Postcolonial Theory and Literature - Edward W. Said, First Wave: Colonial Discourse, Mahasweta Devi, W. E. B. Du Bois
studies world orient cultural
Postcolonial theory, often said to begin with the work of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, looks at literature and society from two broad angles: how the writer, artist, cultural worker, and his or her context reflects a colonial past, and how they survive and carve out a new way of creating and understanding the world. One of the earliest critical works to present this point of view is Robert J. C. Young's White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990).
When Said published his path-breaking book Orientalism in 1978, it established a trend that was, for some years, loosely described as "colonial discourse studies" rather than "postcolonial theory." Although Said ostensibly wrote about the Middle East being constructed as the "Orient" by French intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the Spanish
and British empires that formed the main fields of colonial discourse studies. Although Said's main thesis was that the West constructed something called the "Orient" as an object of investigation through varieties of cognitive, disciplinary, and administrative practice, colonial discourse studies was broader in its focus and conclusions.
Said, an Arab-American of Palestinian origin, continued to influence colonial and subsequently postcolonial studies and its offshoots (cultural studies, women's studies, ethnic studies) with his writings and his political journalism. Important works are Covering Islam (1981), The Question of Palestine (1979), The World, the Text, the Critic (1983), and Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Additional Topics
Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and raised in Jerusalem and Cairo. Said earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1957, and his M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1964) from Harvard University. Said began teaching at Columbia University in 1963, where he rose to be University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He was the author of twenty-two books, translated into thirty-five lan…
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 was born 1926 in D…
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 t…
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 o…
Although the three founders of the movement are located in the discipline of literary criticism, the Saidian revolution has been felt in anthropology as well. In a landmark article published in 1989 and delivered earlier to the American Association of Anthropology, Said accused anthropology of being a tool of imperialism. From within the discipline, the response to this was not as hostile as might…
The connection between the discipline of history and colonial discourse/postcolonial studies can be traced also through the Subaltern Studies collective, established in the early 1980s at the University of Sussex under the leadership of Ranajit Guha. The term subaltern comes from the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Guha had, however, published a monograph entitled A …
This entry will now consider second-wave postcolonial theory as applied to Latin America, Britain, the Caribbean, Africa, Australian, New Zealand, Hawai'i, and East and Southeast Asia, as well as from the perspective of feminism. It has already been mentioned that colonial discourse studies was strong in the Latin American area. Specifically postcolonialist work was undertaken by Jean Franc…
At the turn of the twenty-first century, postcolonial theory is merging with cultural theories of globalization, with the metropolitan emphasis coming frankly to the fore. A book riding the wave is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). The literary production of postcoloniality has generally been in the languages of the metropole, sometimes creolized. This is such a prolific impu…
Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward Liberation. San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. ——. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria . Borderlands La frontera.…
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