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Postcolonial Studies

Historical And Regional Contexts

Academic postcolonial studies initially focused largely on the imperial metropoles, colonies, and former colonies of Britain and France. It has subsequently expanded to include critical analysis of other European imperialisms (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, German) and that of the United States. The field has additionally investigated transnationalism, race, ethnicity, diaspora, and globalization, which now operate as autonomous academic fields. The institutional relationship of postcolonial to ethnic studies and to area studies varies; in some instances, mergers of these previously discrete programs and departments have occurred.

Different regions are associated with different intellectual concerns and contributions. The study of race, for example, has been particularly pronounced in work from (and about) Africa and the Caribbean, challenging orthodox political economy by arguing that, historically, enslaved labor did not precede but was integral to the development of metropolitan capitalism. This work insists on the economic as well as the ideological significance of race.

Postcolonial intellectuals from these regions have also developed negritude and pan-Africanist scholarship that argues for the liberatory value of racial identification. At the same time the strikingly multicultural and multiracial qualities of Caribbean history have led to scholarly studies of cultural plurality and mixing: creolization, metissage, mestizaje, and syncretism are ideas that have been heavily debated in and regarding the Caribbean.

Postcolonial studies originating from (or about) Asia have arguably shown the heaviest imprint of poststructuralism applying Foucauldian, Derridean, and Lacanian psychoanalytic ideas. From India emerged Subaltern Atudies, an influential collective of historians. Its original Gramscian-Marxist orientation produced studies of colonialism as "domination without hegemony" (Ranajit Guha), and studies of the resistance history and consciousness of subalterns (a term describing subordinated social agents). At the start of the twenty-first century, subaltern studies has moved towards deconstructionism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York: Verso, 1992.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Cabral, Amilcar. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches, edited by Africa Information Service. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove, 1968.

Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Transculturation and Autoethnography: Peru 1615/1980." In Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Laura Chrisman

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Positive Number to Propaganda - World War IiPostcolonial Studies - Colonial Encounters, Nationalism, Resistance, Decolonization, Postindependence And Neocolonialism, Historical And Regional Contexts