GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: LITERATURAS POSCOLONIALES
GRADO
EN LENGUA INGLESA I UNIT 1: A HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION TO POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES WRITTEN IN ENGLISH: SOME KEY CONCEPTS
2012-2013
Antonio Ballesteros González (coordinador), Isabel Castelao Gómez GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES
GUÍA DE ESTUDIO: LITERATURAS POSCOLONIALES EN LENGUA INGLESA I UNIT 1. A HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION TO POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES IN ENGLISH: SOME KEY CONCEPTS COMPULSORY READINGS: 1) INTRODUCTORY AND THEORETICAL TEXTS: -Introduction and Chapter 1 in John McLeod’s Beginning Postcolonialism. -Extracts by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. They will be found below in this Guide. They can also be used for the purpose of text commentary.
STUDY PLAN AND SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS This first Unit functions as an introduction to the whole subject. It should be taken into account in this subject (the same as in any other of the Grado de Estudios Ingleses) that, preliminary to additional complementary activities, students must read carefully and with critical insight the compulsory readings, both of a theoretical and literary stance (there are none of the latter in this particular Unit), checking that they have understood their contents, so as to tackle later the tasks and self-assessment exercises proposed. 1) First of all, students should read the Introduction to John McLeod’s book (pp. 1-6), paying attention to the most significant concepts and ideas emphasized by the author. As self-assessment exercises, students can answer gradually the following questions, whose answers can be found in, and/or inferred from, McLeod’s book itself: -Why does postcolonialism challenge us to think again and question some of the assumptions that underpin both what we read and how we read? -Why is it so difficult to define the term ‘postcolonialism’? -What are the main stages conforming the history of the term ‘postcolonialism’? -What is the main difference between ‘post-colonialism’ (with a hyphen) and ‘postcolonialism’ (with no hyphen)?
2) Students must read later Chapter 1 in John McLeod’s book (pp. 7-43). The questions that follow can be used as self-assessment exercises (the answers can be deduced from McLeod’s text): -According to McLeod, what are the two contexts of the term ‘postcolonialism’?
-Trace the major steps in the process of decolonisation within the context of the British Empire. -Explain the difference between ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’. -What are the three distinct periods of ‘decolonisation’ when the colonised nations won the right to govern their own affairs, as regards the imperial venture of the British Empire? -Outline the foremost stages of the emergence and development of ‘Commonwealth Literature’. Why has the term been discarded in recent postcolonial theory? -‘Colonial discourses form the intersections where language and power meet’. Discuss. -Pinpoint Frantz Fanon’s and Edward Said’s main contributions to the field of postcolonial theory. How do their writings support the idea that ‘Empires colonise imaginations’? -Which three forms of textual analysis in particular, according to McLeod, became popular in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism? -What does the phrase ‘writing back to the centre’ mean in a postcolonial context? Has it been widely accepted by the great majority of postcolonial critics? Why?/Why not? -Summarize the most significant advances in postcolonial theory in the first decade of the twenty-first century. -According to McLeod, which are the three salient areas that fall within the remit of the umbrella-term ‘postcolonialism’?
TEXT COMMENTARIES Read and study the following extracts (remember that you can be examined on them). You are recommended to use them as text commentary material. 1) Frantz Fanon (1961) The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre). Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 2001. … Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was carried
on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannon. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say his property, to the colonial system. Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. […] The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools of natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we need not recall Apartheid in South Africa. [...] The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour – all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilderers’ separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms one is superfluous. […] This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich… (pp. 27-31). 2) Edward Said (1978) Orientalism. In The Edward Said Reader. Ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. London: Granta, 2000. … The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated— traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interest inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question […] European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (pp. 69-70). … Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffused collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down to the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual
(as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world (pp. 78-9).
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Students are advised to look up the following webpages connected with postcolonialism. They will be helpful for students of both ‘Literaturas Poscoloniales en Lengua Inglesa I & II’: -The Postcolonial Web: http://www.postcolonialweb.org/ -Postcolonial Theory and Literatures: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri -Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literatures in English: http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse/discurseov.html -The Centre for Asian and African Literatures: http://www.soas.ac.uk/centres/centreinfo.cfm?navid=179 -Anglophone Literatures of Africa, India and the Caribbean: http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~brians/anglophone/index/html