The Social Function of Postcolonial Literature in the 1960s and Now (original) (raw)

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

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

The Development of Postcolonial Theory

Post-colonial theory is a post-positivist/reflectivist/constitutive and non-mainstream International Relations (IR) i theory which posits a critical thinking to dominant IR theories. It is assumed to offer an alternative to the Eurocentric stance and concepts of classical International Relatios theories and carry a potential to move beyond these mainstream theories, even to restructure them. Post-colonial theoreticians, like all critical scholars, have tried to shift the classical thinking in the discipline and save it from the hegemony of Western conceptions by challenging "Western-theorizing" and "decolonizing" it. However, it is not a single theory but a set of different theories. There is an immense diversity of post-colonial theory which focus on different issues such as literature, art, music, linguistics, slavery, migration, discrimination, historiography and discusses different kinds of subjugation like racism, gender, nationalism and identity.

On the particularities of postcolonial studies, or how postcolonialism has become obsolete

Revista Mulemba

I draw first on Vivek Chibber's argument that postcolonial studies fails to provide an adequate basis for a theory of human rights and a practice of global solidarity. I then introduce the Warwick Research Collective's elaboration of a new theory of world literature constructed around the concept of “combined and uneven development.” I conclude by proposing a way out of the limitations of postcolonial studies.

- Postcolonialism as a discoursive formation

Since the mid-1980s the term "postcolonial" has become a well-known key signifier in analysis of cultural and political representations of dominance and subalternity in contemporary societies. It was in the wake of the success of this term that from the early 1990s an impressive field of studies, from transversal to traditional disciplines, entered the archives of Western knowledge, at first in the Anglo-American world but later worldwide: postcolonial studies, or postcolonial critique. It could be argued, as in the case of cultural studies, that postcolonial criticism emerged at an imaginary epis-temic intersectional point, binding in new ways objects, approaches, and perspectives coming from different traditional disciplines: from literary critique to philosophy, from anthropology to psychoanalysis and sociology, from history to the political sciences, from English to linguistics. It is for this reason that the postcolonial discursive formation is usually conceived both as a radical epistemological challenge to traditional academic disciplines and specializations and as a new and more democratic approach to the conceptualization of contemporary and historical relationships between the West and its others. According to this self-representation, then, postcolonial studies may be better defined as an emergent critical space aimed at the decolonization of current theoretical and political practices. Despite its close association with academic European postmodernism and poststruc-turalism in mainstream critical thinking, postcolonial critique can be approached as the effect of a very complex genealogy. My approach to its emergence as a discipline is based on Edward Said's constructivist idea of beginning. A beginning, Said maintains, is different from an origin because a beginning can be chosen, while an origin can only be acknowledged: "beginning is not so much an event unto itself as an opening within discourse" (Said 1975, 350; emphasis original). Said's idea of beginning is important here because it seeks to methodologically combine "intention" and "method," allowing subjectivity and politics ("secular agency") to enter the domain of theory through an epistemological solid ground. Our starting premise will be that postcolonial criticism came out of multiple hybrid and transnational roots. It was not a discourse that originated in the postcolonial world but one produced by migrant postcolonial intellectuals displaced in the West, who were also notably critical of the essentialist and binary political imaginary of anticolonial first "great narrations." However, it could be argued that its beginning can be tracked down to classical anticolonial thinking (to political interventions of figures such as Mariátegui, Gandhi, Sartre, Césaire, Fanon, etc.), namely to the critique of Western imperialism that arose in the context of the different national liberation movements during the decol-onization processes. Its beginning can also be tracked down to the development of The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

The Colonizing Impulse of Postcolonial Theory

2010

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary ...