Post-Colonial English Writing Flashcards
General Info
• Two major forces that impacted writing in Great Britain since WWII: decolonisation and immigration
Post-colonial: problematic term:
• ”Post-” signalling first and foremost a temporal dimension
• But: how to recognise important writings during the period of colonisation?
• May imply whole range of experience from beginning to end of colonialism
• Also: new form of criticism / critical strategy, which reads texts in the light of the phenomenon of European colonialism since the 15th century
• How far does the ‘after-ness’ of the term range?
• In 1960s: ”Commonwealth literature” (launch of new Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 1965) but term is misleading and restricting
• Alternativeterm:“NewliteraturesinEnglish”–butproblematic implication of ‘junior’ literature
Types of Colony
• Colonies of settlement
• Canada, Australia, New Zealand
• Colonies of rule (India (including Bangladesh, Burma, and Pakistan), most of the African colonies)
• Colonies of both settlement and rule (Colonies of the Carribean and South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya)
India
• In terms of size, rich ancient history, cultural complexity, and the very intricate and long history of Britain‘s involvement with it (over a period of ca. 350 years) special status
• Almost a separate Indo-British entity in its own right
• Independence of India and Pakistan in 1947
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy
• Experimental novel; mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English, and idiomatic Englishàgrammar of colonial past is disordered and made strange
• NOT a reflection of actual language use in Nigeria
Dialogue with the Literary Past
• T. S. Eliot and the modernist tradition
• Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
• About post-partition Indian family; epigraph from Four Quartets
• Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage
• Migration from the Carribean to England, also epigraph from Four Quartets
• Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing
• Rhodesia novel, title is line from The Waste Land
• Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
• Nigerian man between cultures; title from Eliot‘s “The Journey of the Magi”
The Importance of Christian Discourses
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o,* Weep Not, Child * and* The River Between* : based partly on experiences from his schooling at a Church of Scotland mission school
• Amos Tutuola, Palm-Wine Drinkard ,based on Yoruba folktale, draws on John Bunyan‘s Pilgrim‘s Progress
“Writing Back”
Chinua Achebe, *Things Fall Apart *
• Representation of Igbo culture from the inside, from its own point of view, in its own richness and complexity
• Comparison between Igbo and British traditions (first, Igbo way of life; then arrival of British missionaries and British colonial government)
• Strategy of making the British strange for the reader
• “Writing back“ as challenging and subverting the dominant
• Strategy of decolonising minds, imaginations, and sensibilities
• Helps establishing field for post-colonial counter-discourses
• Chinua Achebe `replying‘ to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea to Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children to Forster,* A Passage to India*
• Other key texts that have served as sources of counter-discourses for postcolonial writers:
- Shakespeare, The Tempest
- Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
—>Instrumental in establishing an anxiety-ridden myth of first encounter between “civilised Europe” and the “virgin” but “savage” native Caribbean
“Writing-Back” Example James Joyce
• Also writing against British colonisers and their ideas of literary form as mimicry of colonialist culture
• Rejected writing ‘national’ literature and their celebration of military and aristocratic heroes (exemplified by Yeats and others)
• Instead: focus on underrepresented characters from humble backgrounds; Dublin’s common men and women (Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners)
• Created ‘nomadic’ fiction, stories of homecoming, travelling, restlessness in Ulysses
• Formal experiments: instead of linearity, broken plots, repetition, various forms and styles; characters who resists becoming heroes and who affirm Irishness; linguistic playfulness
“Writing-Back” Example Derek Walcott
• Omeros (1990), based on the Odyssey and the Iliad
• Set in St Lucia
• Celebration of ordinary men and women in their daily struggle
• Includes passage in which the poet-narrator visits Ireland and envisions Joyce as his guide
• Rejection of nostalgia for precolonial past
• Main characters: Achilles and Helen, Philoctetes, Hector
• Counterpoint: former English soldier Plunkett, coloniser’s perspective
Reading Postcolonial Literature
• Whose cultural capital (Bourdieu)?
• Problematic structures: the neo-imperialist implica;ons of a postcolonial literary/critical industry centred on, and largely catering to, the West’, an industry mainly articulated in English, depending on publishing houses in London and New York, offering ‘translated’ products for metropolitan consumers, and privileging ‘a handful of famous writers (Achebe, Naipaul, Rushdie)’ and ‘its three celebrity critics (Bhabha, Said, Spivak)“ (Huggan 2001:46, quoted in Innes 2007: 199)
•Nego;a;ng shiXing and overlapping iden;;es and their tensions
