Introduction to PostColonial Literatures

1
Introduction to Post-Colonial Literatures
2
What are post-colonial literatures?

• Definition of post-colonial all the culture
  affected by the imperial process from the moment
  of colonization to the present day (2)
• Post-colonial literatures emerged in their
  present form out of the experience of
  colonization and asserted themselves by
  foregrounding the tension with the imperial
  power, and by emphasizing their differences from
  the assumptions of the imperial centre (2)
• the local vs the metropolitan center
• Spatial metaphors center, margin, periphery
  (Said a conscious affiliation proceeding under
  the guise of filiationa mimicry of the centre
  ) (4)

3
Development and Concerns of Post-Colonial
Literatures

• 1. texts produced by representatives of the
  imperial power ?
• 2. literature produced under imperial license
  by natives or outcasts (5)
• Hegemony of RS-English (Received Standard
  English)linguistic hierarchy (7)
• English vs englisheslinguistic continuum (8)
• Place and displacementdislocation, cultural
  denigration (9)
• The power of marginality (12)

4
Critical Models

• 1. national and regional models
• 2. race-based models
• 3. comparative models
• 4. wider comparative models
• ex. hybridity and syncretism (the process by
  which previously distinct linguistic categories,
  and by extension, cultural formations, merge into
  a single new form) (15)

5
National and Regional Models

• National model ex. American literaturedifference
  from British literature ? American literatures
• Metaphors parent-child, parent tree-offshoot,
  stream-tributary (16)
• Wole Soyinkathe process of self-apprehension
  (17)
• Regional model ex. West Indian literature or
  Caribbean literature (18)

6
Comparative Models

• the metropolitan-colonial axisBritain as a
  standard in-school readers a normative core of
  British literature, landscape, and history
  (Wordsworths daffodils) colonial adventure
• the white diaspora (US, Canada, Australia, New
  Zealand) the black diaspora black white (19)

7
Race-Based Models the Black Writing Model

• the African diaspora
• NégritudeCésaire, Senghoressentialist
  definition of Black culture (emotional
  integration and wholeness, rhythmic and temporal
  principles)the danger of turning into a new
  universal paradigm (21)
• ? Black consciousness movement, Black Power
  movements in the US
• Saidthe danger of adopting a double kind of
  possessive exclusivism insiderism (22)

8
Naming

• Commonwealth literature1960s (23)
• Third World literatures
• new literatures in English
• colonial literatures
• post-colonial literatures(24)
• post-European

9
Place and Language

• D. E. S. Maxwell the appropriateness of using
  non-indigenous languageimported tongue alien
  to the place
• Settler colonies (the US, Canada, Australia, New
  Zealand)transplanted civilization
• Invaded colonies (India, West Africa)indigenous
  culture marginalized (25)
• double vision (local metropolis)
• Limitationsnot comprehensive enough (the West
  Indies and the South Africa) lack of linguistic
  subtlety, essentialist (26)

10
Thematic Parallels

• celebration of the struggle towards independence
  in community and individual (27)
• the dominating influence of a foreign culture of
  post-colonial societies
• the construction or demolition of houses
• the journey of the European interloper through
  unfamiliar landscape with a native guide
• Use of allegory, irony, magic realism,
  discontinuous narrative (28)
• exile (29)

11
Colonizer and the Colonized

• Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi
• the possibility of decolonizing the culture
  (29)
• full independencereturn to pre-colonial
  languages (Edward Brathwaite, Chinweizu)
• inevitable cultural syncreticity (Wilson Harris,
  Soyinka)

12
Dominated and Dominating

• Max Dorsinville
• To account for the changes in American literature
• To account for minority literatures (32)
• Irish, Welsh and Scottish literatures
• Subversion in the dominated literaturesempire
  writes back to the imperial center (33)

13
Hybridity, Syncreticity, Creolization

• Homi Bhabhathe collusion between narrative
  mode, history, and realist mimetic readings of
  texts
• Derek Walcottinto a historyless world (34)
• Harrisimaginative escapeAnancy and the Middle
  Passageeach text contains the seeds of
  community whichcrack asunder the apparent
  inescapable dialectic of history (35)hybridity
  replaces a temporal lineality with spatial
  plurality
• the problems of transmuting time into space,
  with the present struggling out of the past (36)

14
Post-colonial Language

• Language as a medium for powerabrogation and
  appropriation to re-place English (38)
• 3 main types of linguistic groups (39)
• monoglossic single-language societies using
  english as a native tongue
• diglossic bilingualismenglish as the language
  of government and commerceIndia, Africa, the
  South Pacific
• polyglossic or polydialectical a multitude of
  dialects interweave to form a generally
  comprehensible linguistic continuumlinguistic
  intersectionsCaribbean

15
The Construction of English

• The world language called english is a continuum
  of intersections in which the speaking habits
  in various communities have intervened to
  reconstruct the language. (39-40)
• 2 ways of reconstruction
• Regional english varieties introduce new words
• National and regional peculiarities
• English is continually changing and growing
  (becoming an english)

16
Abrogation and Appropriation

• Abrogation is a refusal of the categories of the
  imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory
  standard of normative or correct usage, and its
  assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning
  inscribed in the words.must be combined with
  appropriation to avoid being a reversal of the
  assumptions of privilege, the normal, and
  correct inscription (38)
• Appropriation is the process by which language
  is taken and made to bear the burden of ones
  own cultural experience, orto convey in a
  language that is not ones own the spirit that is
  ones own (38-39)

17
Abrogation

• Reactions against the notions of centrality and
  the authentic in the process of decolonization
  Privileges the margins refutes a standard code
  (40) or rejects the possibility of returning to
  some pure and unsullied cultural condition
  (anti-universalist, anti-representational stance)
  (41)
• The english language as a tool to textually
  construct a world, it also constructs
  difference, separation, and absence from the
  metropolitan norm. (44)

18
The Creole Continuum

• Jean DCosta The Caribbean writer operates
  within a polydialectical continuum with a creole
  base. His medium, written language, belongs to
  the sphere of standardised language which exerts
  a pressure within his own language community
  while embracing the wide audience of
  international standard English. (45)a
  linguistic theory
• Writers in this continuum employ highly
  developed strategies of code-switching and
  vernacular transcription, which achieve the dual
  result of abrogating the standard English and
  appropriating an english as a culturally
  significant discourse.

19
Metonymic Function of Language Variance

• post-colonial writing abrogates the privileged
  centrality of English by using language to
  signify difference while employing a sameness
  which allows it to be understood. It does this
  by employing language variance, the part of a
  wider cultural whole, which assists in the work
  of language seizure whilst being neither
  transmuted nor overwhelmed by its adopted
  vehicle. (51)
• Signifying processpost-colonial texts as
  metonymy language variance itself as metonymic
  of cultural difference (52)

20
Language Variance Allusion

• the process of allusion installs linguistic
  distance itself as a subject of the text. The
  maintenance of the gap in the cross-cultural
  text is of profound importance to its
  ethnographic functions. (58-59)

21
Strategies of Appropriation

• Contrast the appropriated english with SE (59)
• Editorial intrusions footnotes, glossary, the
  explanatory preface, etc. (61)
• Glossing the most primitive form of metonymy
  (62)absence/gap between word and its referent
• Untranslated words selective lexical fidelity
  (64)
• forces the reader into an active engagement
  with the horizons of the culture in which these
  terms have meaning.indicating the gap, a sign
  of distinctiveness an endorsement of the
  facility of the discourse situation (65)

22

• Interchange to generate an inter-culture by
  the fusion of the linguistic structures of two
  languages (66)a term coined by Nemser and
  Selinker to characterize the genuine and discrete
  linguistic system by learners of a second
  language. The concept of an interlanguage
  reveals that the utterances of a second-language
  learner are not deviant forms or mistakes, but
  rather are part of a separate but genuine
  system. (67)
• Syntactic fusion to mix the syntax of local
  language with the lexical forms of English (68)
• developing (colloquial) neologisms (71)

23

• Code-switching the most common strategy of
  appropriation, esp. in the literatures of the
  Caribbean continuum (72)
• Vernacular transcription the transcription of
  dialect forms or radical variants informed in one
  way or another by a mother tongue or by the
  exigencies of transplantation. (73)
• pidginto install class difference and to
  signify its presence (76)
• Strategies of appropriation seize the language,
  re-place it in a specific cultural location, and
  yet maintain the integrity of that Otherness,
  which historically has been employed to keep the
  post-colonial at the margins of power, of
  authenticity, and even of reality itself. (77)