Literary Theory and Methodology Spring 2008 Session One: Postcolonialist Theories

Agenda Revisiting the Autumn Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction Reading poco

Revisiting Session One Theories deal with the production of meaning and value: –Author –Text –Reader –Context –Code

Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction The study of colonial discourse Key words: –Ethnocentrism –Centre – margin: Western – non-Western –Subject positions: authors and readers Backgrounds: –Poststructuralism –Postmodernism

Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction An Example: ”Pears’ Soap”

Edward Said Orientalism: –The history of and cultural relations between Europe and Asia –The university discipline dealing with Oriental languages and culture –Images, stereotypes, myths, and ideologies about ”the Orient” as the ”Other”

Edward Said The ”worldliness” of the text –Texts are not examples of différance – of meaning sliding endlessly along the chain of signifiers –Texts are used by specific people in specific contexts for specific purposes

Edward Said Reading Heart of Darkness Against Chinua Achebe’s interpretation, Conrad is a ”thoroughgoing racist” Contrapuntal reading of the two narratives: –The official imperialist enterprise –The non-Western world Conrad shows but cannot see both narratives

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The subaltern – the colonized non-elite –How can the subaltern speak? –How can we speak for the subaltern?

Spivak Reading Jane Eyre Jane Eyre – feminist heroine of British fiction (independence, individualism) an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism” (i.e. of the way in which imperialism projects a white, European epistemology onto the rest of the world) – silencing the subaltern

A Selection of Further Important Concepts Mimic man: in-between subjectivity Hybridity: Bakthin and revolutionary discourse (the dialogic) Diaspora – the dispersion of something that was originally localized (people, language, culture)

The Spicy Brits British immigrant writers: Salman Rushdie Kazuo Ishiguro Timothy Mo Zadie Smith, White Teeth Monica Ali, Brick Lane