A supplementary presentation report for Eng251: New Literatures in English

1. The Empire Writes Back
Introduction
Post-colonial literatures
• Writings by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers
• Colonial – period before independence and a term indicating a national writing
• Covering all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the
present day
Literatures and English Studies
• ‘institutionalisation and subsequent valorization of English literary study [to] a shape and an
ideological content developed in the colonial context’
• ‘Privileged norm’ was enthroned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template
for the denial of the value of the ‘peripheral,’ the marginal,’ the ‘uncanonized’
• Conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation; a mimicry of the centre proceeding
from a desire not only to be accepted but to be adopted and absorbed
• Development of the post-colonial literatures has necessitated a questioning of many of the
assumptions on which the study of ‘English’ was based
Development of post-colonial literatures
1. During the imperial period writing in the language of the imperial centre is inevitably, of course,
produced by a literate elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power
(privileging the centre)
2. Literature produced ‘under imperial licence’ by ‘natives’ or ‘outcasts,’ for instance the large
body of poetry and prose produced in the nineteenth century by the English educated Indian
upper class, or African ‘missionary literature’
• Result: potential for subversion in their themes cannot be fully realized; prevented from fully
exploring their anti-imperial potential
Hegemony
• The need for the empire to write back to a centre
• British texts all too frequently act as a touchstone of taste and value
• Result: the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production in much of the post-
colonial world
Language
• Medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium
through which conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become established
• British English (Empire) and english (post-colonial countries)
Place and Displacement
• Dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or
‘voluntary’ removal from indentured labour
o The construction of ‘place’ – the gap which opens between the experience of place and
the language available to describe it forms a classical and all-pervasive feature of post-
colonial text

2. • Cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality
and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model
o Pre-colonial culture is suppressed by military conquest or enslavement
• Implication: Post-colonial cultures need to escape from the implicit body of assumptions to
which English was attached, its aesthetic and social values, the formal and historically limited
constraints of genre, and the oppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan
dominance, of centre over margin; need to develop an ‘appropriate’ usage in order to do so (by
becoming a distinct and unique form of english)
Post-coloniality and theory
• Emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and
varied cultural provenance of post-colonial writing
• Political and cultural monocentricism of the colonial enterprise was a natural result of the
philosophical traditions of the European world and the systems of representation which this
privileged.
• Paradoxically, imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect on its own
preoccupations and power
o The alienating process which initially served to relegate the post-colonial world to the
‘margin’ turned upon itself and acted to push that world through a kind of mental
barrier into a position from which all experience could be viewed as uncentred,
pluralistic, and multifarious
Re-placing theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory
Post-colonial literatures and postmodernism
• Groundwork
o Avoid the assumption that post-colonial literatures supersede or replace the local and
particular
o European theories are mere ‘contexts’ for the recent developments in post-colonial
theory
o Danger of reincorporating post-colonial culture into a new internationalist and
universalist paradism
Modernism and the colonial experience
• The discovery of cultures forced Europeans to realize that their culture was only one amongst a
plurality of ways of conceiving of reality and organizing its representations in art and social
practice
o The encounter of the Other inspired the legitimate search for the ‘origins’ of civilization
from the frightening alternative of discovering in the ‘primitive’ its true and permanent
face that threatens the European center
o European art to universal validity are questioned, and in which the constructed and
impermanent nature of ‘civilization’ is exposed

3. • Implication: The encounter of Europeans with the Other (non-Europeans) is crucial because the
‘discovery’ of cultures essentially different from Europe in their basis and development is a
central factor in the production and reproduction of European art
• The ‘discovery’ of Africa was the dominant paradigm for the self-discovery of the 20th century
European world in all its self-contradiction, self-doubt, and self-destruction, for the European
journey out of the light of Reason into the Heart of Darkness
New Criticism and post-colonial theory
• Product of a post-colonial USA intent on establishing the legitimacy of its literary canon against
the persistent domination of the English language
• Emphasized on the individual work from the post-colonial world, thus allowing passage to post-
colonial writers
• Met with negativity: assimilation of post-colonial writers into a ‘metropolitan’ tradition retarded
consideration of their works within an appropriate cultural context, and so seriously militated
against the development of a ‘native’ or indigenous theory
• Also due to New Criticism’s misleading claims to objectivity
• Implication: Post-colonial criticism began to move towards the investigation of a set of
theoretical ‘problematics,’ focusing on what was again perceived to be different from the Anglo-
European model
Postmodernism and the post-colonial experience
• Questioning of historical discourse and exposing its being culture specific rather than universal
(decentralization); turned the question to the ‘Otherness’
• Solution: to control the Other
• Americans also began to acknowledge its own post-coloniality, which may have provided ground
for similarly subversive views of language and culture
• Implication: the acceptance of post-coloniality as part of the American formation is then no
longer a ‘badge of shame’ or immaturity
• Criticism: Post-colonial (centered on older nationalist models of identity crisis and post-
independence legitimacy) as the product of the ‘indirection, illegitimacy and emptiness of post-
colonizing discourses’
• Shock of recognition – European theories mirror the plight of settler colonies and colonies of
intervention in the direction of their literature and criticism
Post-coloniality and contemporary European theory
• Stresses the importance of ideological construction in social-textual relations find echoes in
post-colonial texts
• Lays stress on narrative as an alternative mode of knowledge to the scientific, and draws out the
implications of this for our view of the relationship and privileging of contemporary scientific
ideas of ‘competence’ over ‘customary knowledge’
• Criticism: Science opposes such self-legitimizing narrative statements; classified the narrative
dominated oral world as ‘savage,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘underdeveloped’
• Refutes to entertain the possibility of an unproblematic recuperation of the traditional
• Implication: attempts to articulate a weave of practices grounded in the particular and the local
Post-coloniality and discourse theory

4. • Discourse as a system of possibility for knowledge (Foucault)
• Useful in locating the series of ‘rules’ which determine post-coloniality
• Invoke certain ways of thinking about language, about truth, about power, and about the
interrelationships between all three
• Implication: a struggle for power – that power focused in the control of the metropolitan
language
Counter-discourse: Richard Terdiman
• Notion of language functioning in practice and usage, thus fully acknowledging the material site
of the text’s production
• Echoes the concerns of post-colonial linguistics with the practical orientation of language
• Discourses come into being in a structure of counter-discursive practices
• Implication: Post-colonialism appropriates the idea that the sign obtains its meaning in conflict
and contradiction and apply it to post-colonial texts and societies
Post-coloniality and theories of ideology
• Subjects are interpellated (called into being) within ideologies and that this is inescapable; that
is, that we become conscious under the power of construction resident in imaginary subjection:
‘Ideology interpellates individuals in imaginary subjection’
• Different modes by which in our culture, human being as made subject (Pecheux)
o ‘Good’ subjects who result from ‘Identification’ – freely consenting to the discursive
which determines them
o ‘Bad’ subjects who result from ‘counter-identification’ – they refuse the image offered
and turn it back on the offerer
o ‘Disidentification’ – product of political and discursive practices which work ‘on and
against’ the dominant ideologies
• Useful features of post-colonial studies
o Permits an understanding of the ‘subjective appropriation of knowledges’ (as well as
politics to which they give rise)
o Displaces a concern for the constituting subject to lay its stress on meaning and
discourse as formed in and through material struggle
• Narratives as a socially symbolic act (Jameson)
Marxism, anthropology, and post-colonial society
• Limited in its dealings with these societies by its own conscious Eurocentricity
• Recently, sensitive adaptation in arguing that such categories as ‘class’ are applicable to all
societies
• Implication: understand social and historical phenomena not in their ‘own terms’ but in terms of
‘an underlying system of structural relations, which because it contains within it internal
mechanisms tensions and contradictions, is of course of historical transformation’
Feminism and post-colonialism
• Women in many societies have been relegated to the position of ‘Other,’ marginalized and, in a
metaphorical sense, ‘colonized’

5. • Movement away from the biological stances toward more complex subversive positions and
towards increasing recognition that the principle of ‘difference,’ lying as it does at the very heart
of their construction of ‘Other,’ is basic to any contemporary feminist theory
• Implications: Parallelism between women and colonized races; the intimate experience of the
politics of oppression and repression, and like them have been forced to articulate their
experiences in the language of their oppressors
The politics of theory: decolonizing colonialist discourse
• Objective is to offer ways of dismantling colonialism’s signifying system and exposing its
operation in the silencing and oppressing of the colonial subject
• Colonized is constructed within a disabling master discourse of colonialism which specifies a
degenerate native population to justify its conquest and subsequent rule
• Criticism: questioning whether or not the models which stress the inescapability of the
discourse which constitutes colonizer-post-colonized are not in fact only a sophisticated mask
over the face of a continued, neo-colonial domination of which colonialism was only one
historical stage
• Syncretism – condition within which post-colonial societies operate, and accepting this does not,
in any simple sense, involve hiding the role culture plays in the continuing neo-colonial
hegemonic formation of the day-to-day experience of those societies (hybridity)
Post-colonial reconstructions: literature, meaning, value
• Objective: identify the importance of the ‘variant’ (post-colonial culture) over the ‘standard’
(Eurocentricism) through a non-Eurocentric perspective
• Literature
o Radically questioned easy assumptions about the characteristics of the genres we
usually employ as structuring and categorizing definitives
o Our sense of the name ‘literature’ has been altered by writers incorporating and
adapting traditional forms of imaginative expression to the exigencies of an inherited
english language
o Writer incorporating forms from other traditions within acceptable boundaries
articulate clearly the constant adjustments we make to our perceptions of ‘literature’
o Pre-colonial syncretism – develops a renewed sense of identity and self-value in the
independence period (i.e. music)
o Criticism: risk of being accused of plagiarism
• Meaning
o Meaning in its Eurocentric concept – the struggle of language, utterer/writer, and
meaning exchanged for power
o Post-colonial – all three ‘functions’ participate in the ‘social’ situation of the written text
o Therefore, meaning is a social accomplishment characterized by the participation of the
writer and reader functions within the ‘event’ of the particular discourse
o Criticism: the absence of experience necessary to fully comprehend the social discourse
 To a more extent, it is the problem in the phenomenon of distance – mental
dislocation
 Result: giving language its permanent and volatility at the same time
 However, post-colonial text does not wish to create meaning, but indicate a
shifting horizon of possible meanings
• Value

6. o Even though imitative in structure and form, post-colonial texts are judges with a
different set of standards in its success that render them ‘original’
Post-colonialism as a reading strategy
• Subversion of a canon = set of reading principles
• Movement away from Eurocentricism to alternative reading practice that fits the context in
order to bestow value upon the text