POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS- II Semester

POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS [ENG2C08] STUDY MATERIAL II SEMESTER CORE COURSE MA ENGLISH (2019 Admission onwards) UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION CALICUT UNIVERSITY- P.O MALAPPURAM- 673635, KERALA 190008 ENG2C08-POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT STUDY MATERIAL SECOND SEMESTER MA ENGLISH (2019 ADMISSION ONWARDS) CORE COURSE: ENG2C08 : POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS Prepared by: SMT. SABINA K MUSTHAFA Assistant Professor on Contract Department of English University of Calicut Scrutinized by: Dr. K.M.SHERRIF Associate Professor & Head Department of English University of Calicut ENG2C08-POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS CONTENTS SECTION A: POETRY 1. A K RAMANUJAN: “SELF-PORTRAIT” 2. DOM MORAES: “A LETTER” “SINBAD” 3. LEOPOLD SENGHOR: “NEW YORK” 4. GABRIEL OKARA: “THE MYSTIC DRUM” 5. DAVID DIOP: “AFRICA” 6. ALLEN CURNOW: “HOUSE AND LAND” 7. A D HOPE: “AUSTRALIA” 8. JACK DAVIS: “ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA” 9. MARGARET ATWOOD: “JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR” 10. DEREK WALCOTT: “RUINS OF A GREAT HOUSE” 11. EE TIANG HONG: “ARRIVAL” 12. ALMAGHIR HASHMI: “SO WHAT IF I LIVE IN A HOUSE MADE BY IDIOTS?” 13. KAMAU BRATHWAITE: “NEGUS” SECTION B 1. WOLE SOYINKA: THE ROAD 2. GIRISH KARNAD: HAYAVADANA 3. TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER: OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD SECTION C 1. CHINUA ACHEBE: THINGS FALL APART 2. V. S NAIPAUL: A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS 3. MARGARET LAWRENCE: THE STONE ANGEL 4. KHALED HOSSEINI: THE KITE RUNNER INTRODUCTION POSTCOLONIALISM We encounter a remarkably wide range of literary texts that come from parts of the world as varied as India, West Indies, Africa, Canada, Australia and South America against the backdrop of colonialism and resistance to colonialism, cultural legacies of colonialism as well as those who want to actively engage with the process of decolonization or think through the process of decolonization. Postcolonial literature is a fast expanding field of literary studies and just the number of academic journals, of books, of monograph series, of conference proceedings that are regularly brought out with the word postcolonial or postcolonialism in their title and that very number is now mind boggling. The term postcolonialism is composed of two different elements. The major element is the word “colonialism” but there is also a very important prefix attached to the word which is “post”. The prefix “post” adds an important dimension to our understanding. In the dictionary, generally, the meaning is “behind or after”. If we attach it after a noun then ‘post’ indicates something that happens or comes after the event. Postcolonial means “after colonialism”. Generally, the term refers to the period after a former colony gains its independence. For instance, India became postcolonial in 1947, when it became a nation of its own and stopped being a colony of the British Empire. But “postcolonial” refers to more than just the formation of an independent government. Colonialism exists as ideologies and practices that assume supremacy of the colonizing culture and these do not end when the colonialists leave. Rather, “postcolonial” may refer best to the time period when a previously colonized culture grapples with the meaning of its identity as an independent entity. What language will a postcolonial society speak? Would that be of the colonizers, which had been the official language, or any indigenous languages? How will the history of the postcolonial nation be taught in their schools or in the schools of the colonizing country? Much postcolonial literary theory examines how authors deal with the issues and contradictions of life in formerly colonized cultures. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim and we cannot understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy”, “European literature”, or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of postcolonial theory has been sensibly debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended. Indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally established, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century, especially theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the last four decades, it has remained simultaneously attached to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and devoted to politics and justice in the contemporary scenario. It has taken multiple forms: • It has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; • It has been dedicated to accounting for globalization and global modernity; • It has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains steadfast to those who continue to suffer its effects; and • It has been interested in continually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory is centrally concerned with examining the mechanisms through which the colonizing powers persuaded the colonized people to accept a foreign culture as ‘better’ than their own original methods of government and social organization. Among the most important kinds of power/knowledge brought by the colonizers was the construction of the concept of ‘race’, and more specifically the racial binary opposition of ‘white’ and ‘other’ – be that other ‘black’, ‘yellow’,‘ brown’, ‘red’, or whatever other colour became the signifier for the ‘otherness’ of the colonized people. In the case of the United States, the ‘native’ population was itself defined as white. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Therefore, postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world. Some important terms to be noted under postcolonialism: SUBALTERN A term taken from the colonial military context meaning a non-white soldier of inferior rank, which is used in postcolonial theory to denote a member of the colonized population. Gayatri Spivak uses the term specifically to refer to the lowest layers of a colonial or postcolonial society: the homeless, the day labourers, the unemployed, arguing that these subaltern populations are voiceless and invisible in both colonial and post- or neocolonial cultures. In her article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Spivak focuses on women as subalterns in debates between British and Indian cultures around the issue of sati or widow-burning; women themselves do not participate, from either perspective, in the debate. HYBRIDITY In the postmodern sense, a hybrid is any phenomenon that mixes elements from two distinct traditions or practices. Most post-structuralist theory, for instance, is a hybrid of various modes of thought or disciplines: psychoanalytic, Marxist, linguistic, anthropological, literary. Hybridity often causes deconstruction. Hybridity often comes up in postcolonial theory as a way to describe emerging forms of identity and status that arise in the postcolonial and postmodern world. Homi Bhabha discusses hybridity as the place between two conflicting cultures or moments, when identities are destabilized and deconstructed. One is a hybrid if one belongs to more than one identity category, such as being Islamic (religious) and Turkish (national). Identity categories based on race, class, gender, and nationality, Bhabha argues, are continually being challenged and undermined by hybridity, by people who move across boundaries and inhabit the in between spaces of cultures. The counterattack to postmodern hybridity is the attempt to purify a race, culture, or ethnicity, often by genocide; ‘ethnic cleansing’ to eliminate people who do not fit within single identity categories is an attempt to eradicate hybridity. ORIENTALISM As described by postcolonial theorist Edward Said, Orientalism can be defined as the process of making something or someone “oriental”. Like Foucault, Said describes this as a discursive process—Western European explorers went to a place they called “the Orient” and wrote descriptions and understood “the Orient” as something other than their own country and civilization. “Orient” in English means ‘East’. East and West are relative terms, not absolutes; they require a fixed position to have meaning. In the colonial era, this fixed position was Greenwich, England, the home port of the British Royal Navy. Said talks about how the West constructed the East through discourse, where the colonizer produces the writing and the colonized is silent. The colonized people do not produce knowledge, but are only the subject of knowledge produced by the colonizer. When the West writes the East, the writings create the “oriental” as fundamentally “other”. The negative binary opposite of “civilization” are sexual exoticism, drug use, immorality, lack of organization,

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