Postcolonialism

Question 1

What is an aim of postcolonial criticism?

Answer 1

to undermine universalists claims by liberal humanist critics:
If we claim that great literature has a timeless and universal significance we thereby demote or disregard cultural, social, regional, and national differences in experience and outlook, preferring instead to judge all literature by a single, supposedly ‘universal’, standard.

Question 2

Who thought of Orientalism and othering and what does it mean?

Answer 2

Edward Said
Orientalism (1978)
•Challenging Western representations of foreign cultures as alien or exotic•Studying manifestations of the Other as a means of projecting unwanted characteristics of the Self.
The concept of ‘Othering’
•In relation to postcolonial criticism, Othering can be described as treating people from another group as essentially different from and generally inferior to the group you belong

Question 3

Who thought of mimicry and what does it mean?

Answer 3

Homi Bhabha -The Location of Culture (1994)
•Bhabha: mimicry is the result of the colonizer’s mission of “educating and civilizing” the colonial subject. •Mimicry: when members of a colonized society (say, Indians or Africans) imitate the language, dress, politics, or cultural attitude of their colonizers (say, the British or the French).
•Under colonialism and in the context of immigration, mimicry is seen as an opportunistic pattern of behavior: one copies the person in power, because one hopes to have access to that same power oneself.

Question 4

What is the definition and goals of postcolonial theory?

Answer 4

Definition: Postcolonialism describes anything involving colonial contact, from its beginnings to independence to the present -> from the 1970s on critics began to investigate the effects and aftereffects of imperialism
•Goals: Postcolonial critics want you to challenge the Eurocentrism of a text by noticing when and how a text that seems to be exclusively centered on European interests actually depends on non-European people, places, and culture. “Reading from the margins” adds to the text those historical and thematic dimensions that have been there all along, but played down or ignored

Question 5

What do these critics do?

Answer 5

1. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathiseacross boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of achieving this end.
3. They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially silent on matters concerned with colonialisation and imperialism.
4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in relevant literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity that is, the situation whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (for instance, that of the coloniser, through a colonial school system, and that of the colonised, through local and oral traditions).6.They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived ‘Otherness’ are seen as sources of energy and potential change