Post-colonial
criticism emerges in the 1990s by undermining the timeless and universal
significance of literature made by liberal humanist critics. Specifically, if
great literature is claimed timeless and universal, then cultural, social,
regional and national differences are made less significant. Post-colonial
criticism rejects universalism. It gained currency
through the influence of such books as: In
Other Worlds (Gayatri Spivak,1987);The
Empire Writes Back (Bill Ashcroft,1989);Nation
and Narration (Homi Bhabha,1990)and Culture
and Imperialism (Edward Said,1993).An important collection of relevant
essays (though it does not use the term ‘postcolonialism’) is ‘Race’,Writing and difference(1986),reprinted
from two issues of the journal Critical
Inquiry and edited by Henry Louis Gates,Jr,one of the best-known American
figures in this field.
The first significant
issue of postcolonial criticism is to further under-mine the universalist
claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics. If we
claim that great literature has a time-less and universal significance we
thereby demote or disregard cultural, social, regional, and national
differences in experience and outlook, preferring instead to judge all
literature by a single, supposedly ‘universal’, standard. Thus, for instance, a
routine claim about the ‘Wessex’ setting of Hardy’s novel is that it is really
a canvas on which Hardy depicts and examines fundamental,universal aspects of
the human condition.Thus, Hardy’s books are not thought of as primarily
regional or historical or masculine or white working-class novels- they are
just novels, and built into this attitude is the assumption that this way of
writing and representing reality is the unquestioned norm, so that the
situations depicted can stand for all possible forms of human interaction. This
universalism is rejected by postcolonial criticism; whenever a universal signification
is claimed for a work, then, white, Eurocentric norms and practices are being
promoted by a sleight of hand to this elevated status,and all others
correspondingly relegated to subsidiary, marginalized roles.
Origin
of postcolonial criticism
The ancestry of
postcolonial criticism can be traced to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the earth,published in French in 1961,and voicing
what might be called ‘cultural resistance’ to France’s African empire.Fanon(a
psychiatrist from Martinique)argued that the first step for ‘colonialised’
people in finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past.For
centuries the European colonizing power will have devalued the nation’s
past,seeing its precolonial era as a precivilised limbo,or even as a historical
void.Children,both black and white,will have been taught to see history,culture
and progress as beginning with the arrival of the Europeans.If the first step
towards a postcolonial perspective is to reclaim one’s own past,then the second
is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past had been
devalued.
Development
of postcolonial criticism
Another major book,
which can be said to inaugurate postcolonial criticism proper is Edward Said’s Orientalism(1978),which is a specific
expose of the Eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both the
superiority of what is European or Western, and the inferiority of what is not.
Said identifies a European cultural tradition of ‘Orientalism’, which is a
particular and long-standing way of
identifying the East as ‘other’ and inferior to the West. The Orient, he says,
features in the Western mind ‘as a sort of surrogate and even underground self’.
This means, in effect, that the East becomes the repository or projection of
those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge
(cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, and so on).At the same time, and
paradoxically the East is seen as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the
mystical and the seductive. It also tends to be seen as homogenous, the people
there being anonymous masses rather than individuals, their actions determined
by instinctive emotions (lust,terror,fury,etc) rather than by conscious choices
or decisions.
Their emotions and reactions are always determined by racial
considerations(they are like this because they are Asiatics or blacks or Orientals)rather
than by aspects of individual status or circumstance(for instance,because they
happen to be a sister, or an uncle, or a collector of antique pottery).As Said
says,after quoting the example of a colonial administrator’s 1907 account of
life in Damascus, ‘In such statements as these we note immediately that ‘the Arab’ or ‘Arabs’ have an aura of
apartness,definiteness,and collective
self-consistency such as to wipe out any traces of individual Arabs with
narratable life Histories’. Reading literature with the perspective of
“Orientalism’ in mind would make us, for instance, critically aware of how
Yeats in his two ‘Byzantium’
poems (‘Sailing to Byzantium’,1927
and ‘Byzantium’,1932)
provides an image of Istanbul,
the Eastern capital of the former Roman Empire,
which is identified with torpor, sensuality, and exotic mysticism. At such
moments Yeats adopts an ethnocentric or Eurocentric perspective, seeing the
East as an exotic ‘Other’ which becomes the contrasting foil to his own
pursuits and concerns, all of which the poem presents as normative. Interestingly,
Edward Said has written an essay on Yeats which reads him in the context of
postcolonialism(reprinted in Said’s Culture
and Imperialism).Said views the desire, frequently expressed in Yeat’s work,
to regain contact with an earlier, mythical, nationalistic Ireland as typical
of writers whose own position is postcolonial, and this is closely related to
Fanon’s idea of the need of reclaim the past. Characteristically, postcolonial
writers evoke or create a pre-colonial version of their own nation, rejecting
the modern and the contemporary, which is tainted with the colonial status of
their countries. Here, then, is the first characteristic of postcolonial
criticism –an awareness of representations of the non-European as exotic or
immoral ‘Other’.
For Yeats, as often
with the postcolonial writer, an uneasy attitude to the colonial language is evident:
his injunction to Irish poets, that they should learn their craft, implies the
need to serve a humble apprenticeship. This ‘humble’ attitude to language may
remind us of Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts about the English language in James
Joyce’s A Portrait Of the Artist as a
Young Man, especially the early scene in which Stephen is patronized by an
English priest because of his use of a local dialect word. Stephen tells
himself ‘the language in which we are speaking in his before it is mine…My soul
frets in the shadow of his language’. More recently, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney,
in a poem entitled ‘The Ministry of Fear’, recalls his childhood unease and
self-consciousness about his pronunciation of English. This linguistic
deference amounts to a sense that the linguistic furniture belongs to somebody else,
and therefore shouldn’t be moved around without permission. Some postcolonial
writers have concluded that the colonizers’ language is permanently tainted, and
that to write in it involves a crucial acquiescence in colonial structures.
Language itself, then, is a second area of concern in postcolonial criticism.
As
this implies, Yeats, being a member of the Protestant ruling class in Ireland,
has a double identity as both colonizer and colonized,and it is the recognition
of such double identities which is one of the strengths of the postcolonialist
view.Thus,the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe,publishing his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958,was
criticized by an early reviewer for affecting to identify with African
villagers when actually his university education and his broadcasting job in
the capital city of Lagos should make
him identify, it was implied,with the values of ‘civilisation’,supposedly
brought to Africa by Europeans. This emphasis on identity as doubled,or
hybrid,or unstable is a third characteristic of the postcolonial approach.
At one level Achebe’s
use of a village Africa corresponds to Yeasts’ evocation of a pre-colonial, mythological
Ireland of heroes and heroines.At another level,the double or hybrid identity
is precisely what the postcolonial situation brings into being.The shift in
attitudes in the 1980s and 1990s was towards postcolonial writers seeing
themselves as using primarily African or Asian forms, supplemented with
European-derived influences,rather than as working primarily within European
genres like the novel and merely adding to them a degree of exotic Africanisation.All
postcolonial literatures, it might be said, seem to make this transition.They
begin with an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of European models and
(especially in the novels) and with the ambition of writing works that will be
masterpieces entirely in this tradition.This called the ‘Adopt’ phase of colonial literature, since the writer’s ambition is
to adopt the form as it stands, the assumption being that it has universal validity.
The second stage can be called the ‘Adapt’
phase, since it aims to adapt the European form to African subject matter, thus
assuming partial rights of intervention in the genre. In the final phase there
is,so to speak, a declaration of cultural independence whereby African writers
remake the form to their own specification, without reference to European norms.
This might be called the ‘Adept’phase,since
its characteristic is the assumption that the colonial writer is an independent
‘adept’ in the form,not a humble apprentice, as in the first phase, or a mere licensee,
as in the second. This stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions is a fourth
characteristic of postcolonialist criticism.
This notion of the
double, or divided, or fluid identity which is characteristic of the
postcolonial writer explains the great attraction which post-structuralism and
deconstruction have proved to be for the postcolonial critic. Post-structuralism
is centrally concerned to show the fluid and unstable nature if personal and
gender identity, the shifting, ‘polyvalent’, contradictory currents of
signification within texts, and the way literature itself is a site on which
ideological struggles are acted out.This mind-set is admirably suited to
expressing the numerous contradictions and multiple allegiances of which the
postcolonial writer and critic is constantly aware.This post-structuralist
perspective is seen in the work of such representative figures as Henry Louis
Gates Jr,Gayatri Spivak,and Homi Bhabha.In all three of these a complex
Derridean-Foucauldian notion of textuality and fields of discourse is
immediately apparent. Similarly in all three,the surface of the writing is
difficult and the route through to any consequent political action (or
stance,even) is necessarily indirect. This kind of postcolonial criticism
roughly corresponds, then, to the theoreticised ‘French’feminist criticism
associated with figures like Julia Kristeva or Helene Cixous.The example of
postcolonial criticism offered later is from the work of Edward Said,who is
less overtly theoretical,seems to accept some of the premises of liberal
humanism,and has a more ‘up-front’ political affiliation (his identification
with the Palestinian Arab cause).His work is in this regard reminiscent of the
‘Anglo-American’ variety of feminist criticism, which likewise seems (to me)
more overtly political and certainly more immediately accessible.
If the three stages
mentioned earlier (Adopt,Adapt,and Adept) provide a way of seeing postcolonial
literature, then a way of seeing the stages of postcolonial criticism would be
to suggest, as we have just been doing,that they closely parallel the
developmental stages of feminist criticism. In its earliest phase, which is to
say before it was known as such,postcolonial criticism took as its main subject
matter white representations of colonial countries and criticized these for
their limitations and their bias:thus,critics would discuss the representation
of Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness,
or of India in E. M. Forster’s A Passage
To India, or of Algeria in Albert Camus’s The Outsider. This corresponds to the early 1970s phase of feminist
criticism when the subject matter was the representation of women by male
novelists like D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller-the classic instance is Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics. The second
phase of postcolonial criticism involved a turn towards explorations of
themselves and their society by postcolonial writers. At this stage the
celebration and exploration of diversity, hybridity, and difference become central.
This is the stage when, in the title of the well-known pioneering work in this
field, ‘the empire writes back’. This corresponds to the ‘gynotext’ phase of feminist criticism,when
there is a turn towards the exploration of female experience and identities in
books by women.The analogy between these two types of criticism might be pushed
a little further, so that a parallel might also be perceived with the split in
feminist criticism between ‘theoretical’ and ‘empirical’ versions, as suggested
above. Thus, in postcolonial criticism we might see a split between variants
very directly influenced by deconstruction and post-structuralism-such as the
work of Homi Bhabha-and work like Said’s which accepts a good deal from liberal
humanism, is written in a more accessible way, and seems perhaps to lend itself
more directly to political engagement.
