Postcolonial Studies

1
Postcolonial Studies

• by Henning, Jan, Kathrin, Mark, Miriam and
  Silvie.

2
Definitions

• Post-colonialism
• the time after colonialism ? after the
  colonies had become independent
• Postcolonial Studies
• the study of the interactions between European
  nations and the societies they colonized

3
Historical Background

• Decolonialization after WW II
• Disbanding of British Empire ? Commonwealth of
  Nations
• Independence (bloody) conflicts
• ? no boundaries between ethnic groups
• (e.g. civil war in Kenya)
• Attempt to return to their former culture
• USA role model for high standard of living
• ? dependence on USA ? corruption ?
• neo-colonialism

4
Literature

• written by
• a) colonized people
• b)people of the colonial powers
• attempt to assimilate their experience
• a) during the time of colonialization
• b)of todays neo-colonialism
• since the 1970s/80s
• ? Edward Said Orientalism (1978)

5
Edward Said

• 1953 in Jerusalem 2003 in New York
• Most important work Orientalism (1979)
• 
  ?
• The Orient
• exists for the West, and is constructed
• by and in relation to the West
• is always the Other, the conquerable,
• and the inferior

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• Orientalism
• the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire
  system of thought
• The Oriental
• the person represented by such thinking
• a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and
  national boundaries (most of Asia, Middle East)
• Earlier Orientalism
• first Orientalists 19th century-scholars who
  translated the writings of the Orient into
  English
• knowledge as power assumption that a truly
  effective colonial conquest requires knowledge of
  the conquered people

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• Contemporary Orientalism
• Said argues that Orientalism can be found in
  current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures
• Saids Project
• 'The Orient' cannot be studied in a
  non-Orientalist manner
• the scholar is obliged to study more focused and
  smaller culturally consistent regions, rather
  than the Orient as a whole
• what has until now been known as 'the Oriental'
  must be given a voice (self-representation)

8
Frantz Fanon

• 1925 French Colony of Martinique, 1961
• 1952 first analysis of the effects of racism and
  colonization, Black Skin, White Masks,?
• presents Fanon's personal experience as a
• black intellectual in a white world
• elaborates on the coloniser/colonised
  relationship
• language speaking French means that one
• accepts, or is forced to accept, the
  collective
• consciousness of the French

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• title in an attempt to escape the colonizers
  association of blackness with evil, the black man
  puts on a white mask
• ? fundamental disjuncture between the black
• man's consciousness and his body
• 1961, The Wretched of The Earth ?
• Discusses the effect of the torture
• of Algerian "terrorists"
• analyzes the role of class, race,
• national culture and violence in the struggle
  for national liberation

10
Homi K. Bhabha

• Born 1949 in India
• Moved to America and is currently teaching at
  Harvard University
• His works on Postcolonial Studies are highly
  influenced by post structuralism
• He challenges the idea of treating post-colonial
  countries as a homogenous block, because he
  thinks that this would lead to the assumption
  that those countries would all share the same
  identity

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• He also criticizes thinking only in categories of
  black and white
• In his opinion it is not sufficient to use only
  the typical binary oppositions when there are two
  cultures, which influence and transform each
  other, because they transform too complex
• Bhabha deployed the concept of hybridity
• This concept focuses on the effects of mixture
  upon culture and identity
• In his book The location of culture(1994) he
  analyses the liminality of hybridity as an
  example in contrast to the colonial fear of
  miscegenation

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• The fear of hybridity made the colonizers to
  establish their power, without making sure of
  their economic, political and cultural endurance
• Along with the concept of hybridity comes also
  the term of mimicry
• Mimicry means to take on someone others
  attributes, in connection with Postcolonial
  Studies it means culture
• Most important works
• Nation and Narration (1990)
• The location of culture (1994)

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Problems of Postcolonial Studies

• There are general problems in analysing
  literature of colonized people, especially when
  they develop a language out of their own old
  language and their new language (e.g. English)
• The result then could be a style of language and
  therefore symbols and metaphors might not be the
  same

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• Its also difficult to respect an authors work
  when he violates the typical aesthetic norms of
  western literature, because we are raised in a
  culture where it is very important to stick to
  the aesthetic ideals
• Therefore it is difficult for us to take the
  author of such literature as serious as we would
  actually have to
• An important problem of colonized literature is
  that the authors of that literature have all been
  influenced by the colonizing nation. Even in
  todays societies minorities always have to adapt
  the face of the majority, before they are taken
  seriously and so there individuality gets lost

15
Biography of George Orwell

• his real name was Eric A. Blair,
• but he is better known by his
• pen name George Orwell
• born in Motihari, Bengal
• (the then British Colony of India)
• on June 25, 1903
• came to England at the age of one
• earned scholarships to both Wellington and Eton
• made lifetime friendships with a number of future
  British intellectuals at school

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• 1922 trained to be a colonial officer in the
  British Colonial Service
• joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma
• having grown to hate imperialism, he resigned and
  returned to England in 1928 to work as a writer
• his autobiographical essay "Shooting an Elephant"
  (1931) is based on his experience as a police
  officer in colonial Burma
• in this essay, as well as in A Hanging and
  Burmese Days, he also expresses his protest
  against English Imperialism

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• later he lived in poverty, sometimes even
  homeless in Paris and London for several years
• this is reflected in "Down and Out in Paris and
  London", 1933
• 1933 he adopted his pen name , showing his
  affection for the English tradition and
  countryside
• 1936 he volunteered to fight for the Republicans
  against Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish
  Civil War and was shot in the neck

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• described these Spanish experiences in his short
  essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as
  in the book of reportage Homage to Catalonia
• in the same year he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy
  and left Spain with her (she died in 1945)
• 1941 began to work for the BBC Eastern Service
• 1944 he finished his anti-Stalinist allegory
  Animal Farm

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• During World War II he was a member of the Home
  Guard
• 1949 his best-known work Nineteen Eighty-Four
  was published and he married his second wife
  Sonia Mary Brownell
• he died from tuberculosis at the age of 46 in
  1950

20

• ? As you can see George Orwell had a
• very adventurous life and was active in
• different parts of the world
• ? Whatever he did he immediately
• reflected in his work as a journalist and
  
• a novelist
• ? Today he is mostly known for his two
• novels Animal Farm and Nineteen
• Eighty-Four

21
Aspects of the short story"Shooting an
Elephant" by George Orwell, 1936
22
"Shooting an Elephant" 

• "As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with
  perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot
  him."(...) "Moreover, I did not in the least want
  to shoot him."
• "And suddenly I realized that I should have to
  shoot the elephant after all."
• "A sahib has got to act like a sahib he has got
  to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do
  definite things. To come all that way, rifle in
  hand, with two thousand people marching at my
  heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done
  nothing - no, that was impossible. The crowd
  would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white
  mans life in the East, was one long struggle not
  to be laughed at.
• "But I did not want to shoot the elephant."

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• "For at that time I had already made up my mind
  that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner
  I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
  Theoreticallyand secretly, of courseI was all
  for the Burmese and all against their oppressors,
  the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated
  it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear.
  In a job like that you see the dirty work of
  Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners
  huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups,
  the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts,
  the scarred buttocks of the men who had been
  flogged with bamboosall these oppressed me with
  an intolerable sense of guilt."

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• "All I knew was that I was stuck between my
  hatred of the empire I served and my rage against
  the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make
  my job impossible. With one part of my mind I
  thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable
  tyranny, as something clamped down, in sæcula
  sæculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples
  with another part I thought that the greatest joy
  in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a
  Buddhist priests guts. Feelings like these are
  the normal by-products of imperialism ask any
  Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off
  duty."
• "If the elephant charged and I missed him, I
  should have about as much chance as a toad under
  a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking
  particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful
  yellow faces behind."

25

• "The people expected it of me and I had got to do
  it I could feel their two thousand wills
  pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at
  this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in
  my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness,
  the futility of the white mans dominion in the
  East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
  standing in front of the unarmed native
  crowdseemingly the leading actor of the piece
  but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed
  to and fro by the will of those yellow faces
  behind. I perceived in this moment that when the
  white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that
  he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing
  dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.
  For it is the condition of his rule that he shall
  spend his life in trying to impress the
  natives, and so in every crisis he has got to
  do what the natives expect of him."
• "It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot
  him."

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• "He was dying, very slowly and in great agony,
  ..."
• "... the great beast lying there, powerless to
  move and yet powerless to die, ..."

27

• Thank you all
• for your attention.