Postcolonialism: Postcolonial and Characteristics of Post-Colonial Criticism

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Postcolonial

Something that occurs after the end of colonial period.

Postcolonialism

An academic study or approach that is concerned about the impact of the colonization in the countries which were colonized.

Postcolonial Literature

Post-colonial literature encompasses literature written by people from the colonial world as well as from the marginalized people.

Post-Colonial Theory

It deals with the social, economic, political and other impact of European colonial rule on the country they overpowered.

Postcolonial Criticism

It analyses literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination.

Characteristics of Post-Colonial Criticism

  • An awareness of representation of the non-European as immoral others.
  • Colonizers language is permanently tainted and that too Writing in it involves crucial likening in colonial structure.

Three important phases of colonial literature:

  • Adopt
  • Adapt and
  • Adept.

Adopt

the unquestioning acceptance of the superiority of European models and writing with an aim to make it masterpiece in European tradition is called adopt phase.

Adapt

In this the writer allows partial intervention of European form to Africa subjects.

Adept

It is the face whereby African writer remake the form to their own specification without allowing any intervention to the European standards. It assumes colonial writer is independent.

  • Frantz Fanon՚s The Wretched of The Earth (1961) .
  • Argued that first step for colonized people is finding a voice and an identity that is to reclaim their own past.
  • Edward Said՚s ‘Orientalism’ (1978)
  • He exposes the pseudo-superiority of Europeans.
  • The Orient features in the Western mind as a sort of, surrogate and even underground self՚s (Literature in the modern world. Ed Dennis Welder) .

Major Writers and Their Work

  • Chinua Achebe – Things fall Apart, No Longer At ease, Arrow Of God.
  • Joseph Conrad – Heart Of Darkness
  • Albert Camus – The Outsider
  • Jane Austen – Mansfield Park
  • Patrick white – Voss famous line – ‘The Map? I will first male it.’
  • George Laming – In The Castle Of My skin
  • E. M Froster – A Passage To India
  • Some other major writers are Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Homi Bhabha and Jamaica Kincaid.

MCQs

1. The term used for the state of being other or different in Post-colonial is

a) Alterity

b) ambivalence

C) aporia

d) hybridity

2. Find the odd one out

a) Homi k bhabha

b) Dipesh Chakrawart

C) Gayatri Spivakd

d) Stephen Greenbaltt

3. Shooting an Elephant is written by

a) Salman Rushdie

b) Derek Gregory

c) Chinua Achebe

d) George Orwell

4. “I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.” These lines are from which Novel

a) Anthill of Savannah

b) The Shadow of lines

c) A Passage to India

d) Midnight՚s Children

5. ‘G’ is the name of protagonist in which of the George Orwell՚s work?

a) Homage to Catalina

b) A Clergyman՚s Daughter

c) Nineteen Eighty-Four

d) In the Castle of My Skin

6. Which work of Jean Rhy is thought to be a post-modern response to “Jane Eyre” especially of Eyre՚s character Bertha.

a) Wide Sargasso Sea

b) Voyage in the dark

c) Quartet

d) Smile please

Manishika