1. A Woefully Brief and Limited Intro to Post-Colonial Theory

2. Announcements:
Gentle reminder that The Reading Responses have a HUGE impact on your grade.
Essay 2 is on its way.
If you turned in Essay 1 late, your essay will be graded AFTER the on-time Essay 2 essays are graded.
Don’t forget, you should finish reading Brave New World by Tuesday, May 10!

3. Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism (post-colonial theory or post-oriental) is a term that applies to more than just the study of literature—it also refers the theoretical and critical observations of former colonies of the Western powers and how they relate to, and interact with, the rest of the world.
When discussing it as a literary theory, it focuses on the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries.
In this case it is called Postcolonial Theory.
Postcolonial theory seeks to critically investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one of them ideologically fashions itself as superior and assumes dominance and control over the other.
These theories are reactions to the cultural legacy of colonialism.

4. Post Colonial Theory Continued
It investigates the literature written in colonial countries and by their citizens—especially when it has colonized people as its subject matter.
Similar to the ways in which feminist critics often focus on writing by women that has been historically ignored or thought unimportant, postcolonial critics often focus on writing by people from colonized cultures—either during or after colonization—and examine the (often destructive) ways in which the colonizing or dominating culture influenced or erased the colonized culture.

5. Colonized people who managed to gain access to education and “upward mobility”—especially from colonies in the British Empire—often attended British universities. Their access to education, still unavailable in the colonies, created a new criticism - mostly literary, and especially in novels. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union during the late 20th century, its former republics became the subject of this study as well.

6. Terms: Post-Colonial/Postcolonial
The hyphenated term (-) Postcolonial implies the effects of colonialism on cultures after the end of colonialism, such as the legacy of Eurocentric modernity.
Gandhi, Leela Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction
The run-on term Postcolonial refers to the effects of colonialism on cultures from the beginning of colonialism to the present date.
Ashcroft et. al (1989) Empire Writes Back

7. Key Terms Imperialism-extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial control or through cultural control. Alterity-lack of identification with some part of one’s community, differentness, otherness. Diaspora-refer to any people or ethnic population forced or induce to leave their homelands, being dispersed throughout other parts of the world.

8. Key Terms Eurocentrism-the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. Hybridity-referring to the integration of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and colonized cultures.

9. The 3 Major Foundational Authors in Postcolonial Theory
Edward W. Said
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Homi K. Bhabha

10. Edward Said
Probably the most important figure for the rise of postcolonial studies and theory.
Born in 1935 in Jerusalem and died in 2003
Palestinian-American scholar, critic, and writer
Said, raised as an Anglican (Church of England), attended a British school in Cairo then at Princeton and Harvard, he became an academic literary critic.
From 1963 until his death he was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.

11. Edward Said continued
His 1978 book Orientalism reevaluated an entire historical tradition of European-American thought, examining the relation of political power to the representation of the world, and generated an entire field of cultural and postcolonial studies as well as informing the thinking of scholars in every area of cultural, social and historical work.
It describes the academic and cultural discourse about the East constructed by the West and the problems inherent in that.
Other significant books include The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam (1981), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Peace and Its Discontents (1995), The End of the Peace Process (2000), Reflections on Exile (2000) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004).

12. Orientalism
Illustrates Asian and Islamic Cultures during European imperialism and Europe’s goals of maintaining power and domination of non-Europeans
He argued that Europe used the Orient and imperialism as a symbol of its strength and superiority.
“Said suggested that Orientalists are treated as others—in this case, Muslims and Asians—and as objects defined not in terms of their own discourses, but solely in terms of standards and definitions imposed on them from outside. Among the influences underlying these definitions was, in Said's view, a long-standing Western concern with presenting Islam as opposed to Christianity.

13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in 1942
Is thought of as one of the three co-founders of postcolonial theory.
Her main work on the postcolonial theory was her Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)
Her work combines Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, and Deconstruction.

14. Homi K. Bhabha He wrote the Nation and Narration (1990)
This considers how to conceptualize the nation under colonialism and, by default, in postcoloniality.
Here he takes issue with the anthropologist Benedict Anderson's view of the relationship between imperialism and its resistance in Imagined Communities (1991).

15. Places that produce literature often examined in Postcolonial Studies
Latin America
Africa
East and Southeast Asia
South Asia
Caribbean
Polynesia
United States

16. Postcolonial Examples: Books: - Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart - Wole Soyinka, The Lion and the Jewel - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea - Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana Films: - Gandhi (1982) --India (colonized by the British) - Sugar Cane Alley (1984) –Martinique (colonized by the French) - Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) –Australia, colonized by the British - Whale Rider (2004) –New Zealand, colonized by the British - The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) –Ireland, colonized by the British

17. American Multiculturalism
A Critical Theory of Cultural Studies

18. American Multiculturalism
Since its beginnings, America as a nation has been home to many peoples from many different cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds.
Many of these groups came willingly, as did (most) immigrants from Europe and other places, while others—African slaves in particular—did NOT.
America is diverse and multiethnic, and as a result it is—and should be—multicultural.
American multiculturalism has grown out of the idea that America was built on and is composed of not ONE “American” culture, but is of MANY, and that all are equally valuable.

19. Multicultural Critics Say What?
One of the first and foremost goals of multicultural critics has been to increase the visibility of the literature produced by members of minority groups in the United States.
Another goal has been to create a critical and academic environment in which these works can be properly understood and appreciated (and taken seriously!)
Due to the marginalization of minority cultures, many works by minority authors were written out of a set of assumptions and worldviews different from those of the dominant culture and therefore not fully understood or taken seriously in academic circles.

20. American Multiculturalism
Often Focuses On the Works Of:
African American Writers
Latina/o Writers
American Indian Literatures
Asian American Writers
Henry Louis Gates uses the word “race” only in quotation marks.

21. African American Writers
African American Writing often displays a folkloric conception of a humankind; a “double consciousness,” as W.E.B. DuBois called it, arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white cultural superiority; a naturalistic focus on survival’ and inventive reframing of language itself, as in language games like “jiving,””sounding,””signifying,” and “rapping.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, circa 1907

22. African American Writers
The Harlem Renaissance ( ) signaled a tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an especial interest in primitivist art the so-called New Negroes.
Langston Hughes was a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance -- a movement during the 1920s of black writers and intellectuals who engaged in intense debate regarding the place of the African American in American life, and on the role and identity of the African-American artist.
Pictured here are Langston Hughes [far left] with [left to right:] Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney, on a Harlem rooftop on the occasion of a party in Hughes' honor, 1924.

23. Latina/o Writers Spanish-speaking people in the United States.
The majority of Mexican residents stayed in place, transformed into Mexican Americans with a stroke of the pen.
One of the primary tropes in Latina/o studies has to do with the entire concept of borders-borders between nations, between cultures and within cultures.

24. Latina/o Writers
“Code-switching” is a border phenomenon studied by linguists. Speakers who code-switch move back and forth between Spanish and English, for instance, or resort to the “Spanglish” of border towns.
Liminality, or “betweeness” is characteristic of postmodern experience but also has special connotations for Latina/o.

25. American Indian Literatures
In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life.
For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans.
For many, American Indian is often preferred over “Native American”. Even better—use specific nation/tribe names!
Wendy Rose – a Hopi/Miwok writer and poet
Sherman Alexie – grew up on the Spokane Reservation

26. American Indian Literatures
Two types of American Indian literature have evolved as fields of study.
Traditional American Indian literature includes tales, songs, and oratory.
Mainstream American Indian literature refers to works written by Indians in English in the traditional genres of fiction, poetry and autobiography.
Many say that N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn(1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, The Way to Rainy Mountain(1969), began a renaissance of American Indian fiction and poetry and inspired a generation of Indian writers, poets, and artists.

27. Asian American Writers
Edward Said has written of orientalism, or the tendency to objectify and exoticise Asians, and the countries and cultures of both the so-called “near” and “far” East.
While Asian literature goes back for a millennia** , Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the 20th century, primarily with autobiographical “paper son” stories and “confessions.”
**Example: The first novel, The Tale of Genji, was written by a Japanese woman, Murasaki Shikibu, in 1021

28. Asian American Writers
Paper son stories were carefully fabricated for Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities believe that their New World sponsors were really their fathers.
Asian American autobiography inherited these descriptive strategies, as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warriors: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts(1976) illustrates.
Identity may be individually known within but is not always at home in the outward community.
Maxine Hong Kingston has won the National Book Critics Circle Award (for /The Woman Warrior/)

29. Asian American Writers
Chinese women make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American writers.
Jade Snow Wong’s female “coming of age” story was called Fifth Chinese Daughter.
Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989) traces the lives of four Chinese women immigrants starting in 1949, when they form their mah-jongg club and swap stories of life in China; these mother’s vignettes alternate with their daughters’ stories.
Directed by Wayne Wang

30. Apply It To The Literature:
An American Multicultural reading of “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker might choose to focus on the quilts, and the significance of such quilts in African American art and history.
Such a reading might also compare Maggie and Dee’s relationship to that history and how they differ.
Example:
African-American art has often been functional—that is, it is meant to be used. The quilts that become the subject of contention in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” are an example of this type of practical art. In fact, the title of the story is a specific reference to the functionality of homemade things that Dee wants to take from the family home and preserve. Given Dee’s newfound interest in African and African-American culture and heritage, it is striking that she is unable to appreciate this fact which seems so obvious to her mother and sister.