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Postcolonial Theory and Literature

First Wave: Colonial Discourse

The influential practitioners of early colonial discourse studies were, on the Latin American front, Gordon Brotherston, José Rabasa, and Peter Hulme. Brotherston's book The Book of the Fourth World (1992) was particularly significant in suggesting major differences in the historiography of time and place if indigenous languages were studied in depth.

MAHASWETA DEVI

Mahasweta Devi was born 1926 in Dhaka, then in British India, to parents who were nationalist intellectuals. She was educated at a school and college established by anti-imperialist poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Devi earned her M.A. in English from Calcutta University in 1963.

Exposing exploitation and domination in the postcolonial state, Devi's writings are different from the literature of diasporic nostalgia for the place left behind. Between 1956 and 1965, Devi published nineteen titles. Among these was Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi, 1956), a novel about young princess of a small princely state losing her life in the Mutiny of 1857 against the British, based on archival sources as well as oral history collected by Devi herself.

From 1966 to 1975, Devi published three historical novels. One explored a low-caste boy's struggle for human rights; another, the Maratha cavalry raids in the eighteenth century. Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) provided a feminist and urban perspective on the Naxalite movement of the early 1970s that brought peasants and intellectuals together. This was Devi's first major book.

Between 1976 and 1985, Devi's work focused on the aboriginal and the (post)colonial state. Her fiction about the Indian "aboriginals" (remnants of ethnic groups already living on the Indian sub-continent when the pastoralist economies, speaking Indo-European languages, spread to the area between 6000 and 2000 B.C.E.) include the novel Aranyer Adhikar (1975; Right to the forest), on Birsa Munda and the anti-British Munda rebellion in the late nineteenth century; the short story collection Agnigarbha (1978; Womb of fire); and the novel Chotti Munda Ebong Tar Tir (1980; Chotti Munda and his arrow).

In 1980, Devi started the Bengali quarterly Bortika (Torch) as a forum for peasants, agricultural and factory workers, the urban subproletariat, middle-class activists, and conscientious government workers. It was the first significant alternative publication in Bengali. In 1980 and 1981, she initiated investigative and interventionist journalism against every social ill in the postcolonial state. In 1981, Devi became involved with bonded labor (rural landowners charging exorbitant interest for small, often imagined, and invariably undocumented, loans, so that generations give free labor in "exchange"). Active in national and state-level human rights, Devi masterminded the first public interest litigation against the state on behalf of the aboriginals in 1998.

Devi is a one-person resource center for people in distress, tenaciously holding the state to its accountability. Her activism is thus different from the international civil society—self-selected moral entrepreneurs, controlled by the dominant states of the world, who bypass the dominated states. She is "postcolonial" against this new and unacknowledged colonialism. Devi approaches administrative machinery at all levels. In her fiction, she presents the aboriginal in her otherness and singularity. In her activism, she is careful that those whose suffering she foregrounds should not suffer because of her intervention.

Devi was named Padmashree (distinguished citizen) by the government of India in 1986 for work among aboriginals. In 1996, she received the Jnanpith (a literary award presented by the government of India) and the Ramon Magsaysay award (for literature, given by the government of the Philippines). In 2003, Devi was named to the Légion d'honneur (second order, by the government of France).

By far the most numerous studies were confined to the British Empire in India. An offshoot of this work was a thorough investigation of the cross-cultural elements of the British Renaissance period. This work has also been called the New

W. E. B. DU BOIS

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At fifteen, Du Bois was a race correspondent for the New York Globe. He encountered racism early, but gained a deeper knowledge of it teaching at a county school while an undergraduate at Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee. Du Bois earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, is the first volume of the Harvard Historical Series.

Du Bois initiated the scientific approach to social phenomena in 1896 with his work The Philadelphia Negro. He continued developing methodology while serving on the faculty of Atlanta University, presenting historical versions of African and African-American cultural development. Du Bois engaged in a growing ideological controversy with Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), who preferred industrial to liberal education and limited economic growth to political power. Du Bois proposed higher education of the "Talented Tenth."

In 1903, Du Bois saw the publication of his landmark The Souls of Black Folk.

In 1906, Du Bois organized the "Niagara Movement," leading on to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In1909, Du Bois began editing the chief organ of the NAACP, Crisis magazine; he continued as editor for twenty-five years. Du Bois's scathing editorials often led to battles within the ranks of the association.

During World War I, Du Bois used Crisis to lead Congress to open black officer training schools, bring legal action against lynchers, and set up a federal work plan for returning veterans. Crisis subscription grew from 1,000 in 1909 to over 10,000 in 1919. Du Bois's "Returning Soldier" editorial marked the climax of the period.

In 1919, Du Bois represented the NAACP at the Peace Conference in France, where he organized the abortive Pan-African conference. In 1921, Du Bois planned a second Pan-African meeting. That same year, Du Bois met the populist Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) and visited Africa for the first time. With the publication of "The Negro Mind Looks Out" (1925), Du Bois anticipated postcolonial criticism by fifty years.

In 1927, Du Bois visited the Soviet Union. He commented, "My day in Russia was the day of Communist beginnings." Du Bois left the NAACP in 1933 and rejoined Atlanta University. His works on the black freedom struggle, Black Reconstruction and Dusk of Dawn, were published in 1935 and 1940, respectively.

As an associate consultant to the American delegation, Du Bois charged the fledgling United Nations with imperialism in1945.

The Fifth Pan-African Congress, also in 1945, included Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the first president of Ghana; George Padmore (1903–1959), the international revolutionary; and Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1890–1978), the first president of Kenya. Du Bois was elected International President, and was named "Father of Pan-Africanism." His The World and Africa was published in 1947.

As a member of the American Labor Party, Du Bois asserted, "Drunk with power, we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery, which once ruined us, to a third world war, which will ruin the world."

Du Bois demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons as chairman of the Peace Information Center. He was indicted under Foreign Agents Registration Act, but was acquitted on insufficient evidence. In 1959, Du Bois told a large audience in Beijing: "In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a NIGGER." Du Bois left the United States permanently for Ghana in 1961. He directed the state-sponsored Encyclopedia Africana at Nkrumah's request and became a Ghanaian citizen and member of the Communist party.

Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.

SOURCE: Adapted from Gerald C. Hynes, "A Biographical Sketch of W. E. B. Du Bois." Available from http://www.duboislc.org/html/DuBoisBio.html.

Historicism. The most important critic in this trend is Stephen J. Greenblatt. Greenblatt's most representative book is Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991).

As for colonial discourse studies proper, work by the British Indian scholar Homi K. Bhabha can be seen as groundbreaking in the early 1980s. In the essays collected as The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha describes "mimicry" as "at once resemblance and menace," "hybridity" as "'denied' knowledges enter[ing] upon the dominant discourse and estrang[ing] the basis of its authority," and the "third space" as "the nonsynchronous temporality of global and national cultures."

The importance of Bhabha's early work lay in his use of the discourse of psychoanalysis as revised by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), and developed by the British journal Screen, where some of Bhabha's earliest writings appeared. "DissemiNation," the influential introduction to his edited volume Nation and Narration (1990), considers how to conceptualize the nation under colonialism and, by default, in postcoloniality. Here he takes issue with the anthropologist Benedict Anderson's view of the relationship between imperialism and its resistance in Imagined Communities (1991). Anderson, a scholar of Southeast Asia, suggests that the narrative time of the novel is particularly suitable for the epistemic shift suffered by colonial populations. In his 1998 book The Spectre of Comparisons, Anderson provides a detailed analysis of the coming into being of a place called Southeast Asia. This is a postcolonial text that carries on the Saidian tradition of the construction of an object of investigation into the academic practice of the U.S. university.

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Positive Number to Propaganda - World War IiPostcolonial Theory and Literature - Edward W. Said, First Wave: Colonial Discourse, Mahasweta Devi, W. E. B. Du Bois