General Introduction

When Arthur James Balfour stood up in the House of Commons, at the

height of British imperial power, on June 13 1910, to answer challenges
to Britains presence in Egypt, Edward Said tells us (1978:32), he spoke
under the mantle of two indivisible foundations of imperial authority
knowledge and power. The most formidable ally of economic and political
control had long been the business of knowing other peoples because
this knowing underpinned imperial dominance and became the mode
by which they were increasingly persuaded to know themselves: that is,
as subordinate to Europe. A consequence of this process of knowing
became the export to the colonies of European language, literature and
learning as part of a civilising mission which involved the suppression of
a vast wealth of indigenous cultures beneath the weight of imperial control.
The date of Balfours speech is significant. In just a few years British
imperial power would begin to be dismantled by the effects of two world
wars and the rise of independence movements throughout the world. This
political dismantling did not immediately extend to imperial cultural
influences, but it was attended by an unprecedented assertion of creative
activity in postcolonial societies.
European imperialism took various forms in different times and places
and proceeded both through conscious planning and contingent
occurrences. As a result of this complex development something occurred
for which the plan of imperial expansion had not bargained: the immensely
prestigious and powerful imperial culture found itself appropriated in projects
of counter-colonial resistance which drew upon the many different
indigenous local and hybrid processes of self-determination to defy, erode
and sometimes supplant the prodigious power of imperial cultural
knowledge. Post-colonial literatures are a result of this interaction between
imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices. As a
consequence, post-colonial theory has existed for a long time before that
particular name was used to describe it. Once colonised peoples had cause
to reflect on and express the tension which ensued from this problematic
and contested, but eventually vibrant and powerful mixture of imperial
language and local experience, post-colonial theory came into being.
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The term post-colonial is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity
of the many different cultural experiences it implicates, and, as the extracts
in this Reader demonstrate, it addresses all aspects of the colonial process
from the beginning of colonial contact. Post-colonial critics and theorists
should consider the full implications of restricting the meaning of the term
to after-colonialism or after-Independence. All post-colonial societies are
still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial
domination, and independence has not solved this problem. The
development of new lites within independent societies, often buttressed
by neo-colonial institutions; the development of internal divisions based on
racial, linguistic or religious discriminations; the continuing unequal treatment
of indigenous peoples in settler/invader societiesall these testify to the
fact that post-colonialism is a continuing process of resistance and
reconstruction. This does not imply that post-colonial practices are seamless
and homogeneous but indicates the impossibility of dealing with any part of
the colonial process without considering its antecedents and consequences.
Post-colonial theory involves discussion about experience of various
kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference,
race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master discourses of
imperial Europe such as history, philosophy and linguistics, and the
fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come
into being. None of these is essentially post-colonial, but together they
form the complex fabric of the field. Like the description of any other field
the term has come to mean many things, as the range of extracts in this
Reader indicates. However we would argue that post-colonial studies are
based in the historical fact of European colonialism, and the diverse
material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise. We need to keep this
fact of colonisation firmly in mind because the increasingly unfocused use
of the term post-colonial over the last ten years to describe an astonishing
variety of cultural, economic and political practices has meant that there is
a danger of its losing its effective meaning altogether. Indeed the diffusion
of the term is now so extreme that it is used to refer to not only vastly
different but even opposed activities. In particular the tendency to employ
the term post-colonial to refer to any kind of marginality at all runs the risk
of denying its basis in the historical process of colonialism.
While drawing together a wide variety of theoretical and critical
perspectives, this Reader attempts to redress a process whereby postcolonial theory may itself mask and even perpetuate unequal economic
and cultural relations. This happens when the bulk of the literary theory is
seen to come out of the metropolitan centres, adding value to the literary
raw material imported from the post-colonial societies (Mitchell 1992). Such
a situation simply reproduces the inequalities of imperial power relations.
Post-colonial theory has been produced in all societies into which the
imperial force of Europe has intruded, though not always in the formal guise
of theoretical texts. But this might not be so clear today given the privileging
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

of theory produced in metropolitan centres and the publishing networks

which perpetuate this process. It is relatively easy, for instance, to obtain
the classic texts of colonialist discourse theory in metropolitan societies,
since they appear in publications widely circulated in these areas. But critical
material by post-colonial theorists such as E.K.Brathwaite, Michael Dash,
Raja Rao and Wilson Harris (not to mention the theory located in creative
texts) are either not available or ignored in many contemporary metropolitan
discussions of the field. Equally, though for different reasons, such as a
crisis of documentation in many post-colonial societies, much of this material
is difficult to obtain there, too. One purpose of this collection is to make a
wide range of post-colonial critical material available in a relatively
accessible and inexpensive form.
We have attempted to show and celebrate the immense range of
countries and literatures from which the theorisation of the post-colonial
condition has emerged, and in so doing to place the more publicised recent
concerns of colonialist discourse theory in a wider geographic and historic
context. Indeed, for us, the hyphenated form of the word post-colonial has
come to stand for both the material effects of colonisation and the huge
diversity of everyday and sometimes hidden responses to it throughout the
world. We use the term post-colonial to represent the continuing process
of imperial suppressions and exchanges throughout this diverse range of
societies, in their institutions and their discursive practices. Because the
imperial process works through as well as upon individuals and societies
post-colonial theory rejects the egregious classification of First and Third
World and contests the lingering fallacy that the post-colonial is somehow
synonymous with the economically underdeveloped.
The effects of imperialism occur in many different kinds of societies
including those settler/invader societies in which post-colonial contestation
is just as strongly and just as ambivalently engaged as it is in more obviously
decolonising states and regions. By the term post-colonial we do not imply
an automatic, nor a seamless and unchanging process of resistance but a
series of linkages and articulations without which the process cannot be
properly addressed. These linkages and articulations are not always directly
oppositional; the material practices of post-colonial societies may involve a
wide range of activities including conceptions and actions which are, or
appear to be, complicit with the imperial enterprise. However, such complicit
activities occur in all post-colonial societies, and their existence suggests
the possibility of crucial comparisons which may be made within the whole
range of post-colonial societies. The study of settler colony cultures where,
it is frequently argued, such complicit practices are more obvious may, as
a result, be especially useful in addressing the problem of complicity in all
oppositional discourse, since they point to the difficulties involved in
escaping from dominant discursive practices which limit and define the
possibility of opposition. Settler colonies, precisely because their filiative
metaphors of connection problematise the idea of resistance as a simple
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

binarism, articulate the ambivalent complex and processual nature of all

imperial relations.
The readings we have assembled here are mainly from societies which
employ forms of english1 as a major language of communication. Clearly it
would be possible and even desirable to construct a text which addressed
the wider polyphonic spectrum of the colonial past but this would require a
project far beyond the scope of this one. The Reader also recognises, but
does not directly address, the importance of the continuing body of work in
indigenous languages. The silencing of the post-colonial voice to which
much recent theory alludes is in many cases a metaphoric rather than a
literal one. Critical accounts emphasising the silencing effect of the
metropolitan forms and institutional practices upon pre-colonial cultures,
and the resulting forces of hybridisation which work on the continuing
practice of those cultures, make an important point. But they neglect the
fact that for many people in post-colonial societies the pre-colonial
languages and cultures, although themselves subject to change and
development, continue to provide the effective framework for their daily lives.
Failure to acknowledge this might be one of the ways in which post-colonial
discourse could, unwittingly, become a coloniser in its turn (Ashcroft et al.
1989:218). Without endorsing a naively nativist position post-colonial theory
needs to be aware that it is engaged in a project which supplements rather
than replaces the continuing study and promotion of the indigenous
languages of post-colonial societies.
In putting together this Reader we have asked the question: how might
a genuinely post-colonial literary enterprise proceed? Our focus in
addressing this problem is through the particular agency of literature
teaching in the academy. We recognise that this is only one limited avenue
of address to the wider social and political issues affecting post-colonial
societies, but it seems to us to be an important and worthwhile one, since
literature and literary study in the academy have been crucial sites of political
and cultural struggle with the most far-reaching results for the general history
and practices of colonisation and de-colonisation. To define our purpose
then: we have taken as our limited aim the provision of an effective text to
assist in the revision of teaching practice within literary studies in english
and so have sought to represent the impact of post-colonial literatures and
criticism on the current shape of english studies.
NOTE
1

This spelling reflects the fact that, as the editors argued in their earlier book
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures
(Ashcroft et al. 1989:8), there is a need to distinguish between what is
proposed as a standard code, English (the language of the erstwhile imperial
centre), and the linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and
subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout the world.