POSTCOLONIALISM CRITICISM

Lecturer : Arcci Tusita, M.Hum

Agung Anata W.
By : Ali Alfarizi
Hari Purwadi
Lukmanul Hakim
European Domination of the New World began in the
late fifteenth century. During the nineteenth century
Britain emerged as the largest imperial power, and by
the turn of the twentieth century the British Empire
ruled one quarter of the earth’s surface.

British colonial domination continued until the end of

World War II, when India gained independence in 1947,
and other colonies gradually followed suit. By 1980 Britain
had lost all but a few of its colonial holdings.

Postcolonial Criticism analyzes literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial
domination, from the first point of colonial contact to the present

Postcolonial Criticism focuses on the literature of cultures that developed in response to British
colonial domination because English departments study, for the most part, literatures written in
English.
A. Postcolonialism Identity
• So many people formerly colonized by Britain speak English,
write in English, use English in their school and universities,
and conduct government business in English, in addition to
the local language they may use at home.

• That is an indication of the residual effect of colonial

domination on their cultures.

• Colonialist ideology create an assumption for the colonizers to

believe that only their own Anglo-European culture was civilized and
sophisticated. Therefore, native people were defined as savage, not fully human, backward, and
underdeveloped

• This condition makes colonizers see themselves as the center of world, being embodiment of what a
human being should be. The practice of judging all who are different as less than fully human is
called “othering”

• Today, this attitude, the use of European cultures as the standart to which all other cultures are
negatively contrasted, is called Eurocentrism.
First World : Britain, Europe, and the United States
Second World : The White populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
Southern Africa, the former Soviet.
Third World : Developing nations, (India, Africa, Central & South America,
and Southeast Asia)
Fourth World : Native Americans (Indians) and Native Australians (Aborigin)
• Another example of Eurocentrism is a specific form of
othering nations called Orientalism.

• That purpose is to produce a positive national self-definition

for Western nations by contrast with Eastern nations on which
the West projects all the negative characteristic to them
(whatever Asian or Middle Eastern population are defined
as cruel, sneaky, evil, cunning, dishonest, given to sexual
promiscuity and perversion).

• Thus, colonialist ideology was a pervasive force in the British

schools established in the colonies to plant British culture
and values in the indigenous people and thereby forestall rebellion. This is also to
consider the superior.

• Many of those colonial subject (colonized people) tried to imitate their colonizers, as
much as possible, in dress, speech, behaviour, and lifestyle. This phenomenon is called
mimicry.

• That made a double consciousness, which are between both cultures of colonizer and
indigenous community, for them.
• Double consciousness often produced an unstable
sense of self, which was heightened by the forced
migration colonialism frequently.

• Forced migration, either as a quest for employment,

including indentured servitude, or as the result of
enslavement, scattered large number of people
around the globe, and large populations of their
descendants have remained in the disaspora, or
separated from original homeland.

• This feeling is reffered by Homi Babha and others as unhomeliness.

Being unhomed is to feel not at home even in the home because we are not at home in our
selves.

• In order to reject colonialist ideology and embrace precolonial cultures, some native
authors write in their own local languages. On the other hand, many indigenous writers
from former British colonies prefer to write in English because that is the language in which
they first learned to write.
• Much precolonial culture has been lost over many generations of colonial domination.

• The ancient culture would have changed by now, no culture stands still, frozen in time.
Furthermore, most cultures are changed by cross-cultural contact.

• Postcolonial critics and feminist criticism have a number of similiarities in the theoretical
issues.

• Patriarchal subjugation of women is analogous to colonial

subjugation of indigenous populations.
B. Postcolonial Debate

Neocolonialism creates expolitation the cheap labour available in devel

oping countries

Cultural Imperialism makes domination of economic and culture,

consist of take over of one culture by another
C. Postcolonial Criticism and
Literature

Common topics ilustrate postcolonial criticism’s recognition of the close relationship between psyc
hology and ideology or, more specifically, between individual identity and cultural beliefs :
1.The native people’s initial encounter with the colonizers and the disruption of indigenous culture.
2. The journey of the European outsider through an unfamiliar wilderness with a native guide.
3. Othering (the colonizers’ treatment of members of the indigenous culture as less than fully huma
n) and colonial oppression in all its forms.
4. Mimicry ( the attempt of the colonized to be accepted by imitating the dress,behavior,speech,an
d lifestyle of the colonizers)
5.Exile (the experience of being an “ outsider” in one’s own land or a foreign wanderer in britian)
6.post-independence exuberance followed by disillusionment.
7.The struggle for individual and collective cultural identity and the related themes of alienation, un
homeliness ( feeling that one has no cultural “ home’” or sense of cultural belonging), double cons
ciousness ( feeling torn between the social and psychological demands of two antagonistic culture)
, and hybridity ( experiencing one’s cultural identity as a hybrid of two or more cultures, which feeli
ng is sometimes described as a positive alternative to unhomeliness)
8. The need for continuity with a precolonial past and self-definition of the political future.
In addition, most postcolonial critics analyse the ways in which a literaty text, whatever it topics, is
colonialist or anticolonialist, that is, the ways in which the text reinforces or resists colonialism’s op
pressive ideology.

In other words, the colonialist ideology contained in literature is deposited there by writers and ab
sorbed by readers without their necessarily realizing it.