Postcolonial studies/ lit. , feminism, poststructuralism

Postcolonial Studies, Feminism, Poststructuralism

Literature in English III

Mariel Amez

POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM

• new writing in English?• world fiction?• international or transcultural writing?• Commonwealth literature?

Postcolonial literature?

POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM

Postcolonial studies/ theory: Reading

vs

Postcolonial literature: Writing

• Colonial literature: concerned with colonial perceptions and experience, written by metropolitans, creoles and indigenes during colonial times

• Colonialist literature: concerned with colonial expansion, written by and for colonizing Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them.

POSTCOLONIALISMPOSTCOLONIALISM

Colonialist literatureColonialist literature

Eurocentric discourse that assumed the normality and preeminence of everything "occidental," correlatively with its representations of the "oriental" as an exotic and inferior other.

Postcolonial literaturePostcolonial literature

Counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history written by Europeans.

Colonialist and Postcolonial Colonialist and Postcolonial literatureliterature

did not simply articulate colonial or nationalist preoccupations;

also contributed to the making, definition, and clarification of those same preoccupations

Colonialist vs Postcolonial Colonialist vs Postcolonial literatureliterature

A valid dichotomy?

An overgeneralisation?

A rewriting of hegemony and domination?

Otherness Difference

• Marginalised• Disempowered• Robbed of their voice and identity

BUT

• Self cannot exist without the other• Self and other are mirror images connected by

their reflection

Chapter 1 “Imperialism and Textuality” in Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and

Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors.

How was the colonized other characterized?

• in need of civilization

• savages lacking the power and ability to think and rule

• useless, lazy, avoiding to do work through pretence

Agency, diversity, resistance, voices

screened out

Representations of white men

• hard and careful workers

• sensible, rational

• careful builders

• intellectuals

• profit-makers

• colonial officers part of an elite

Purposes of Othering

• construct superiority of the West

• justify the dispossession of natives

• represent the degradation of other human beings as natural

• foster nationalism

“Mainstream realist novels could be of imperial domination even if they

were not about it”.

• a commodity (images of riches and trade)• a new beginning (transportation; exile)• “The forbidden”: fascination or fear

Mainly

• took for granted the integrity, superiority, and strength of the West

• showed acceptance of the Empire

Which “forms of self-validation” of the Empire in the 19th century are

mentioned?

• ideologies of moral, cultural, and racial supremacy

• responsible, kind, gentle and morally uplifting ruling

• selfless, serious, above blame, good government and peace under the law

• inevitable and historically important: a new history

Chapter 2 “Colonialist Concerns” (provided on paper) from Boehmer,

Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors.

What is the attitude towards other cultures in colonialist texts?

• sources of contamination: infectious and bewitching

• create vulnerability: closeness to savage passions; apprehension at racial mixing

• interpreting reality in a European way • empty of indigenous cultures • objects of study • accepting British rule as part of the order

of things

What is the “colonial gaze”?

gaze

to look at someone or something for a long time, giving it all your attention, often without realizing you are doing so

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

What is the “colonial gaze”?

gaze

• psychological relationship of power• gazer: superior to object of gaze

Schroeder, J.E. Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research. Representing Consumers: Voices Views and Vision. Routledge Publishers, 1998.

What is the “colonial gaze”?

normative gaze

• Eurocentric racial identity: lens to view and construct other races

West, Cornel

What is the “colonial gaze”?

Commanding perspective assumed by the European in the text

• high vantage point

• knowledgeable position

• bird’s-eye description

• represents authority

How is the white hero characterised in colonialist texts?

• youth and virility

• model of Christian honour and patriotism

• emissary of progress

• restraint

• moral earnestness

• rationality

• technological skill

• ability to rule

How are women characterised in colonialist texts?

• seductive distraction or harmful presence

• unmanning and polluting

• black: contamination and degeneration of excessive pleasure

How is the colonised characterised in colonialist texts?

• fossilised survival of earlier evolutionary stages

• irrational, barbaric, primitive, animal-like or childlike, violent or difficult to control, evil and harmful

• passive, soft, lazy, weak, inscrutable, seductive, feminine

• lack of character and individual will: crowd imagery

• certain nobility due to military skill

How are the colonised countries characterised in colonialist texts?

• vast and shapeless

• savage and degraded

• sources of threat, trauma and mystery

• treacherous, dark, still

• “the engulfing female”

• places where white men defined their masculinity and where they bonded

Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961) – Martinique•Black Skin, White Masks (1952) •The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

The category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black." Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Frantz Fanon (cont’d)•Speaking French means accepting the collective consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with evil and sin.

•To escape this association the black man thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in society.

•The black man is necessarily alienated from himself.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Edward Said (1935-2003) – Jerusalem

• Orientalism (1978)

• Culture and Imperialism (1993)

• Politics of Dispossession (1994)

Examines the ways through which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to be constructed through the lens of Europeans, in part defining Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Edward Said (cont’d)•The European invention of the fiction of the Orient and the Orientals has served to create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe

•This knowledge tradition has functioned to serve hegemonic, imperialist ends

•The Occident / Orient distinction has operated on oppositional terms ensuring that the Orient has been constructed as a negative, inferior inversion of Western culture

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Edward Said (cont’d)

By constructing the ‘Orient’ as culturally static, eternally uniform and incapable of self-definition, the ‘Occident’ as its established opposite is infused with a secure sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The West consequently viewed itself as dynamic, innovative and expanding, which ultimately secured a sense of imperial conceit and self-justification for colonial rule.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Binary oppositions

The West: dynamic, rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values - “male”

The Orient: static, irrational, warlike, passion-ridden, “immoral” – “female”

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) – India• Nation and Narration (1990) • The Location of Culture (1993)• Cosmopolitanism (2002)

Encourages a rigorous rethinking of nationalism, representation, and resistance that above all stresses the "ambivalence" or "hybridity" that characterizes the site of colonial contestation.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Homi K. Bhabha (cont’d.)

•Criticises the supposedly homogenous, innate, and historically continuous traditions that falsely define and ensure the subordinate status of Third World nations.

•Argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(b. 1942) – India

• In Other Worlds (1988)

• Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993)

• A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (cont’d)

Criticises European literary and philosophical texts for providing ideological support for European colonialism and develops a feminist perspective .

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (cont’d)

•Postcolonial theory focuses too much on past forms of

colonial domination - inadequate to criticise the impact

of contemporary global economic domination

•By speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural

identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their

subordinate position in society. The academic

assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to

an ethnocentric extension of Western logos.

Postcolonial StudiesPostcolonial Studies

Postcolonial literature

• Writing from the Empire (before political independence)

white settlers creoles indigenous peoples

Postcolonial literature

• Writing after Independence

cancelling colonial stereotypes becoming subjects rewriting history establishing identity

Postcolonial literature

• Genres

• Themes or Motifs

• Strategies

Postcolonial literature:Strategies

• Appropriation

• Indigenous myth

• Language

FeminismFeminism

• First waveFirst wave: equality, rights, liberation and emancipation.

• Second waveSecond wave: sex is our biological and natural being; gender is the social and cultural interpretation of that being.

• Third waveThird wave: no natural ‘sex’ underlying our gender; sex is textual – always in production and open to question.

Feminist literary criticismFeminist literary criticism

• starts in late 1960’s

• not a unitary theory or procedure

• includes adaptations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theories.

Shared AssumptionsShared Assumptions

• Western civilization is pervasively patriarchalpatriarchal

• sex is determined by anatomy; gendergender is a cultural constructcultural construct generated by patriarchal biases of civilization

• patriarchal ideology pervades writings traditionally considered great literaturegreat literature, written mainly by men for menby men for men

• standard selection and critical treatment gender-biasedgender-biased

Anglo-American Feminist Crit.Anglo-American Feminist Crit.

• do justicejustice to female points of view, concerns, and values

• enlargeenlarge, reorder, even displace, the literary canoncanon

• no fundamental difference:no fundamental difference: an undervaluing of female writing

• analysis of the representationrepresentation of men and women by male and female authors

• E.g. Gilbert & Gubar (1979): The Madwoman in the Attic:

French Feminist Crit.French Feminist Crit.

• theorytheory of the role of gender in writing

• fundamental distinctiondistinction based on social and economic factors

• Western languages male-engendered, male-constituted, and male-dominated: phallogocentrismphallogocentrism

• écriture féminineécriture féminine (Cixous)

Post-structuralismPost-structuralism

• late 1960’s

• critiques structuralism

• complements structuralism: alternative modes of inquiry, explanation and interpretation.

• Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, etc.

Post-structuralismPost-structuralism

• signifier and signified are not only oppositional but pluralplural

• incommensurateincommensurate qualities of language

• no text can mean what it no text can mean what it seems to sayseems to say

• challengeschallenges (even undermines) traditional traditional conceptionsconceptions of meaning, knowledge, truth, and the subject or "self" (humanism)

DeconstructionDeconstruction

• language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways: no certaintiesno certainties

• destabilisationdestabilisation of hierarchical oppositions

• the signified is always a signifier in another system: infinite deferral of meaninginfinite deferral of meaning

DeconstructionDeconstruction

différancedifférance: : (French différer)

•to deferdefer, postpone, delay and also

•to differdiffer, be different from

The text is an endless sequence of

signifiers which can have no ultimate or

determinate meaning

DeconstructionDeconstruction

• aporia:aporia: tension between what a text manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean

• tracestraces: indications of an absence that define a presence

• reading under erasureerasure

DeconstructionDeconstruction

• a way of highlighting things that texts do to themselves and each other

• questioning prioritiesquestioning priorities set up as natural or self-evident

• demonstrating binary oppositions are unstableunstable, reversible, and mutually dependent

• showing how texts subvertsubvert, exceed, even overturn their author's stated purposes

Literature in English III

Mariel Amez