Postcolonial Criticism Has Embraced Cultural Studies Essay

Post colonial Criticism Has Embraced Cultural Studies EssayAfter the determination of World War II, there occurred a large-scale process of decolonization of the territories subjugated by virtually of the imperial powers (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium). Postcolonial literature and criticism arose twain during and after the struggles of many nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere for independence from colonial rule. The 1950s and sixties saw the publication of seminal texts of postcolonialism Aim Csaires Discours sur le colonialisme, and Frantz Fanons Black Skin, White Masks. In 1958, Chinua Achebe published his fabrication Things Fall Apart. George Lammings The Pleasures of Exile appeared in 1960 and Fanons The Wretched of the Earth followed in 1961. In his book Postclonialism A Very Short Introduction, Robert Young regarded that the founding trice of postcolonial theory was the journal the Tricontinental, which initiated the first global alliance of the bulks of the three continents against imperialism (Young 16-17).E. ii. chief(prenominal) aims of the theoryPostcolonial criticism has embraced a number of aims most fundamentally, to re-examine the accounting of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized to determine the economic, political, and cultural impact of colonialism on some(prenominal) the colonized peoples and the colonizing powers to analyze the process of decolonization and above all, the contestation of forms of hegemony, and the representative of political and cultural identities (Young, White Mythologies, 11). Early voices of anti-imperialism stressed the need to nonplus or return to indigenous literary traditions so as to renew their cultural heritage eclipsed by the imperial domination1. Other conspicuous voices, such as Said and Spivak, hit advocated a deconstructive critique of western sandwich discursive formation of knowledge in order to attain their induce political and Acultural ends. Ho wever, recent voices, led by Homi Bhabha, choose embraced the notion of hybridity as a space of cultural articulation and negotiation.E. iii. Scope and proposalsThe scope of postcolonial preaching extends over the domains of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Indeed, it might be an oversimplification to treat either the colonizer or the colonized as homogeneous entities, which can somehow be mutually opposed. such a rigid division undermines the fact that both class exploitation and gender oppression function in both the westerly and in colonized nations (Young 8-9). Hence, postcolonial discourse has been associated with ethnic studies of various minorities in Western societies such as African-American, Native American, Latin American, and womens studies. All of these discourses have challenged the main streams of Western philosophy, literature, and ideology. In this respect, it has become a common project to question and revaluate the literary and cultural enactment in Weste rn institutions. The 1960s saw left-wing uprisings against the elements of liberal humanism Western democracy, the Enlightenment rationalism, objectivity, and one-on-one autonomy. This reaction against the Western mainstream tradition was fostered more often than not by the emergence of french literary theory, which insisted that the text was an indirect brass and often a justification of the prevailing power structure. This structure was inevitably a hierarchy in which the voices of minorities, women, and the working classes were suppressed. In fact, the appeal to timeless truths in the Western literature, which is presumptively claimed as universal in its scope and purpose, has always transcended historical, economic, and political contexts. Such claim reveals the extent to which Eurocentric representations of the Self, resting on the Enlightenment project of rationality, progress, civilization, and virtuous agency, were constructed on a binary star opposition to various f orms of Otherness, which are founded on polarized images such as superstition, backwardness, barbarism, and moral incapacity.E. iv. Recent developments in the postcolonial theorySaids frontier work repointalism appeared in 1978. More recent works include The conglomerate Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin and Gayatri Spivaks The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), as hale as work by Abdul JanMohamed, Benita Parry and most importantly Homi Bhabhas The situation of Culture (1994). In his book White Mythologies, Robert Young sees postcolonialism as chronic to derive its inspiration from the anti-colonial struggles of the colonial era. Anti-colonialism had many of the characteristics comm only associated with postcolonialism such as diaspora, transnational migration and transcultural identities. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin also use the term postcolonialism in a comprehensive sense to cover all the history wedged by imperialism from the moment of co lonization to the present day, which is a form of continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods.Most of the exponents of postcolonialism have regarded the trio Said, Spivak and Bhabha, as the most influential theorists of what has become known as postcolonialism2. Their works have largely been at the center of various contemporary postcolonial debates. Saids Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the celestial sphere of explicitly postcolonial criticism in the West. He argues that the Western representation of the Orient was produced by the imaginative geography of Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies. Postcolonial theory reverses the historical center/margin heed of cultural studies. Critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, Homi K. Bhabha has questioned the binary feeling that produces the dichotomies-center/margin, white/black, and col onizer/colonized-by which colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial Other and the relation of the possession of discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Nowadays, postcolonialism offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to subvert the essentialist thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect, postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the eccentric of colonized peoples- their wealth, labor, and culture- in the development of groundbreaking European nation states. duration postcolonial criticism emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture, including the imperialism of multinational capitalism, sugge sts a continued relevance for this field of study.E. v. Delimitation of postcolonial theoryPostcolonial theory, as any other a priori approach, has conceptual boundaries and limitations. Although it offers a theoretical approach that highlights the importance of examining the present colonial legacies, most of the early literature in postcolonial theory has emerged from the decolonized world of the twentieth century that theorizes mostly from the British imperial discourse. Thus, for the most part, it has not only overlooked the (post)colonial texts written in native languages, but also created a kind of postcolonial canon that has so far reinforced and maintained the domination of the colonizers language that has served as a tool for colonialism and imperialism. According to Wail Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, Anglophone postcolonial studies have sustained British literature as a frame of informant (18). Therefore, only Commonwealth Anglophone writers are introduced to English de partments, while writers who write in their native languages are neglected. As a result, Anglophone postcolonial literature is a exceedingly selective field that consolidates the argument that Anglophone postcolonialism has become a mimic canon that functions effectively to reinforce neocolonial hegemony (Hassan and Saunders 18).Nevertheless, the use of english3as the language of expression makes the postcolonial works available to a wider audience and, thus, gives voice to ex-colonial subjects (Subaltern/Other) to speak for themselves and repair the agency of self-representation. According to Ashcroft, through using E/english, colonized people have subverted the tropes by which they have habitually been marginalized, and, ultimately, have permanently influenced however the educational disciplines by which those tropes were perpetuated (Ashcroft, On Postcolonial Futures, 2).