Literary Theory and Criticism, Part-VII

Postcolonial Theory

For the purposes of the study of literature the most relevant concern of postcolonial thought has been the decentralization of western culture and its values. Seen from the perspective of a postcolonial world, it has been the major works of thought of Western Europe and American Culture that have dominated philosophy and critical theory as well as works of literature throughout a large part of the world, especially those areas which were formerly under colonial rule. Derrida’s concept of a ‘white mythology’, which has attempted to impose itself on the entire world, has lent support to the postcolonial attack on the dominance of western ideologies. The postmodern rejection of ‘grand narratives’, universalizing western modes of thought, has also been very influential (see the section on postmodernism).The most important writers among postcolonial theorists are Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and G C Spivak.

Edward Said (1935–)

Said is concerned to relate poststructuralist theories of discourse, especially that of Foucault, to real political  problems in the world. His most important work in this respect is Orientalism (1978). Said distinguishes between three usages of the term ‘orientalism’. Firstly, it refers to the long period of cultural and political relations between Europe and Asia. Secondly, the term is used to refer to the academic study of oriental languages and culture which dates from the early nineteenth century. And thirdly, it is used to refer to the stereotypical views of the Orient developed by many generations of western writers and scholars, with their prejudiced views of orientals as inherently criminal and deceitful. He includes evidence, not only from literature, but also from such sources as colonial government documents, histories, studies of religion and language, travel books etc. The distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’ exists, in Said’s view, only in ‘imaginative geography’. Said’s analyses of various social discourses are therefore essentially deconstructive and ‘against the grain’. His aim is to ‘decentre’ awareness of the ‘Third World’ and provide a critique which undermines the dominance of ‘First World’ discourses.

For Said, all the representations of the Orient by the West constituted a determined effort to dominate and subjugate it. Orientalism served the purposes of western hegemony (in Gramsci’s sense): to legitimize western imperialism and convince the inhabitants of such regions that accepting western culture was a positive civilizing process. In defining the East, orientalism also defined what the West conceived itself to be (in the way of binary oppositions). Stressing the sensuality, primitiveness and despotism of the East underlined the rational and democratic qualities of the West. In the light of Said’s theories, literature written by native populations could now be seen in a new light. Did the writers comply with western hegemony or oppose it? In his essay, The World, the Text and the Critics (1983), Said criticised all modes of textual analysis which considered texts as being separate from the world in which they exist. The notion of it being possible for there to be infinite possible readings of a text could only be entertained by such severing of the text from the real world.

Homi Bhabha (1950–)

Homi Bhabha is essentially interested in exploring noncanonical texts which reflect the margins of society in a postcolonial world. He explores the subtle interrelations between cultures, the dominant and the subjugated. Of especial interest to him is the way in which subjugated races mimic their subjugators. These ideas are explored especially in the volume The Location of Culture (1994). There are examples of such ‘mimics’ in several wellknown works of literature which trace the relations between the British and the Indians: in the works of Rudyard Kipling, such as Kim, and in E M Forster’s A Passage to India. They exist in between cultures and, neither fully of the one nor of the other, are in fact hybrids.

Bhabha argues that the interaction between colonizer and colonised leads to the fusion of cultural norms, which confirms the colonial power but also, in its mimicry, threatens to destabilise it. This is possible because the identity of the coloniser is inherently unstable, existing in an isolated expatriate situation. The coloniser’s identity exists by virtue of its difference. It materialises only when in direct contact with the colonised. Before that, its only reality is in the ideology of orientalism, as defined by Said.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942–)

Spivak has been described as the first truly feminist postcolonial theorist. She criticises western feminism especially for focusing on the world of white, middle-class heterosexual concerns. She is also interested in the role of social class and has focused on what in postcolonial studies has become known as the ‘subaltern’, originally a military term referring to those who are in a lower rank or position. Its usage in critical theory is derived from the writings of Gramsci. Spivak uses the term to refer to all the lower levels of colonial and postcolonial society: the unemployed, the homeless, subsistence farmers etc. Of course, she is especially interested in the fate of the ‘female subaltern’. She is concerned that the ‘female subaltern’ is not misrepresented (in Can the Subaltern Speak?, 1988). Spivak argues that, in the traditional Indian practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, neither the Indians nor the British colonisers allowed the women themselves to express their own views. She combines Marxism and a deconstructive approach in analysis of colonialist texts, showing how they create false oppositions between a united colonialist consciousness and a fictional primitive chaos. It is possible, she argues, through deconstruction of the text, to reveal the instability of these oppositions, the hollowness in fact of the colonial power structure.