GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: LITERATURAS POSCOLONIALES

GRADO EN LENGUA INGLESA I

UNIT 1: A HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION TO POSTCOLONIAL
LITERATURES WRITTEN IN ENGLISH: SOME KEY CONCEPTS

2014-2015

Antonio Ballesteros González (coordinador), Isabel Castelao Gómez

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES
GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: LITERATURAS POSCOLONIALES EN
LENGUA INGLESA I

UNIT 1. A HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION

TO POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES IN ENGLISH: SOME KEY
CONCEPTS
COMPULSORY READINGS:

1) INTRODUCTORY AND THEORETICAL TEXTS:

-Introduction and Chapter 1 in John McLeod’s Beginning Postcolonialism.

-Extracts by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. They will be found below in this Guide.
They can also be used for the purpose of text commentary.

STUDY PLAN AND SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS

This first Unit functions as an introduction to the whole subject. It should be taken into
account in this subject (the same as in any other of the Grado de Estudios Ingleses) that,
preliminary to additional complementary activities, students must read carefully and
with critical insight the compulsory readings, both of a theoretical and literary stance
(there are none of the latter in this particular Unit), checking that they have understood
their contents, so as to tackle later the tasks and self-assessment exercises proposed.

1) First of all, students should read the Introduction to John McLeod’s book (pp. 1-6),
paying attention to the most significant concepts and ideas emphasized by the author.
As self-assessment exercises, students can answer gradually the following questions,
whose answers can be found in, and/or inferred from, McLeod’s book itself:

-Why does postcolonialism challenge us to think again and question some of the
assumptions that underpin both what we read and how we read?

-Why is it so difficult to define the term ‘postcolonialism’?

-What are the main stages conforming the history of the term ‘postcolonialism’?

-What is the main difference between ‘post-colonialism’ (with a hyphen) and

‘postcolonialism’ (with no hyphen)?

2) Students must read later Chapter 1 in John McLeod’s book (pp. 7-43). The questions
that follow can be used as self-assessment exercises (the answers can be deduced from
McLeod’s text):

-According to McLeod, what are the two contexts of the term ‘postcolonialism’?
-Trace the major steps in the process of decolonisation within the context of the British
Empire.

-Explain the difference between ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’.

-What are the three distinct periods of ‘decolonisation’ when the colonised nations won
the right to govern their own affairs, as regards the imperial venture of the British
Empire?

-Outline the foremost stages of the emergence and development of ‘Commonwealth

Literature’. Why has the term been discarded in recent postcolonial theory?

-‘Colonial discourses form the intersections where language and power meet’. Discuss.

-Pinpoint Frantz Fanon’s and Edward Said’s main contributions to the field of
postcolonial theory. How do their writings support the idea that ‘Empires colonise
imaginations’?

-Which three forms of textual analysis in particular, according to McLeod, became

popular in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism?

-What does the phrase ‘writing back to the centre’ mean in a postcolonial context? Has
it been widely accepted by the great majority of postcolonial critics? Why?/Why not?

-Summarize the most significant advances in postcolonial theory in the first decade of
the twenty-first century.

-According to McLeod, which are the three salient areas that fall within the remit of the
umbrella-term ‘postcolonialism’?

TEXT COMMENTARIES

Read and study the following extracts (remember that you can be examined on
them). You are recommended to use them as text commentary material.

1) Frantz Fanon (1961) The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre).
Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 2001.

… Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is,
obviously, a programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of
magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding.
Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot
be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and
content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by
their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of
substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the
colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence
together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried
on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon. The settler and the native are
old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’
well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who
perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is
to say his property, to the colonial system.
Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals
and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their
inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s
floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by
new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the
veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to
any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man
during the same process by which it frees itself.
[…] The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is
probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European
quarters, of schools of natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we
need not recall Apartheid in South Africa.
[...] The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the
frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the
policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the
spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the
educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes
handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are
given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which
springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour – all these aesthetic
expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the
exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens
the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral
teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilderers’ separate the exploited from those in
power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier,
by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact
with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge.
It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure
force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the
domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear
conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the
home and into the mind of the native.
The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone
inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a
higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow
the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two
terms one is superfluous.
[…] This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is
inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that
economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never
come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the
colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the
fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the
colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
 consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are
rich… (pp. 27-31).

2) Edward Said (1978) Orientalism. In The Edward Said Reader. Ed. Moustafa
Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. London: Granta, 2000.

… The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative
meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century
there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—
traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which
is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other
two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for
dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in
short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel
Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archeology of
Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention
is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly
understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was
able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-
Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism
have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so
without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by
Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a
free subject of thought or action. This said about the Orient, but that it is the
whole network of interest inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always
involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question
[…] European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against
the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (pp. 69-70).

… Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is

reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and
diffused collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and
expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down to the
“Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into
aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it
is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made
up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of
“interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological
reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it
not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or
intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to
incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is,
above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship
with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven
exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with
power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual
 (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the
modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of
taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what
“they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that
Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of
modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient
than it does with “our” world (pp. 78-9).

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Students are advised to look up the following webpages connected with

postcolonialism. They will be helpful for students of both ‘Literaturas Poscoloniales en
Lengua Inglesa I & II’:

-The Postcolonial Web:

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/

-Postcolonial Theory and Literatures:

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri

-Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literatures in English:

http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/discurseov.html

-The Centre for Asian and African Literatures:

http://www.soas.ac.uk/centres/centreinfo.cfm?navid=179

-Anglophone Literatures of Africa, India and the Caribbean:

http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~brians/anglophone/index/html