00196--What is Post-Colonial Reading?

Post-Colonial Reading is an approach (that includes the reading and rereading of texts) toward texts of both metropolitan and colonial cultures to draw deliberate attention to the deep and inexorable effects of colonization on literary production; anthropological accounts; historical records; administrative and scientific writing. It is a form of deconstructive reading most usually applied to works emanating from the colonizers (but may be applied to works by the colonized) which demonstrates the extent to which the text contradicts its underlying assumptions (civilization, justice, aesthetics, sensibility, race) and reveals its (often unwitting) colonialist ideologies and processes.