7/25/2019 Postcolonialist Criticism - Application (1)

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Postcolonialist perspective application

Brief examples of postcolonial interpretation of literary texts: Homi Bhabha gives us a

wonderful example of the global orientation of postcolonial criticism when he offers a new

way to analyse world literature, not in terms of national traditions, how it generally has been

studied, but in terms of postcolonial themes that could cross national boundaries. Bhabha

suggests that world literature may be studied in terms of the different ways culture has

experienced historical trauma, perhaps such traumas as slavery, revolution, civil war,

oppressive regimes, the loss of cultural identity, and the like. r world literature might be

seen as the study of the ways in which cultures define themselves by !othering" groups whom

they demonise or otherwise devalue for that purpose. r we might analyse world literature by

examining the representation of people and events that occur across cultural boundaries,

rather than within them, such as representations of migrants, political refugees, and colonised

peoples. !#he centre of such a study", Bhabha says, !would neither be the $sovereignty% of

national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture, but a focus on...unspoken,

unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present." #hat is we might study what world

literature tells us about the personal experience of people whom history has ignored the

disenfranchised, the marginalised, the unhomed such are found in the work of &outh 'frican

writer (adine )ordimer and 'frican 'merican writer #oni *orrison.

+n other words, the colonialist ideology contained in literature is deposited there by

writers and absorbed by readers without their necessarily realising it.

#he task of postcolonial literary criticism is to locate the modes of representations in

which the native is represented in inferior ways. +t assumes that colonial writing is racialied

and such literature feeds directly into the colonial intentions. #he task of postcolonial literarystudies, thus, is to unpack those literary figures, themes and representations that have enforced

imperialist ideology, colonial dominance and continuing -estern dominance. ' classic

method in postcolonial literary studies is to uncover the subtextsof ng./it.texts, to probe

beneath the obvious and apparently universal0humanistic0aesthetic themes in order to reveal

their racial, gendered imperial assumptions. #his is what dward &aid does in his !1ane

'usten%s Mansfield Park". He reads the work from the victim%s side. He writes: $the

2aribbean plantation in 'ntigua is linked inextricably to the family fortunes and life in

ngland and thereby showing how the colony is inseparable from the uropean country%.

Postcolonial literary studies pay attention to the context in which nglish literary texts

were produced and to the workings of colonial ideologies in those texts. #hus re-

interpretationis an important strategy in postcolonial criticism. 2hinua 'chebe reinterpreted

2onrad%s Heart of Darkness 345678 by arguing that he had no interest in 'fricans, and

reduced them, in this novel, to animal and dehumanied images. #he relevance of this study

is: it 9uestioned the earlier praise of the novel as pro 'frican.