...Jasmine Williams English 103 Professor Bryan Henery 16 December 2015 Postcolonial Criticism When analyzing stories from a postcolonial criticism viewpoint, oftentimes one will see and oppressed group along with a dominant group. Postcolonial critics also see stereotypes in text as people without power are portrayed as the inferior ones. Oppressed individuals as seen from this viewpoint can also develop feelings of alienation. Postcolonial criticism can be similar to cultural studies, however it can have a unique perspective on literature and politics. This type of criticism can look at certain issues of power, politics, economics, and culture. Moreover, the authors can 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). In many works of literature, specifically those coming out of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent, we meet characters that are struggling with their identities in the wake...
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...challenges of self-determination and how they incorporate or reject the Western norms and conventions, such as legal or political systems, left in place after direct administration by colonial powers ended. Ironically, much early postcolonial theory, with its emphasis on overt rejection of imposed Western norms, was tied to Marxist theory, which also originated in Europe. Contemporary studies focus more on the effects of postcolonial globalization and the development of indigenous solutions to local needs. INTRODUCTION (Enote) By definition, postcolonialism is a period of time after colonialism, and postcolonial literature is typically characterized by its opposition to the colonial. However, some critics have argued that any literature that expresses an opposition to colonialism, even if it is produced during a colonial period, may be defined as postcolonial, primarily due to its oppositional nature. Postcolonial literature often focuses on race relations and the effects of racism and usually indicts white and/or colonial societies. Despite a basic consensus on the general themes of postcolonial writing, however, there is ongoing debate regarding the meaning of postcolonialism. Many critics now propose that the term should be expanded to include the literatures of Canada, the United States, and Australia. In his essay discussing the nature and boundaries of postcolonialism, Simon During argues for a more inclusive definition, calling it “the need, in nations, or groups which have...
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...So many words have been uttered while discussing of postcolonial studies, as it is a post modern way of intellectual discourse which shows analysis of the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In simplest and most familiar way, the hyphenated term post colonial means post or after the colonial period and it indicates something that happened after the end of formal colonization. Post-colonial has become useful because it raises large and important questions. Therefore, the widest definition of post colonial fiction easily includes Chinua Achebe’s novels. Postcolonial study delineates all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning to the end of colonial contact. Chinua Achebe’s novels contain the experiences of Nigerian people after the end of British Empire. Achebe’s novels are the replication of African history as well. Therefore, his novels describe an archetypal post colonial era African country. Chinua Achebe is one of the finest Nigerian novelists of the twentieth century, whose novels show various post colonial aspects in them. Achebe throws light on the changes in African society and politics, His four novels cover the entire colonial history of Africa from the early days of European advent to the post colonial aspects like retrieval of an identity and own past, language liberty, cultural change, disestablishment of Eurocentric norms and complexes of this period of perplexity. Achebe wrote novels chronologically one is attached to another as, pre-colonial...
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...James Clifford T. Santos Dr. Jocelyn Martin LIT 127.2 (Postcolonial Literature II) Ateneo De Manila University 10 February 2014 Of Interpreters, Schools, and Courts: An Analysis of the Postcolonial Themes of Language, Education, and Power in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Through his awareness of the European literary tradition of negatively stereotyping the African natives as uncivilized peoples and putting the West in the pedestal in terms of cultural superiority and advancement (Guthrie 51-52), it can be asserted that the renowned African novelist and intellectual Chinua Achebe may had realized, at one point in his life, that in order to have a more realistic portrayal of the dynamics of Western and non-Western contact, there is a need to break such convention which undeniably favours the West. Perhaps, this is the reason why Achebe had written Things Fall Apart in such a way that it provides readers the African point of view of culture, identity and colonization thereby eradicating the dominant and unwarranted perception that the peoples of Africa are mere savages that have no customs, beliefs and traditions. Indeed, by providing a somewhat balanced approach in portraying the dynamic societal changes experienced by the Ibo people due to the conflict between their traditional culture and the foreign culture brought by their English colonizers primarily through religious and educational instruction, Things Fall Apart indubitably qualifies as a relevant and interesting...
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...The Concept of the Outsider Literature often persecutes the most vulnerable, a person who lacks support and therefore power within society. Described by Terry Eagleton for The Guardian as the “literary mainstream”; these characters are often referred to as the Outsider due to their exclusion from the community in which the text is set. The characters who are referred to as Outsiders can be portrayed in different ways; their initial exclusion from society can ultimately lead to a narrative of their acquisition of power throughout the text but similarly, can portray a story of their maintenance of the minimal power they have over the course of the text’s plot. However, this is not to argue that some Outsiders presented within literature do not have power over the course of the development of the text so, as a consequence, remain excluded from the society. In this case, the text would then be considered an exposition of the character’s experience from their position in society rather than the author’s attempt of trying to integrate their character into society through their work. Furthermore, the author themselves may be considered an Outsider through their own status in society; they command their readers to be Outsiders themselves within the novel. As well as to read and observe the narrative in order to emulate the same feeling within themselves, within the reader or to have a specific impact on the issues surrounding humanity at the time. The contrast in the ways in which...
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...Yogendran Professor Frank Runcie Postcolonial Literature: Africa 09 March 2015 In Chinua Achebe’s Death Men’s Path, the main focus was to share a narrative, which emphasize the conflict between world-views and value systems. This story is about Michael Obi, a modern and ambitious young man who is appointed headmaster of the un-progressive Ndume Central School. Obi hopes to clean up the educational mission field and speed up its Christianizing mission. Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child and Colonialist Criticism leads the readers to thoroughly understand Dead Men's Path. In Colonist Criticism, the author criticizes the enduring colonialism in the criticism of African literature by non-Africans. The writer states, "If the text is judged from European perspective a text doesn't get right evaluation and the essence of the text is killed" which shows Achebe’s disagreement on the European colonial injustice, a habit of ruling and discriminating other and comparing African people their literature, art and culture. He argues that African literature should not be judged with the official literature since it has its own particularity. The mask of European civilization does not know the history of African people. So Achebe's claim is that colonized people should write their own history disregarding what has been already universalized. According to Achebe, there are two problems with Universalism; first every literature must speak of their own place and culture...
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...Postcolonialism By Patricia Waugh Summarized by Syed Saad Mukhtar M.Phil English Literature 1st Semester The Islamia University of Bahawalpur An academic discipline and theory featuring the methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain and respond to legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for economic exploitation of native people and their land. The term postcolonialism addresses itself to historical, political, cultural and textual branches of colonial encounter between West and Non-West dating from 16th century to present day. Postcolonialism is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies but it also designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across 20th century and beyond. The two very different traditions of Postcolonial thinking — the theoretical Post-Structuralist and Practical Political are thus linked in so far as some of the key concepts in postcolonialism. Postcolonialism therefore refers to those theories, texts, political strategies that engage in such questioning that aim to challenge structural inequalities and bring about social justice. It is often helpful to view Postcolonialism in comparative framework alongside political practices, with which it shares key objectives and expressions: Feminism. It is possible broadly speaking to trace three...
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...The Location of Culture, by Homi K. Bhabha; 285 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $49.95. This book assembles several of Homi Bhabha's most significant essays, allowing for an examination of his contribution to contemporary literary theory. As a self-described postcolonial critic, often compared with Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity, which he develops in "Signs Taken For Wonders" and several other essays included in this collection. Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects, "[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different--a mutation, a hybrid" (p. 111). This hybrid trace contradicts both the attempt to fix and control indigenous cultures and the illusion of cultural isolation or purity. His project thus adapts poststructuralist challenges to stable or fixed identities, attempting to "rename" postmodernism from a postcolonial perspective (p. 175), and allowing sustained attention to the ways in which race, gender, community, and nationality converge. One of his major contributions to theories of cultural production and identity is that he examines these various intersections closely, and avoids simply listing them or elevating one aspect of his analysis over others. Eight of the twelve chapters in this volume have been...
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...Portland State University English 547: Arthurian Literature Tobias Wilms 913944913 Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King in the Discourse of Postcolonial Criticism Introduction: Ever since his name was first mentioned by the Welsh monk Nennius in the 9th century, writers modified and applied the great King Arthur's popular legend to convey their various political, religious and social beliefs. The Victorian author Alfred Lord Tennyson followed this tradition exemplarily and enwraped his imperialistic views in the famous Arthurian poem Idylls of the King. The aim of this paper is to accentuate his political and social ideologies from the context and introduce to some of the reactions of postcolonial critics. Idylls of the King, a Piece of Victorian Literature: Especially if Tennyson's Idylls are the first and only piece of Arthurian literature one has read, one can irritatedly ignore its dedication and letter to the royals Albert and Victoria, and simply summarize it as the story of a medieval King, the adventures of his accompanying knights, the fortune of the ladies at his court, and the creation and downfall of his kingdom in twelve books. Those readers, however, who are familiar with the previous versions of Arthurian stories written by Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory, for instance, cannot be satisfied with that. They wonder about Tennyson's framing poems “Dedication” and “To the Queen”, stumble over the changes the author made in his adoption of the Arthurian...
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...Penguin, 1990. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Supplementary Texts and Resources: Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds.. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Litaratures. New York: Routledge, 1989. Baer, William, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford UP, 1973. ------ed., Homer: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, PA.: Dufour P, 1991. Davies, Gregson, ed. The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. “Derek Walcott.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Volume 42 (1987). Dove, Rita. “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14, 1 (1987): 49-76. Finley, M.I. The World of Odysseus. New York: Signet, 1974. Fox, Robert Elliot. “Derek Walcott: History as Dis-Ease.” Callalloo 9, 2 (1986): 331-40. Fuller, Mary. “Forgetting the Aeneid.” American Literary History 4,3 (1992): 517-38. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literature. Oxford UP, 1989. Griffin, Jasper. Homer on Life and Death. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Hamner, Robert D. ed. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington: Three Continents P, 1993. ------Derek...
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...Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk HEIKE HÄRTING N HIS REVIEW of Anil’s Ghost, Todd Hoffmann describes Michael Ondaatje’s novel as a “mystery of identity” (449). Similarly, Aritha van Herk identifies “fear, unpredictability, secrecy, [and] loss” (44) as the central features of the novel and its female protagonist. Anil’s Ghost, van Herk argues, presents its readers with a “motiveless world” of terror in which “no identity is reliable, no theory waterproof” (45). Ondaatje’s novel tells the story of Anil Tessera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist working for a UN-affiliated human rights organization. Haunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation, Anil takes up an assignment in Sri Lanka, where she teams up with a local archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to uncover evidence of the Sri Lankan government’s violations of human rights during the country’s period of acute civil war. Yet, by the end of the novel, Anil has lost the evidence that could have indicted the government and is forced to leave the country, carrying with her a feeling of guilt for her unwitting complicity in Sarath’s death. On one hand, Anil certainly embodies an ethical (albeit rather schematic) critique of the failure of global justice. On the other, her character stages diaspora, in Vijay Mishra terms, as the “normative” and “ exemplary … condition of late modernity” (“Diasporic” 441) — a condition usually associated...
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...What is Critical Theory?DefinitionGenerally, Critical Theory is a broad approach to challenging and destabilizing established knowledge.In a more focused sense, Critical Theory comes out of the German 'Frankfurt School,' (who called it Critical Theory of Society or Critical Social Theory)which emphasizes that all knowledge is historical and biased, and that 'objective' knowledge is illusory.DiscussionCritical Theory starts from Marx and Freud and expands through the 20th century to cover areas such as literary criticism, linguistics, semiotics, psychology, philosophy, feminism, screen theory, and includes methods such as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism.Critical Theory is such a huge area, it is almost impossible to cover it in total depth. This section is based on an extension of a study done as a part of a postgraduate university course in psychology. | What is literary criticism? Literary criticism has multiple functions. It is used as a vehicle to interpret or analyze various types of literature, including poetry, novels, and plays. There are many different types, or schools, of literary criticism that can be applied to works of literature. Critical essays are the most common form of literary criticism, and they are generally found in scholarly journals or in books of collected essays or anthologies. In effect, literary criticism explores different possible meanings that a text may have. Criticism may look at an idea in a single text or may...
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...Journal of Postcolonial Writing ISSN: 1744-9855 (Print) 1744-9863 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20 “He does not understand our customs”: Narrating orality and empire in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Jarica Linn Watts To cite this article: Jarica Linn Watts (2010) “He does not understand our customs”: Narrating orality and empire in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart , Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 46:1, 65-75, DOI: 10.1080/17449850903478189 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449850903478189 Published online: 27 Jan 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 501 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjpw20 Download by: [Indiana University Libraries] Date: 24 February 2016, At: 16:43 Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 46, No. 1, February 2010, 65–75 “He does not understand our customs”: Narrating orality and empire in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Jarica Linn Watts* University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA Downloaded by [Indiana University Libraries] at 16:43 24 February 2016 jarica.watts@utah.edu Jarica 0 100000February 46 2010 &Article OriginalofFrancis 1744-9855 (print)/1744-9863 JournalandPostcolonial 10.1080/17449850903478189(online) RJPW_A_448194.sgm TaylorLinnWatts 2010 Writing Francis This article delineates different strains of...
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...the ideas and critiques of society and culture are still valid today. Shakespeare was an English man who wrote plays that carried many similar themes such as love and betrayal but he often incorporated many critical undertones in which he offered what could be viewed as his own opinion on many social and cultural realities. Many of these ideas are still applicable today and this is perhaps one of the reasons that Shakespeare’s plays have managed to not only stay relevant, but also gain popularity. An important issue in the Arab world is the idea of post colonialism. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, many Arabic countries became colonized by Britain and Italy. Historians and social studies experts have written on the nature of the postcolonial Arab world, painting it as a sometimes-complicated fixture. For example, in certain regions such as Algeria, the French colonization brought with it the imposition of French as the official language. This adoption of a new official language caused the Arabic tongue to fade over time. In this sense, the Arabic language became a sign of resistance and defiance....
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...World Literature 2310 Postcolonial Analysis Postcolonial theory has many themes ranging from identity to hybridity. Many, if not all of these themes can be found in any literature reading. The theme that is the most interesting is oppression. Oppression can be displayed in many ways and forms within any literature reading and can be obvious, or very subtle. All the themes seem to flow together and are often times created from the effects of another theme. For example, oppression can be an effect of identity. Identity is how a person sees themselves and those that are not at the same class or level of knowledge as them. This starts the theme of oppression. Oppression is when someone has control or power over someone or a group of people and controls their actions and way of life. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the city of Uruk is ruled by Gilgamesh, who is part god and part human that was created by the gods. With his power as a ruler of Uruk, he created his own set of rules for the people of Uruk to follow that may not have been a part of their everyday lives before Gilgamesh arrived in their city. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, a townsperson tells Enkidu “Gilgamesh the king is about to celebrate marriage with the Queen of Love, and he still demands to be first with the bride, the king to be first, and the husband to follow”(6). This is one example of how Gilgamesh uses his power to oppress the lives of the people of Uruk to do as he says. Gilgamesh also takes the young sons...
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