Orientalism and Subaltern Studies in the Postcolonial Studies (original) (raw)

Orientalism by Edward Said: A Study of Postcolonial Culture

zahraa, 2023

The article will discuss how postcolonialism addresses themes like Orientalist discourse, loss of identity, ethnicity, culture, oppression, and representation in the modern period. As a field of study, it adopts a deconstructionist attitude, and it questions what the colonized do and how he behaves when the colonizer confronts him. Orientalism is a key work for

EDWARD SAID: THE POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE LITERATURE OF DECOLONIZATION

This paper attempts an exploration of the literary theory of postcolonialism, which traces European colonialism of many regions all over the world, its effects on various aspects of the lives of the colonized people and its manifestations in the Western literary and philosophical heritage. Shedding light on the impact of this theory in the field of literary criticism, the paper focuses on Edward Said's views for the simple reason that he is considered the one who laid the cornerstone of this theory, despite the undeniable role of other leading figures. This theory is mainly based on what Said considers the false image of the Orient fabricated by Western thinkers as the primitive "other" in contrast with the civilized West. He believes that the consequences of colonialism are still persisting in the form of chaos, coups, corruption, civil wars, and bloodshed, which permeates many ex-colonies. The powerful colonizer has imposed a language and a culture, whereas those of the Oriental peoples have been ignored or distorted. Referring to some works of colonial and postcolonial novelists, the paper shows how being free from the repression of imperialism, the natives could, eventually, produce their own culture of opposition, build their own image, and write their history outside the frame they have for long been put into. With such writers, Conrad's Heart of Darkness can never be read the same after Achebe's criticism, nor can Bronte's Jane Eyre after Jean Rhys's postcolonial parallel novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Introduction This paper attempts an exploration of postcolonialism, a literary theory, which traces European colonialism of many regions all over the world, its effects on various aspects of the lives of the colonized people in general, and its manifestations in Western literary and philosophical heritage in particular throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, in addition to the emergence of the literature of opposition and resistance in the ex-colonies. The purpose of this study is to shed light on this theory and the remarkable impact it has left in the field of literary criticism. The paper will focus on Edward Said's views and ideas by exploring his most important books and articles, for the simple reason that Said is considered the one who laid the cornerstone of this theory, despite the importance of other leading figures such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha in this respect. Edward Said, the Palestinian American, and the notable academic and lecturer, had been the professor of comparative literature at Colombia University for a long time until his death of leukemia in 2003. Said's name came to light when his book Orientalism was published in 1978 and laid the ground for the theory of postcolonialism, sparking a storm of controversy, which didn't die with Said's decease.

GROUNDING THE TEXT OF POSTCOLONIALISM: CULTURAL STUDIES AND LITERATURE

International Journal of Modern Agriculture, 2020

This research paper aims to introduce Postcolonial theory and its implementation that focuses on the intense interaction between the cultural studies and literature. This piece of writing stresses on defining the terms likethe imperialism, the colonialism and the necolonialism and the postcolonialism in order to emphasize the cultural aspects of postcolonialism. The conception of postcolonialism in the literary field is not the same as imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism for the prime centre on culture. In basic, it is an amalgamation of literary study and cultural research which presents new perceptions to revise literary masterpieces from the cultural view point. With the spread of multiculturalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism, to a greater extent the intellects will pursue the pathway of the three pioneers-Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi K Bhabha. Postcolonialism will persist to be a significant theme for literary studies. And the implementations of postcolonialism, particularly the cultural aspects of it, will outlook the impact of the research of the world literature for an extensive stretch of phase. Key words:Culture, Orientialism, Hybridity, Subaltern, Postcolonial theory, Identity

The Holy Trinity of Postcolonial Studies: Background and Scope Samir Arab 728 The Holy Trinity of Postcolonial Studies: Background and Scope ‫ما‬ ‫اسات‬ ‫لدر‬ ‫املقدس‬ ‫الثالوث‬ ‫الاستعمار‬ ‫بعد‬ : ‫النطاق‬ ‫و‬ ‫الخلفية

Joussour al maréfa, 2023

In the last two decades, postcolonial theory gained more prominence and has become one of the most influential approaches to literary analysis. The extensiveness of postcolonial studies, in terms of philosophical and thematic concerns, somehow disturbs the reader. In literature and literary criticism, scholars argue that being acquainted with the founding fathers of any literary movement gives the reader more chance to meet the author's expectations and the understand his/her message. Edward Said, Homi Bhaha, and Gayatri Spivak are the pillars of postcolonial studies that any postcolonialist-reader is compelled to read about before approaching postcolonial literary texts. They are considered by Robert Young as the Holy Trinity of Postcolonialism. The present study sheds light on postcolonialism as a theory of subversion and reclamation and examines the contributions of the Holy Trinity to the rise of postcolonial studies.

Construction of truth and Identity: An analysis of Edward Said and GayatriSpivak’s postcolonial theory

International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES), 2022

Post colonialism is a word generally used to mean all the cultures of our colonial epoch impacted by the imperial process. Since the outset of the colonial process, post colonialism signifies ongoing concerns and discussions between East and West. It aims to study and analyses the aftermath of colonialism and exploring the truth, restoring the identity of the Independent Oriental Nations. It contains literature from countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, and other former colonial British countries. They are sometimes referred to as nations of the Third World. Marxism and Post structuralism influenced the ideas of Fanon to Gayatri Spivak. In the postcolonial period, Euro centrism or Euro centrism is decentered/deconstructed. In this study, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial aspects on constructing the truth for exploring colonized people’s identity will be discussed based on their famous book Orientalism and Can the Subaltern Speak?

Postcolonialism, Gayatri Spivak and the Subaltern: Struggle and Voices of the Disenfranchised

KY PUBLICATIONS, 2021

Postcolonialism includes literature of the nations such as Nigeria, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Jamaica and other third world countries. The leading critics in this area are Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha. Postcolonialism encompasses the issues such as, subaltern, racism, orientalism and diaspora. The focus of this paper will be on Gayatri Spivak and 'subaltern'. For Spivak subaltern refers to third world women and men, working class people or those disenfranchised and marginalized by the western culture. Marxism and poststructuralism have been a major influence on Gayatri Spivak. In her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' she examines the voice of the subaltern groups (women, tribal, orient). Drawing on Foucault's notion of 'discourse', on Gramsci's 'hegemony' and Derrida's 'deconstruction' this paper focuses on the role of texts, literary and otherwise in the colonial enterprise. This paper attempts to illustrate the representation of the subaltern characters in the texts written by the western writers.

Moving Beyond Edward Said: Homi Bhabha and the Problem of Postcolonial Representation

International Studies Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal, 2012

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses on Bhabha's concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-à-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm.

Introduction: The Genres of Postcolonialism

Social Text, 2004

This issue gathers recent work in postcolonial criticism and theory. The perspectives represented and contexts considered (South Africa, Canada, the United States, India, Pakistan) are the result of an especial-and still all-too-uncommon-effort to attend to scholarship produced in the global South, rather than simply entrenching further the association of postcolonial studies with a relatively narrow coterie of metropolitan migrants. At the same time, in bringing together work engaged with subaltern studies historiography in India (particularly the contributions of Sanjay Seth and Rosinka Chaudhuri) and work explicitly concerned with U.S. imperialism and contemporary globalization (particularly the contributions of Pius Adesanmi and Mark Driscoll), the issue poses once more a question raised by the last Social Text special issue on this topic-published in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War-around the theorization of the postcolonial itself. 1 Vigorously questioned in that setting in now-classic essays by Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock, the term postcolonial may have proven itself to be most useful precisely when it is placed under severe pressure, angled to highlight the necessarily uneasy relationship between colonial past and neocolonial present, history writing and current critique, cultural studies and political economy, as a task or problematic rather than a method or map. 2 In 1992 Shohat noted what she termed the "puzzling" absence of the term postcolonial in the rhetoric of the academic opposition to the Gulf War (in contrast to commonly invoked terms such as imperialism and even neocolonialism). She wondered in response whether something about the rubric of the postcolonial "does not lend itself to a geopolitical critique"; in the open-ended present of the "war on terror," the relative invisibility of explicitly postcolonial analysis must beg the same question. 3 Instead of rehearsing those definitional debates or simply offering overviews of the essays that follow, I will comment briefly on an issue that has long haunted methodological concerns in postcolonial studies: the politics of interdisciplinarity. The following essays raise this issue in disparate arenas and different ways (whether Sarah Nuttall's recourse to ethnography and feminist critique; Rosinka Chaudhuri's conjoining of poetics, translation studies, and historiography; Kamran Asdar Ali's attending to reader-response criticism as well as the sociology of religion; or Mark