progress or develop without their intervention and assistance. In this way, they justified their actions, including violence against those who resisted colonial rule. Revising history to tell things from the perspective of those colonized is thus a major preoccupation of postcolonial writing.

Characteristics:

1) Resistant descriptions Postcolonial writers use detailed descriptions of indigenous people, places and practices to counteract or "resist" the stereotypes, inaccuracies and generalizations which the colonizers circulated in educational, legal, political and social texts and settings.

2) Although many colonized countries are home to multiple indigenous languages. In India, for example, more than 12 languages exist alongside English. Many postcolonial writers choose to write in the colonizers' "tongue". However, authors such as Arundhati Roy deliberately play with English, remoulding it to reflect the rhythms and syntax of indigenous languages and inventing new words and styles to demonstrate mastery of a language that was forced upon them.

3) Another characteristic is reworking colonial art-forms. Authors such as Arundhati Roy rework European art-forms like the novel to reflect indigenous modes of invention and creation. They reshape imported colonial art-forms to incorporate the style, structure and themes of indigenous modes of creative expression such as oral poetry and dramatic performances.

The post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries or literature written in colonizing countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on basically the following:

First, the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities and inscribes the inferiority of the colonized people

Second, on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness. It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized countries. Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance:

1. Otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other, every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define;

2. The western concept of the oriental is based on the Manichean allegory: if the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil. Simply to reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and identity-destroying power.

3. Colonized peoples are highly diverse in their nature and in their traditions and as beings in cultures, they a, re both constructed and changing, so that while they may be 'other' from the colonizers, they are also different one from another and from their own past and should not be totalized or essentialized, through such concepts as a black consciousness, Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This totalization and essentialization is often a form of nostalgia which has its inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of the colonized and it serves to give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while mystifying that of others.

4. The colonized people will also be other than their pasts which can be reclaimed but never reconstituted and so must be revisited and realized in partial, fragmented ways.

Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of resistance as subversion or opposition or mimicry but with the haunting problem that resistance always inscribes the resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a two-edged sword. As well, the concept of resistance carries with it or can carry with its ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity, individuality, etc., which ideas may not have been held or held in the same way, in the colonized culture's view of humankind.

On a simple political or cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce a literature which helps to reconstitute the identity of the colonized one may have to function in at the very least the means of production of the colonizers -the writing, publishing, advertising and production of books, for example. These may well require a centralized economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions. 

The concept of producing national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept foreign to the traditions of the colonized people, who (a) had no literature as it is conceived in the western traditions or in fact no literature or writing at all.

( b) did not see art as having the same function as constructing and defining cultural identity.

( c)  were like the people of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different geographical/political/economic/cultural world. It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid identity, which is created or called forth by the colonists' attempts to constitute and represent identity.

The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or convey in the cultural traditions of colonized people.

There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized country can reclaim or reconstitute its identity in a language that is now but was not its own language and genres which are now but were not the genres of the colonized. One result is that the literature may be written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized people or area, which language use does not read like Standard English and in which literature the standard literary allusions and common metaphors and symbols may be inappropriate or may be replaced by allusions and tropes which are alien to British culture and usage. It can become very difficult ththanor others to recognize or respect the work as literature.

There are times when the violation of the aesthetic norms of western literature is inevitable,

1. As colonized writers search to encounter their culture's ancient yet transformed heritage, and

2. As they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so pressing that the normal aesthetic transformations of western high literature are not relevant, make no sense.

The idea that good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced at a point in a culture's history and therefore for a particular cultural usage not be good literature at all, is difficult for us who are raised in the culture which strong aesthetic ideals to accept.

The development of hybrid and reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven, disparate and might defy those notions of order and common sense which may be central not only to western thinking but to literary forms and traditions produced through western thought.

The term 'hybrid' used above refers to the concept of hybridity, an important concept in post-colonial theory, referring to the integration of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures. The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the cross-fertilization of cultures, can be seen as positive enriching and dynamic, as well as oppressive. “Hybridity" is also a useful concept for helping to break down the false sense that colonized cultures or colonizing cultures for that matter are monolithic or have essential, unchanging features.

The representation of these uneven and often hybrid, polyglot, multivalent cultural sites may not look very much like the representations of bourgeois culture in western art, ideologically shaped as western art is to represent its own truths about itself. 

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the middle passage of slavery and in slavery, the voyage out of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because of such spatial histories of displacement now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of global media technologies make the question of how culture signifies or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences -literature, art, music, ritual, life, death and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation-migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. The naturalized, unifying discourse of nation, people or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of cultures particularity cannot be readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, the advantage of this position is that it makes one increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.