The central issues are: 1. The rejection of the “master narrative” of Western imperialism, 2. Concern with the construction of the colonial and postcolonial subject, and, 3. Disestablishing the Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values.
1. The colonial other is marginalized and subordinated in the master narrative where the central power is western imperialism. Traditionally, the Eurocentric notions regulated the art and literature. But here there is a revolution. The master narrative is replaced by a counter-narrative. By doing this the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history manipulated by Europeans.
2. Postcolonial studies are also concerned with the categories of by means of which this subject conceives itself and perceives the world within which it lives and acts. The colonial subject=Subaltern. Subaltern is a British word stands for a low ranked military personnel. Sub=under. Alter=other. (Latin) Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak is an important work in this field.
3. The main agenda of post colonialist thinkers is to destroy the centre that holds the power (here it is Eurocentric norms) so that both the colonial and postcolonial writers can come under one umbrella.
Frantz Fanon worked for the French during the French colonial
occupation in Algeria. He first worked
for the French and then joined with the freedom fighters, and thus very well
knew the different perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. His important works are The
Wretched of the Earth (1963) and Black
Skin, White Masks (1967).
ØAccording to Frantz Fanon the colonizer
destroyed the very soul of the repressed and suffering native. The psychology of colonialism is that when
the colonial paints the native as evil, pagan and primitive, over a period of
time the native begins to accept this prejudiced and radicalized view as true.
ØThe native comes to see himself as
evil, pagan and primitive. The black man
loses his sense of self and identity because he can see only through the eyes of
the white man. For the native, man means white man
because he doesn’t see himself as a man at all.
The term ‘culture’ for the native becomes the ‘culture’ of the white
man.
ØFor the white man, the native is
always a NEGATIVE,
PRIMITIVE OTHER; the very opposite to what he (white man) and his
culture stands for. Fanon here develops
a psychoanalytical theory of Colonialism.
Fanon suggests that the European self develops in its relation and encounter with the ‘Other’
(the native). Thus the Colonialism
engages the white and the native in an ‘encounter/relation’ where one develops
only in its contrast with the other.
ØFor the native the only way of
dealing with this psychological inadequacy is by trying to be as ‘white’ as
possible. The native takes on the
western values, religion, language and practices of the white colonial and
rejects his own conditions. HERE HE PUTS
ON ‘WHITE MASKS’.
ØHowever this ‘mask’ over the black
skin is not a perfect solution or fit. Fanon
argues that the native experiences a schizophrenic condition as a result of
this duality. The buildup of this sense of
inadequacy and inferiority in the colonized’s psyche, argues Fanon, results in violence.
ØViolence is a form of
self-assertion. When the native
discovers that he cannot hope to become truly ‘white’ or expel the whites, his
violence erupts against his own people. Thus,
tribal wars, for Fanon, are an instance of this; the violence generated through
the colonial system where the ‘wretched’ turn upon each other, haunted by a
failure to turn against the colonial master.
ØFanon recognized the significance of Cultural
Nationalism when he propounded the idea of a national literature (in
Wretched of the Earth) leading to a national consciousness. His deployment of the term national culture
was an attempt to plead for a greater pan-African cause. The blacks had to create their own history,
and write their own stories. And it is
through this CONTROL OVER REPRESENTATION that the native can break free of the
colonial shackles.
ØSuch a national culture believed
Fanon, must Return to African Myths and cultural practices.
ØIt is within these mythic, cultural
and even mystic traditions that black identity can be resurrected.
A NATIONAL CULTURE IS FRAMED IN THREE
STAGES
1.The native
intellect is under the influence of the colonizer’s culture, and seeks to
emulate and assimilate it by abandoning his own. He tries to be as white as possible.
2.The native
discovers that he can never become truly white, or white enough for the
colonial masters to treat him as equal. Now
he returns to study his own culture, and might even romanticize his traditions
and past. Here there is no critical
engagement with the native culture, just a celebratory tone.
3.In the 3rd
stage the native is truly anti-colonial.
He joins the ranks of his people and battles colonial domination. He carefully analyses his own culture. Such analyses help him to abandon these
elements of native culture that are dated or even oppressive. So that a new future is possible.
WHAT HAPPENS IN A POSTCOLONIAL STATE [AFTER GETTING FREEDOM FROM THE COLONISER]
OR NEO-COLONIALISM
Fanon drew unfavourable parallels between the
colonial masters and the elite of the postcolonial nations. He argued that the power struggles between
the colonial master and the native subject ends with political
independence. However, ironically this
soon emerges in a different form: the battle for power between the elites and
the rest in the postcolonial state.
Native elites occupy the spaces of power once
occupied by the white masters, and the corruption, oppression and exploitation
of the working classes continue this time at the hands of fellow natives. This, in effect, is NEO-COLONIALISM. The middle classes and the intellectual
classes that were educated in the colonial system now acquire power and
duplicate the unjust and exploitative colonial system even after political
independence.
Emerged out of developments within literary studies in the late 1970s as the revolution in ‘theory’ was extended to encompass the cultural, political and economic legacy of empire and its aftermath. For many, the pivotal moment in the development of postcolonialism came with the publication of Edward Said’s path-breaking book ORIENTALISM in 1978. Here, Said linked the cultural and intellectual discourse of ‘the West’ with the material practices of colonialism. This concern with the relationship between culture and power is the dominant feature of postcolonialism, which has broadened into a disciplinary sub-field in its own right. Nevertheless, it is also a highly contested and, to a great extent, controversial area of study and this is reflected in diasgreements over the term itself.
The term ‘postcolonialism’ has emerged from these controversies as a way of marking the existence of a field of discourse rather than a particular theoretical concept – the absence of the hyphen indicating perhaps the lack of substantive content within the term. However, this is not to imply the field is therefore theoretically empty. On the contrary, it is distinguished, if not fraught, by theoretical complexity and richness; indeed, for some it is overly theoretical and this in itself is reason to suspect that far from increasing our understanding, postcolonialism tends to obfuscate the urgent political, economic and social crises that have been brought about and intensified during and after colonialism. Many critics charge it with concentrating too much on culture at the expense of a genuinely radical critique of the materialities of power and inequality in a post-colonial age. The absence of the hyphen is perhaps indicative of the indeterminacy of what exactly is meant by ‘post-colonial’ (i.e. with a hyphen). The ‘post’ clearly refers to and implies a period ‘after’ colonialism and in this strict literal sense the object of postcolonial studies is the historical period of the late twentieth century as the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries broke up and former colonies achieved their political independence. However, this is unsatisfactory because to suggest that colonialism has ended is to overlook the fact that the configurations of power in the colonial world have remained largely intact in the post-colonial period. That is, far from achieving independence, the former colonies have now succumbed to more subtle forms of domination.
Analysis of neo-colonialism and the structures of domination and subordination in the postcolonial period is one of the key features of postcolonialism and so the hyphen seems misplaced from that perspective. It has been suggested that the ‘post’ refers to everything that happens after the colonial intervention so that historically postcolonialism encompasses the colonial period as well as its aftermath. This is one reason why ‘colonial discourse analysis’ is also one of the key sub-fields of postcolonialism. In examining the production and reproduction of discourses produced by and for colonialism, in deconstructing their rationales and habits of mind, in analysing colonial representations of the subjugated peoples, colonial discourse analysis seeks to lay bare the processes through which colonialism was practised culturally as well as materially, and how ideologies justifying colonialism were disseminated and embedded into consciousness.
Colonial discourse analysis adopts Foucauldian concepts of discourse that conceive of culture as a material practice, and rejects criticism of discourse analysis as thereby privileging cultural critique over material analysis. Others, however, have criticized postcolonialism for privileging the colonial encounter as the central fact in the histories of colonized peoples. This takes for granted the centrality of European experience and posits the experience of the colonized as an adjunct to that. It thereby replicates at the level of analysis precisely that kind of dependency that remains a feature of contemporary neo-colonialism, leading some critics to suggest that postcolonialism is the ‘cultural logic’ of neo-colonialism writ small in the language of the metropolitan academy. Certainly, the theoretical sophistication of post-colonial theory, and its sometimes difficult and opaque language, extends itself to criticism that postcolonialism is an over-elaborate, abstracted and self-indulgent form of cultural analysis that does little to address the politically urgent problems of the formerly colonized world.
The writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, who, along with Said have been characterized as the ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, raise objections because of their dense style. Yet, particularly in the case of Spivak, this may be seen as a postcolonial strategy of ‘deforming’ the discourse of European knowledge, a discourse that Said has shown to be deeply implicated in colonialism itself.
Ambiguity concerning the temporal scope of postcolonialism is offset by a fair degree of consensus concerning its geographical provenance. Postcolonialism sees modern colonialism as having been global in scope and so it concerns itself with a global agenda, concentrating as much on the former European (or Western) ‘centre’ as the colonial ‘peripheries’. It has extended its concern into debates concerning multiculturalism, diaspora, racism and ethnicity as the mass migrations in the postwar period by formerly colonized peoples have radically transformed the cultures and societies of their erstwhile masters. In addition, a generation of feminist scholars have examined the intersections of gender and sexuality with colonial and post-colonial discourses on race, ethnicity and nation.
