Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Postcolonialism
Chapter One
What’s the Connection Between
Colonialism and Capitalism?
1. Nationalism
2. Europe’s declining power in the
world
3. Rise of the U.S. and the Soviet
Union as major powers
4. Expense of maintaining Empire.
Commonwealth Literature
Definition: Literature in English emerging
from colonized countries – excepting the
U.S. and Ireland
Shift from imperial or colonial to
commonwealth as nations developed their
independence.
However, one of the primary assumptions of
scholars of commonwealth literature was
that the writers brought new insights to
Western readers. The focus is on the West,
on English speakers.
Issues in Commonwealth
Literature
1. Nationalism or the creation of a nation
2. Connections between commonwealth
nations – similarities of their experiences
3. Cultural differences between
commonwealth nations, and between those
nations and the West
Relationship to English Literature/Classics
Universal condition of Human kind
Historical, cultural, geographical sense of
time/place
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Colonizing the Mind – justifying to those in the
colonizing nation that it is right and proper for them
to be ruled over by other people
Getting the colonized people to accept their lower
ranking in the colonial order of things.
Encouraging people to internalize the logic and
speak the language of colonial dominance.
Traumatizes the colonized, who are taught to look
negatively on themselves, their people and their
culture.
Frantz Fanon
Psychologist, writing about the effects of colonialism
by the French on Algerians.
Born in French Antilles in 1925. Educated in
Martinique and France.
Colonized encouraged to see themselves as
objects, rather than as subjects, as at the mercy of
the colonizer, as inferior, not fully human. Their
identity is created by the other, not by themselves.
To decolonize, means not just to get rid of colonial
rule, but to destroy this internalized version of the
self.
Edward Said