Neil Bowen on
Postcolonial Theory
Although the term Postcolonial theory only started to be used widely in the 1990s, the ideas of Postcolonial criticism developed in the explosion of new literary theory that swept through Universities in the 1960s. Essentially Postcolonial theorists pointed out that traditional readings of canonical texts were constructed by European colonisers, and hence expressed the values and judgements of this special interest group.
Moreover critical norms meant that these views were often presented as timeless, universal and objective. A further result of these norms was a reduction in the importance of cultural, national, regional and social differences between people. And inevitably traditional white Eurocentric critical readings tended to present Europeans rather well, often as virtuous and cultured, with the corollary that the colonised people were presented as inferior and as alien, or ‘other’.
According to famous Postcolonial theorists, such as Edward Said, non-European cultures are often presented in European literature and criticism as homogenous. Peter Barry, author of ‘Beginning Theory’ puts it like this, the (colonised) people are presented as ‘anonymous masses, rather than individuals, their actions determined by instinctive emotions….their emotions and reactions determined by racial considerations (they are like this because they are asiatics or blacks or orientals’.
Postcolonial theorists exposed and attacked the cultural assumptions underpinning traditional criticism. They re-read canonical texts, problematising the relation between coloniser and colonised. For example, where Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ had traditionally been read to present the superiority of civilised Prospero over the savage, uncivilised Caliban, Postcolonial Critics argue that a) this would suggest that the play is racist and that b) actually Prospero is not presented by Shakespeare as a heroic character, nor is Caliban presented entirely unsympathetically. This sort of thinking leads Postcolonial critics to celebrate the energy and potential for change embodied in the ‘Other’.
Another key concern of Postcolonial critics is the idea of ‘hybridity’, which is a concept used to describe what is produced through the encounter between colonising and colonised cultures. Postcolonial critics discuss and celebrate hybridity of identity, seeing it as an essential feature of our postcolonial world.
Postcolonial theorists are also interested in the developments of hybridity in the literary culture of a colonised, or oppressed people. Essentially they identify three stages, sometimes summarised as ‘Adopt, adapt and adept’:
The colonised people’s culture is suppressed and the alien colonisers’ culture imposed.
The colonised people seek to recover and reclaim their lost culture, often presenting it in nostalgic and romantic terms, rejecting the modern and contemporary as tainted by the colonial, consciously or unconsciously as a way of re-affirming cultural and/or national identity. Often the literature produced adopts the cultural forms of the colonising culture. Novels written in India and Africa in the middle years of the twentieth century, for instance, tend to incorporate local experience within the form of the European Novel.
The colonised people recover or develop their own cultural forms, distinct from European cultural values and traditions.