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SMT S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.Bhavnagar University.
Name :- Goswami Mahir Pari C.
Roll no :- 21
Topic name :- Literary Term :- " Eco - Criticism "
Submitted to :- Department of English
Paper name :- Literary Theory & Criticism: The 20th Western & Indian Poetics – 2:
E - mail :- goswamimahirpari786@gmail.com
Enrollment no :- 20691084201180021
Definition of postcolonial
---------> colonialism: The imperialist expansion of Europe into the rest of the world during the last four hundred years in which a dominant imperium or center carried on a relationship of control and influence over its margins or colonies. This relationship tended to extend to social, pedagogical, economic, political, and broadly culturally exchanges often with a hierarchical European settler class and local, educated (compractor) elite class forming layers between the European "mother" nation and the various indigenous peoples who were controlled. Such a system carried within it inherent notions of racial inferiority and exotic otherness.
post-colonialism: Broadly a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies. It is concerned with both how European nations conquered and controlled "Third World" cultures and how these groups have since responded to and resisted those encroachments. Post-colonialism, as both a body of theory and a study of political and cultural change, has gone and continues to go through three broad stages:
an initial awareness of the social, psychological, and cultural inferiority enforced by being in a colonized state
the struggle for ethnic, cultural, and political autonomy
a growing awareness of cultural overlap and hybridity
According to M h a Ibrahim
---------->.
Postcolonial Studies. The critical analysis of the history, culture, litera-
ture, and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of Eng-
land, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have
focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean
islands, and South America. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such
analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of such countries as
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which achieved independence much
earlier than the Third World countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes en-
compass also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the
social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten
by colonial exploitation.
An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this recently
developed field of study was Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American
scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault's his-
toricist critique of discourse (see under new historicism) to analyze what he
called "cultural imperialism." This mode of imperialism imposed its power
not by force, but by the effective means of disseminating in subjugated
colonies a Eurocentric discourse that assumed the normality and preeminence
of everything "occidental," correlatively with its representations of the "ori-
ental" as an exotic and inferior other. Since the 1980s, such analysis has been
supplemented by other theoretical principles and procedures, including Al-
thusser's redefinition of the Marxist theory of ideology and the deconstructive
theory of Derrida. The rapidly expanding field of postcolonial studies, as a re-
sult, is not a unified movement with a distinctive methodology. One can,
however, identify several central and recurrent issues:
(1) The rejection of the master-narrative of Western imperialism—in
which the colonial other is not only subordinated and marginalized,but in effect deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by a
counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back
into a world history written by Europeans. The influential collection of
essays, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Litera-
tures (1989), ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffins, stresses
what it terms the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures, in
which imperialist importations are superimposed on indigenous tradi-
tions; it also includes a number of postcolonial countertexts to the
hegemonic texts that present a Eurocentric version of colonial history.
(2) An abiding concern with the formation, within Western discursive
practices, of the colonial and postcolonial "subject," as well as of the
categories by means of which this subject conceives itself and per-
ceives the world within which it lives and acts. (See subject under post-
structuralism.) The subaltern has become a standard way to designate
the colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourse
and internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse;
"subaltern" is a British word for someone of inferior rank, and com-
bines the Latin terms for "under" (sub) and "other" (alter). A recurrent
topic of debate is how, and to what extent, a subaltern subject, writ-
ing in a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resis-
tance against, rather than of compliance with, the very discourse that
has created its subordinate identity. See, e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), reprinted in The Postcolo-
nial Studies Reader, listed below.
(3) A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish Euro-
centric norms of literary and artistic values, and to expand the liter-
ary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the United
States and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to in-
clude, in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innova-
tive novels, poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in the
English language as the Africans Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka,
the Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and the au-
thors from the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and Salman
Rushdie. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994); and for a
survey of the large and growing body of literature in English by post-
colonial writers throughout the world, see Martin Coyle and others,
Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (1990), pages 1113-1236.
A comprehensive anthology is The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), ed.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Refer also to Franz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth (trans., 1966); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti
Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native,
Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989); Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990);
Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthro-
pology in Africa (1990); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993).
History of postcolonial
------------> Since the 1980s, numerous novelists, dramatists, and poets have been marketed as postcolonial writers. But what is postcolonial literature? In the broadest terms, this category includes works that have a relationship to the subjugating forces of imperialism and colonial expansion. In short, postcolonial literature is that which has arisen primarily since the end of World War II from regions of the world undergoing decolonization. Works from such regions in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, South Africa, and numerous parts of the Caribbean, for example, might be described as postcolonial.
The rise of postcolonial theory
----------> In order to understand the rising attention to postcolonial fiction, a basic understanding of postcolonial theory is necessary. Keep in mind, this is a very short history and is by no means all-inclusive! If you’re interested in postcolonial theory, you might start with some of the writers we’re about to discuss before moving onto your own explorations of the topic.
In 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was published in French. Arising out of the Algerian struggle for independence from France, the text examined possibilities for anti-colonial violence in the region and elsewhere. Fanon was a Martinique-born intellectual who was also a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, and his writings have inspired numerous people across the globe in struggles for freedom from oppression and racially motivated violence. If you’re particularly interested in Fanon as a collector, you might seek out first editions of Fanon’s work. Grove Press published the first U.S. edition of The Wretched of the Earth in 1963, with a translated forward by Jean-Paul Sartre.
By 1979, Edward Said had written Orientalism, a text examining the relationship between those in the West and the “Other” in the East. This work has become a staple in postcolonial courses, and it helped to expand the field over the last few decades. Said was a Palestinian-American scholar who taught at Columbia University for the majority of his academic career. Other important early thinkers in postcolonial theory, just to name a couple, include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha.
Early Postcolonial writer's of Imaginative literature
--------> While the field of postcolonial studies only began taking shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous fiction writers began publishing works in the decades immediately following World War II. One of the most significant postcolonial novels to emerge in this period was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). This novel now graces many Anglophone fiction course syllabi, which isn’t a surprise given its enormous popularity and importance when it first was published.
Published in the late 1950s, Achebe wrote the book at the end of the British colonial period in Nigeria but depicted an earlier moment in Nigerian history. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo village leader in the late 19th century who must witness the tragic demise of his culture at the hands of colonialism. Nigeria remained a British colony until 1960. If you’re interested in adding one of Achebe’s works to your collection, you might look for a first U.K. edition of Things Fall Apart, published by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1958, or a first American edition published a year later in New York by McDowell Obolensky.
Even before Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, Nadine Gordimer had already written one book and several short-story collections, and she was in the process of publishing her second novel. A South African writer of Eastern European origin, Gordimer didn’t personally experience the racial discrimination and violence that arose from decolonization and the institution of apartheid, but she nonetheless spent her career advocating for equal rights in her country. Some of her most notable works that deal with postcolonial politics and the stark harms of apartheid include The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981). A signed copy of one of Gordimer’s works would make a fantastic edition to any postcolonial literature collection.
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) is another significant and early work of postcolonial fiction. A bildungsroman of sorts, Salih’s novel follows an unnamed protagonist as he returns to his Sudanese village after years of education abroad in England only to learn of the devastating effects of imperialism. The novel was originally written in Arabic, and it was published in English for the first time in 1969.
When it comes to plays, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) helped to set the world stage for postcolonial dramatists. A writer from Saint Lucia, Walcott’s works frequently depict the colonial harms of the West Indies. Indeed, his plays, as well as his poems, encourage his readers to question the history and politics of the Caribbean, and its role as a postcolonial site through which we might renegotiate remedies for imperialism.
Stay tuned for Part II of our brief history of postcolonial literatue, in which we'll explore contemporary writers who detail the postcolonial condition.
Critical approaches
--------> Amongst prominent theorists are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Bill Ashcroft, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Leela Gandhi, Gareth Griffiths, Abiola Irele, John McLeod, Hamid Dabashi, Helen Tiffin, Khal Torabully, and Robert Young. Another important theorist is Harvard University professor Homi K Bhabha, (1949 – ). He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence.
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925 – 1961) was a Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[3] As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and a Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization,[4] and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Post-colonial literary theory re-examines colonial literature, especially concentrating upon the social discourse, between the colonizer and the colonized, that shaped and produced the literature. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Saïd analyzed the fiction of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), and explored how they were influenced, and how they helped to shape the societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fiction writers deal with the traditional colonial discourse, either by modifying or by subverting it, or both.
The “anti-conquest narrative” recasts the indigenous inhabitants of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers.[8] This depicts the colonised people in a more human light but risks absolving colonisers of responsibility for addressing the effects of colonisation by assuming that native inhabitants were "doomed" to their fate.
Mary Pratt, however, proposes a completely different theorization of "anti-conquest" than the ideas discussed here, that can be traced to Edward Said. Instead of referring to how natives resist colonization or are victims of it, Pratt analyzes European literatures in which a European narrates their adventures and struggles to survive in the land of the non-European Other.[9] The anti-conquest is a function of how the narrator writes him or her self out of being responsible for or an agent, direct or indirect, of colonization and colonialism. This different notion of anti-conquest is used to analyze the ways in which colonialism and colonization are legitimized nonetheless through entertaining stories of survival and adventure. Pratt created this unique notion in association with concepts of contact zone and transculturation, which have been very well received in Latin America social and human science circles.[citation needed] Négritude is a literary and ideological philosophy, developed by francophone African intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France during the 1930s. Its initiators included Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (a future President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disapproved of French colonialism and claimed that the best strategy to oppose it was to encourage a common racial identity for native Africans worldwide.
Back to Africa movement
--------> Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. (1887 – 1940),[10] was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a proponent of the Pan-Africanism movement, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).He also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
Prior to the 20th century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (some sects of which proclaim Garvey as a prophet).
Postcolonial feminist literature
--------->Postcolonial feminism is a form of feminism that developed as a response to the fact that feminism seemed to focus solely on the experiences of women in Western cultures. Postcolonial feminism seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world.
South Africa
-------->. Elleke Boehmer (cf. Cullhed, 2006: 79) writes, “Nationalism, like patriarchy, favours singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all ... [and] will promote specifically unitary or ‘one-eyed’ forms of consciousness.” The first problem any student of South African literature is confronted with, is the diversity of the literary systems. Gerrit Olivier notes, "While it is not unusual to hear academics and politicians talk about a 'South African literature', the situation at ground level is characterised by diversity and even fragmentation". Robert Mossman adds that "One of the enduring and saddest legacies of the apartheid system may be that no one – White, Black, Coloured (meaning of mixed-race in South Africa), or Asian – can ever speak as a "South African." The problem, however, pre-dates Apartheid significantly, as South Africa is a country made up of communities that have always been linguistically and culturally diverse. These cultures have all retained autonomy to some extent, making a compilation such as the controversial Southern African Literatures by Michael Chapman, difficult. Chapman raises the question:
[W]hose language, culture, or story can be said to have authority in South Africa when the end of apartheid has raised challenging questions as to what it is to be a South African, what it is to live in a new South Africa, whether South Africa is a nation, and, if so, what its mythos is, what requires to be forgotten and what remembered as we scour the past in order to understand the present and seek a path forward into an unknown future.
South Africa has 11 national languages: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Venda, SiSwati, Tsonga, and Ndebele. Any definitive literary history of South Africa should, it could be argued, discuss literature produced in all eleven languages. But the only literature ever to adopt characteristics that can be said to be "national" is Afrikaans. Olivier argues: "Of all the literatures in South Africa, Afrikaans literature has been the only one to have become a national literature in the sense that it developed a clear image of itself as a separate entity, and that by way of institutional entrenchment through teaching, distribution, a review culture, journals, etc. it could ensure the continuation of that concept." Part of the problem is that English literature has been seen within the greater context of English writing in the world, and has, because of English's global position as lingua franca, not been seen as autonomous or indigenous to South Africa – in Olivier’s words: "English literature in South Africa continues to be a sort of extension of British or international English literature." The African languages, on the other hand, are spoken across the borders of Southern Africa - for example, Tswana is spoken in Botswana, and Tsonga in Zimbabwe, and Sotho in Lesotho. South Africa's borders were drawn up by the British Empire and, as with all other colonies, these borders were drawn without regard for the people living within them. Therefore: in a history of South African literature, do we include all Tswana writers, or only the ones with South African citizenship? Chapman bypasses this problem by including "Southern" African literatures. The second problem with the African languages is accessibility, because since the African languages are regional languages, none of them can claim the readership on a national scale comparable to Afrikaans and English. Sotho, for instance, while transgressing the national borders of the RSA, is on the other hand mainly spoken in the Free State, and bears a great amount of relation to the language of Natal for example, Zulu. So the language cannot claim a national readership, while on the other hand being "international" in the sense that it transgresses the national borders.
Olivier argues that "There is no obvious reason why it should be unhealthy or abnormal for different literatures to co-exist in one country, each possessing its own infrastructure and allowing theoreticians to develop impressive theories about polysystems". Yet political idealism proposing a unified "South Africa" (a remnant of the colonial British approach) has seeped into literary discourse and demands a unified national literature, which does not exist and has to be fabricated. It is unrealistic to ever think of South Africa and South African literature as homogenous, now or in the near or distant future, since the only reason it is a country at all is the interference of European colonial powers. This is not a racial issue, but rather has to do with culture, heritage and tradition (and indeed the constitution celebrates diversity). Rather, it seems more sensible to discuss South African literature as literature produced within the national borders by the different cultures and language groups inhabiting these borders. Otherwise the danger is emphasising one literary system at the expense of another, and more often than not, the beneficiary is English, with the African languages being ignored. The distinction "black" and "white" literature is further a remnant of colonialism that should be replaced by drawing distinctions between literary systems based on language affiliation rather than race.
---------> The first texts produced by black authors were often inspired by missionaries and frequently deal with African history, in particular the history of kings such as Chaka. Modern South African writing in the African languages tends to play at writing realistically, at providing a mirror to society, and depicts the conflicts between rural and urban settings, between traditional and modern norms, racial conflicts and most recently, the problem of AIDS.
In the first half of the 20th century, epics largely dominated black writing: historical novels, such as Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930), Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (trans. 1925), and epic plays including those of H. I. E. Dhlomo, or heroic epic poetry such as the work of Mazizi Kunene. These texts “evince black African patriarchy in its traditional form, with men in authority, often as warriors or kings, and women as background figures of dependency, and/or mothers of the nation” (Cullhed, 2006: 21). Female literature in the African languages is severely limited because of the strong influence of patriarchy, but over the last decade or two society has changed much and it can be expected that more female voices will emerge.
The following are notable white South African writers in English: Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Wilbur Smith. André Brink has written in both Afrikaans and English while Breyten Breytenbach writes primarily in Afrikaans, though many of their works have been translated into English. Dalene Matthee's (1938 – 2005) is another Afrikaner, best known for her four Forest Novels, written in and around the Knysna Forest, including Fiela se Kind (1985) (Fiela's Child).[35] Her books have been translated into fourteen languages, including English, French, and German.[36] and over a million copies have been sold worldwide.
The Americas
Caribbean Islands
Maryse Condé (1937 – ) is a French (Guadeloupean) author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985).
West Indies
---------> An exemplar post-colonial novel is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979), a mid-twentieth century novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, though she was mainly resident in England from the age of 16. This novel is based on Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, re-told from the perspective of a subaltern protagonist, Antoinette Conway. It is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman—he is never named by the author. He renames her to a prosaic Bertha, declares her mad, and requires her to relocate to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Cosway is Rhys' version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic." As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. It is also concerned with power relations between men and women
----------> The term "West Indies" first began to achieve wide currency in the 1950s, when writers such as Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Edgar Mittelholzer, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming began to be published in the United Kingdom.[39] A sense of a single literature developing across the islands was also encouraged in the 1940s by the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices, which featured stories and poems written by West Indian authors, recorded in London under the direction of producer Henry Swanzy, and broadcast back to the islands.[40] Magazines such as Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana, Bim in Barbados, and Focus in Jamaica, which published work by writers from across the region, also encouraged links and helped build an audience.[41]
Many—perhaps most—West Indian writers have found it necessary to leave their home territories and base themselves in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada in order to make a living from their work—in some cases spending the greater parts of their careers away from the territories of their birth. Critics in their adopted territories might argue that, for instance, V. S. Naipaul ought to be considered a British writer instead of a Trinidadian writer, or Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall American writers, but most West Indian readers and critics still consider these writers "West Indian".
West Indian literature ranges over subjects and themes as wide as those of any other "national" literature, but in general many West Indian writers share a special concern with questions of identity, ethnicity, and language that rise out of the Caribbean historical experience.
One unique and pervasive characteristic of Caribbean literature is the use of "dialect" forms of the national language, often termed creole. The various local variations in the language adopted from the colonial powers such as Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands, have been modified over the years within each country and each has developed a blend that is unique to their country. Many Caribbean authors in their writing switch liberally between the local variation - now commonly termed nation language - and the standard form of the language.[42] Two West Indian writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Derek Walcott (1992), born in St. Lucia, resident mostly in Trinidad during the 1960s and '70s, and partly in the United States since then; and V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad and resident in the United Kingdom since the 1950. (Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960, was born in the French territory of Guadeloupe.)
Other notable names in (anglophone) Caribbean literature have included Earl Lovelace, Austin Clarke, Claude McKay, Orlando Patterson, Andrew Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (who was born in Barbados and has lived in Ghana and Jamaica), Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Michelle Cliff, to name only a few. In more recent times, a number of literary voices have emerged from the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora, including Kittitian Caryl Phillips (who has lived in the UK since one month of age), Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian immigrant to the United States; Anthony Kellman from Barbados, who divides his time between Barbados and the United States; Andrea Levy of the United Kingdom, Jamaicans Colin Channer and Marlon James, the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) (as well as John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women, the unpublished screenplay "Dead Men", and the short story "Under Cover of Darkness"), Antiguan Marie-Elena John, and Lasana M. Sekou from St. Maarten/St. Martin.
Earl Lovelace (1935 – ) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures."[43] As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken
United States
------------>. American David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly addresses the Western perspective on China and the French as well as the American perspectives on Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was inspired by Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940– ) is a Chinese American author who has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States.
Bharati Mukherjee although of East Indian ancestry has gone on record that she considers herself an American writer, and not an Indian expatriate writer. In a 1989 interview with Amanda Meer, Mukherjee said: "I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America."
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967 –) is an Indian-American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
African-American literature
------------>. Throughout American history, African Americans have been discriminated against and subject to racist attitudes. This experience inspired some Black writers, at least during the early years of African-American literature, to prove they were the equals of European-American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr, has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."
By refuting the claims of the dominant culture, African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity." This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power." In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the white intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for Black political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, perhaps most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois.
Native American Renaissance
---------------> Native American Renaissance is a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in the 1983 book Native American Renaissance to categorise the significant increase in production of literary works by Native Americans in the United States in the late 1960s onwards. A. Robert Lee and Alan Velie note that the book's title "quickly gained currency as a term to describe the efflorescence on literary works that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968". Momaday's novel garnered critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
Conclusion
--------------> here I conclude this literary term postcolonial with his definition and brief history and some colonize Nations and the literature and their major writers and their works I have written it.
SMT S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.Bhavnagar University.
Name :- Goswami Mahir Pari C.
Roll no :- 21
Topic name :- Literary Term :- " Eco - Criticism "
Submitted to :- Department of English
Paper name :- Literary Theory & Criticism: The 20th Western & Indian Poetics – 2:
E - mail :- goswamimahirpari786@gmail.com
Enrollment no :- 20691084201180021
Definition of postcolonial
---------> colonialism: The imperialist expansion of Europe into the rest of the world during the last four hundred years in which a dominant imperium or center carried on a relationship of control and influence over its margins or colonies. This relationship tended to extend to social, pedagogical, economic, political, and broadly culturally exchanges often with a hierarchical European settler class and local, educated (compractor) elite class forming layers between the European "mother" nation and the various indigenous peoples who were controlled. Such a system carried within it inherent notions of racial inferiority and exotic otherness.
post-colonialism: Broadly a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies. It is concerned with both how European nations conquered and controlled "Third World" cultures and how these groups have since responded to and resisted those encroachments. Post-colonialism, as both a body of theory and a study of political and cultural change, has gone and continues to go through three broad stages:
an initial awareness of the social, psychological, and cultural inferiority enforced by being in a colonized state
the struggle for ethnic, cultural, and political autonomy
a growing awareness of cultural overlap and hybridity
According to M h a Ibrahim
---------->.
Postcolonial Studies. The critical analysis of the history, culture, litera-
ture, and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of Eng-
land, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have
focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean
islands, and South America. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such
analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of such countries as
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which achieved independence much
earlier than the Third World countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes en-
compass also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the
social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten
by colonial exploitation.
An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this recently
developed field of study was Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American
scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault's his-
toricist critique of discourse (see under new historicism) to analyze what he
called "cultural imperialism." This mode of imperialism imposed its power
not by force, but by the effective means of disseminating in subjugated
colonies a Eurocentric discourse that assumed the normality and preeminence
of everything "occidental," correlatively with its representations of the "ori-
ental" as an exotic and inferior other. Since the 1980s, such analysis has been
supplemented by other theoretical principles and procedures, including Al-
thusser's redefinition of the Marxist theory of ideology and the deconstructive
theory of Derrida. The rapidly expanding field of postcolonial studies, as a re-
sult, is not a unified movement with a distinctive methodology. One can,
however, identify several central and recurrent issues:
(1) The rejection of the master-narrative of Western imperialism—in
which the colonial other is not only subordinated and marginalized,but in effect deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by a
counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back
into a world history written by Europeans. The influential collection of
essays, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Litera-
tures (1989), ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffins, stresses
what it terms the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures, in
which imperialist importations are superimposed on indigenous tradi-
tions; it also includes a number of postcolonial countertexts to the
hegemonic texts that present a Eurocentric version of colonial history.
(2) An abiding concern with the formation, within Western discursive
practices, of the colonial and postcolonial "subject," as well as of the
categories by means of which this subject conceives itself and per-
ceives the world within which it lives and acts. (See subject under post-
structuralism.) The subaltern has become a standard way to designate
the colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourse
and internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse;
"subaltern" is a British word for someone of inferior rank, and com-
bines the Latin terms for "under" (sub) and "other" (alter). A recurrent
topic of debate is how, and to what extent, a subaltern subject, writ-
ing in a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resis-
tance against, rather than of compliance with, the very discourse that
has created its subordinate identity. See, e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), reprinted in The Postcolo-
nial Studies Reader, listed below.
(3) A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish Euro-
centric norms of literary and artistic values, and to expand the liter-
ary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the United
States and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to in-
clude, in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innova-
tive novels, poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in the
English language as the Africans Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka,
the Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and the au-
thors from the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and Salman
Rushdie. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994); and for a
survey of the large and growing body of literature in English by post-
colonial writers throughout the world, see Martin Coyle and others,
Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (1990), pages 1113-1236.
A comprehensive anthology is The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), ed.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Refer also to Franz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth (trans., 1966); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti
Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native,
Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989); Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990);
Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthro-
pology in Africa (1990); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993).
History of postcolonial
------------> Since the 1980s, numerous novelists, dramatists, and poets have been marketed as postcolonial writers. But what is postcolonial literature? In the broadest terms, this category includes works that have a relationship to the subjugating forces of imperialism and colonial expansion. In short, postcolonial literature is that which has arisen primarily since the end of World War II from regions of the world undergoing decolonization. Works from such regions in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, South Africa, and numerous parts of the Caribbean, for example, might be described as postcolonial.
The rise of postcolonial theory
----------> In order to understand the rising attention to postcolonial fiction, a basic understanding of postcolonial theory is necessary. Keep in mind, this is a very short history and is by no means all-inclusive! If you’re interested in postcolonial theory, you might start with some of the writers we’re about to discuss before moving onto your own explorations of the topic.
In 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was published in French. Arising out of the Algerian struggle for independence from France, the text examined possibilities for anti-colonial violence in the region and elsewhere. Fanon was a Martinique-born intellectual who was also a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, and his writings have inspired numerous people across the globe in struggles for freedom from oppression and racially motivated violence. If you’re particularly interested in Fanon as a collector, you might seek out first editions of Fanon’s work. Grove Press published the first U.S. edition of The Wretched of the Earth in 1963, with a translated forward by Jean-Paul Sartre.
By 1979, Edward Said had written Orientalism, a text examining the relationship between those in the West and the “Other” in the East. This work has become a staple in postcolonial courses, and it helped to expand the field over the last few decades. Said was a Palestinian-American scholar who taught at Columbia University for the majority of his academic career. Other important early thinkers in postcolonial theory, just to name a couple, include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha.
Early Postcolonial writer's of Imaginative literature
--------> While the field of postcolonial studies only began taking shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numerous fiction writers began publishing works in the decades immediately following World War II. One of the most significant postcolonial novels to emerge in this period was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). This novel now graces many Anglophone fiction course syllabi, which isn’t a surprise given its enormous popularity and importance when it first was published.
Published in the late 1950s, Achebe wrote the book at the end of the British colonial period in Nigeria but depicted an earlier moment in Nigerian history. The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo village leader in the late 19th century who must witness the tragic demise of his culture at the hands of colonialism. Nigeria remained a British colony until 1960. If you’re interested in adding one of Achebe’s works to your collection, you might look for a first U.K. edition of Things Fall Apart, published by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1958, or a first American edition published a year later in New York by McDowell Obolensky.
Even before Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, Nadine Gordimer had already written one book and several short-story collections, and she was in the process of publishing her second novel. A South African writer of Eastern European origin, Gordimer didn’t personally experience the racial discrimination and violence that arose from decolonization and the institution of apartheid, but she nonetheless spent her career advocating for equal rights in her country. Some of her most notable works that deal with postcolonial politics and the stark harms of apartheid include The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981). A signed copy of one of Gordimer’s works would make a fantastic edition to any postcolonial literature collection.
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) is another significant and early work of postcolonial fiction. A bildungsroman of sorts, Salih’s novel follows an unnamed protagonist as he returns to his Sudanese village after years of education abroad in England only to learn of the devastating effects of imperialism. The novel was originally written in Arabic, and it was published in English for the first time in 1969.
When it comes to plays, Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) helped to set the world stage for postcolonial dramatists. A writer from Saint Lucia, Walcott’s works frequently depict the colonial harms of the West Indies. Indeed, his plays, as well as his poems, encourage his readers to question the history and politics of the Caribbean, and its role as a postcolonial site through which we might renegotiate remedies for imperialism.
Stay tuned for Part II of our brief history of postcolonial literatue, in which we'll explore contemporary writers who detail the postcolonial condition.
Critical approaches
--------> Amongst prominent theorists are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Bill Ashcroft, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Leela Gandhi, Gareth Griffiths, Abiola Irele, John McLeod, Hamid Dabashi, Helen Tiffin, Khal Torabully, and Robert Young. Another important theorist is Harvard University professor Homi K Bhabha, (1949 – ). He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence.
Frantz Omar Fanon (1925 – 1961) was a Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[3] As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and a Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization,[4] and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Post-colonial literary theory re-examines colonial literature, especially concentrating upon the social discourse, between the colonizer and the colonized, that shaped and produced the literature. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Saïd analyzed the fiction of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), and explored how they were influenced, and how they helped to shape the societal fantasy of European racial superiority. Post-colonial fiction writers deal with the traditional colonial discourse, either by modifying or by subverting it, or both.
The “anti-conquest narrative” recasts the indigenous inhabitants of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers.[8] This depicts the colonised people in a more human light but risks absolving colonisers of responsibility for addressing the effects of colonisation by assuming that native inhabitants were "doomed" to their fate.
Mary Pratt, however, proposes a completely different theorization of "anti-conquest" than the ideas discussed here, that can be traced to Edward Said. Instead of referring to how natives resist colonization or are victims of it, Pratt analyzes European literatures in which a European narrates their adventures and struggles to survive in the land of the non-European Other.[9] The anti-conquest is a function of how the narrator writes him or her self out of being responsible for or an agent, direct or indirect, of colonization and colonialism. This different notion of anti-conquest is used to analyze the ways in which colonialism and colonization are legitimized nonetheless through entertaining stories of survival and adventure. Pratt created this unique notion in association with concepts of contact zone and transculturation, which have been very well received in Latin America social and human science circles.[citation needed] Négritude is a literary and ideological philosophy, developed by francophone African intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France during the 1930s. Its initiators included Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (a future President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disapproved of French colonialism and claimed that the best strategy to oppose it was to encourage a common racial identity for native Africans worldwide.
Back to Africa movement
--------> Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. (1887 – 1940),[10] was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a proponent of the Pan-Africanism movement, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).He also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
Prior to the 20th century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (some sects of which proclaim Garvey as a prophet).
Postcolonial feminist literature
--------->Postcolonial feminism is a form of feminism that developed as a response to the fact that feminism seemed to focus solely on the experiences of women in Western cultures. Postcolonial feminism seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world.
South Africa
-------->. Elleke Boehmer (cf. Cullhed, 2006: 79) writes, “Nationalism, like patriarchy, favours singleness—one identity, one growth pattern, one birth and blood for all ... [and] will promote specifically unitary or ‘one-eyed’ forms of consciousness.” The first problem any student of South African literature is confronted with, is the diversity of the literary systems. Gerrit Olivier notes, "While it is not unusual to hear academics and politicians talk about a 'South African literature', the situation at ground level is characterised by diversity and even fragmentation". Robert Mossman adds that "One of the enduring and saddest legacies of the apartheid system may be that no one – White, Black, Coloured (meaning of mixed-race in South Africa), or Asian – can ever speak as a "South African." The problem, however, pre-dates Apartheid significantly, as South Africa is a country made up of communities that have always been linguistically and culturally diverse. These cultures have all retained autonomy to some extent, making a compilation such as the controversial Southern African Literatures by Michael Chapman, difficult. Chapman raises the question:
[W]hose language, culture, or story can be said to have authority in South Africa when the end of apartheid has raised challenging questions as to what it is to be a South African, what it is to live in a new South Africa, whether South Africa is a nation, and, if so, what its mythos is, what requires to be forgotten and what remembered as we scour the past in order to understand the present and seek a path forward into an unknown future.
South Africa has 11 national languages: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Venda, SiSwati, Tsonga, and Ndebele. Any definitive literary history of South Africa should, it could be argued, discuss literature produced in all eleven languages. But the only literature ever to adopt characteristics that can be said to be "national" is Afrikaans. Olivier argues: "Of all the literatures in South Africa, Afrikaans literature has been the only one to have become a national literature in the sense that it developed a clear image of itself as a separate entity, and that by way of institutional entrenchment through teaching, distribution, a review culture, journals, etc. it could ensure the continuation of that concept." Part of the problem is that English literature has been seen within the greater context of English writing in the world, and has, because of English's global position as lingua franca, not been seen as autonomous or indigenous to South Africa – in Olivier’s words: "English literature in South Africa continues to be a sort of extension of British or international English literature." The African languages, on the other hand, are spoken across the borders of Southern Africa - for example, Tswana is spoken in Botswana, and Tsonga in Zimbabwe, and Sotho in Lesotho. South Africa's borders were drawn up by the British Empire and, as with all other colonies, these borders were drawn without regard for the people living within them. Therefore: in a history of South African literature, do we include all Tswana writers, or only the ones with South African citizenship? Chapman bypasses this problem by including "Southern" African literatures. The second problem with the African languages is accessibility, because since the African languages are regional languages, none of them can claim the readership on a national scale comparable to Afrikaans and English. Sotho, for instance, while transgressing the national borders of the RSA, is on the other hand mainly spoken in the Free State, and bears a great amount of relation to the language of Natal for example, Zulu. So the language cannot claim a national readership, while on the other hand being "international" in the sense that it transgresses the national borders.
Olivier argues that "There is no obvious reason why it should be unhealthy or abnormal for different literatures to co-exist in one country, each possessing its own infrastructure and allowing theoreticians to develop impressive theories about polysystems". Yet political idealism proposing a unified "South Africa" (a remnant of the colonial British approach) has seeped into literary discourse and demands a unified national literature, which does not exist and has to be fabricated. It is unrealistic to ever think of South Africa and South African literature as homogenous, now or in the near or distant future, since the only reason it is a country at all is the interference of European colonial powers. This is not a racial issue, but rather has to do with culture, heritage and tradition (and indeed the constitution celebrates diversity). Rather, it seems more sensible to discuss South African literature as literature produced within the national borders by the different cultures and language groups inhabiting these borders. Otherwise the danger is emphasising one literary system at the expense of another, and more often than not, the beneficiary is English, with the African languages being ignored. The distinction "black" and "white" literature is further a remnant of colonialism that should be replaced by drawing distinctions between literary systems based on language affiliation rather than race.
---------> The first texts produced by black authors were often inspired by missionaries and frequently deal with African history, in particular the history of kings such as Chaka. Modern South African writing in the African languages tends to play at writing realistically, at providing a mirror to society, and depicts the conflicts between rural and urban settings, between traditional and modern norms, racial conflicts and most recently, the problem of AIDS.
In the first half of the 20th century, epics largely dominated black writing: historical novels, such as Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi: An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago (1930), Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (trans. 1925), and epic plays including those of H. I. E. Dhlomo, or heroic epic poetry such as the work of Mazizi Kunene. These texts “evince black African patriarchy in its traditional form, with men in authority, often as warriors or kings, and women as background figures of dependency, and/or mothers of the nation” (Cullhed, 2006: 21). Female literature in the African languages is severely limited because of the strong influence of patriarchy, but over the last decade or two society has changed much and it can be expected that more female voices will emerge.
The following are notable white South African writers in English: Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Wilbur Smith. André Brink has written in both Afrikaans and English while Breyten Breytenbach writes primarily in Afrikaans, though many of their works have been translated into English. Dalene Matthee's (1938 – 2005) is another Afrikaner, best known for her four Forest Novels, written in and around the Knysna Forest, including Fiela se Kind (1985) (Fiela's Child).[35] Her books have been translated into fourteen languages, including English, French, and German.[36] and over a million copies have been sold worldwide.
The Americas
Caribbean Islands
Maryse Condé (1937 – ) is a French (Guadeloupean) author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985).
West Indies
---------> An exemplar post-colonial novel is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979), a mid-twentieth century novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, though she was mainly resident in England from the age of 16. This novel is based on Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, re-told from the perspective of a subaltern protagonist, Antoinette Conway. It is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman—he is never named by the author. He renames her to a prosaic Bertha, declares her mad, and requires her to relocate to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Cosway is Rhys' version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic." As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. It is also concerned with power relations between men and women
----------> The term "West Indies" first began to achieve wide currency in the 1950s, when writers such as Samuel Selvon, John Hearne, Edgar Mittelholzer, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming began to be published in the United Kingdom.[39] A sense of a single literature developing across the islands was also encouraged in the 1940s by the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices, which featured stories and poems written by West Indian authors, recorded in London under the direction of producer Henry Swanzy, and broadcast back to the islands.[40] Magazines such as Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana, Bim in Barbados, and Focus in Jamaica, which published work by writers from across the region, also encouraged links and helped build an audience.[41]
Many—perhaps most—West Indian writers have found it necessary to leave their home territories and base themselves in the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada in order to make a living from their work—in some cases spending the greater parts of their careers away from the territories of their birth. Critics in their adopted territories might argue that, for instance, V. S. Naipaul ought to be considered a British writer instead of a Trinidadian writer, or Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall American writers, but most West Indian readers and critics still consider these writers "West Indian".
West Indian literature ranges over subjects and themes as wide as those of any other "national" literature, but in general many West Indian writers share a special concern with questions of identity, ethnicity, and language that rise out of the Caribbean historical experience.
One unique and pervasive characteristic of Caribbean literature is the use of "dialect" forms of the national language, often termed creole. The various local variations in the language adopted from the colonial powers such as Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands, have been modified over the years within each country and each has developed a blend that is unique to their country. Many Caribbean authors in their writing switch liberally between the local variation - now commonly termed nation language - and the standard form of the language.[42] Two West Indian writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Derek Walcott (1992), born in St. Lucia, resident mostly in Trinidad during the 1960s and '70s, and partly in the United States since then; and V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad and resident in the United Kingdom since the 1950. (Saint-John Perse, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960, was born in the French territory of Guadeloupe.)
Other notable names in (anglophone) Caribbean literature have included Earl Lovelace, Austin Clarke, Claude McKay, Orlando Patterson, Andrew Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite (who was born in Barbados and has lived in Ghana and Jamaica), Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Michelle Cliff, to name only a few. In more recent times, a number of literary voices have emerged from the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora, including Kittitian Caryl Phillips (who has lived in the UK since one month of age), Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian immigrant to the United States; Anthony Kellman from Barbados, who divides his time between Barbados and the United States; Andrea Levy of the United Kingdom, Jamaicans Colin Channer and Marlon James, the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) (as well as John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women, the unpublished screenplay "Dead Men", and the short story "Under Cover of Darkness"), Antiguan Marie-Elena John, and Lasana M. Sekou from St. Maarten/St. Martin.
Earl Lovelace (1935 – ) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures."[43] As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken
United States
------------>. American David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly addresses the Western perspective on China and the French as well as the American perspectives on Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was inspired by Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.
Maxine Hong Kingston (1940– ) is a Chinese American author who has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States.
Bharati Mukherjee although of East Indian ancestry has gone on record that she considers herself an American writer, and not an Indian expatriate writer. In a 1989 interview with Amanda Meer, Mukherjee said: "I totally consider myself an American writer, and that has been my big battle: to get to realize that my roots as a writer are no longer, if they ever were, among Indian writers, but that I am writing about the territory about the feelings, of a new kind of pioneer here in America. I’m the first among Asian immigrants to be making this distinction between immigrant writing and expatriate writing. Most Indian writers prior to this, have still thought of themselves as Indians, and their literary inspiration, has come from India. India has been the source, and home. Whereas I’m saying, those are wonderful roots, but now my roots are here and my emotions are here in North America."
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967 –) is an Indian-American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.
African-American literature
------------>. Throughout American history, African Americans have been discriminated against and subject to racist attitudes. This experience inspired some Black writers, at least during the early years of African-American literature, to prove they were the equals of European-American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr, has said, "it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture."
By refuting the claims of the dominant culture, African-American writers were also attempting to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some scholars assert that writing has traditionally been seen as "something defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity." This means that, in American society, literary acceptance has traditionally been intimately tied in with the very power dynamics which perpetrated such evils as racial discrimination. By borrowing from and incorporating the non-written oral traditions and folk life of the African diaspora, African-American literature broke "the mystique of connection between literary authority and patriarchal power." In producing their own literature, African Americans were able to establish their own literary traditions devoid of the white intellectual filter. This view of African-American literature as a tool in the struggle for Black political and cultural liberation has been stated for decades, perhaps most famously by W. E. B. Du Bois.
Native American Renaissance
---------------> Native American Renaissance is a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in the 1983 book Native American Renaissance to categorise the significant increase in production of literary works by Native Americans in the United States in the late 1960s onwards. A. Robert Lee and Alan Velie note that the book's title "quickly gained currency as a term to describe the efflorescence on literary works that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968". Momaday's novel garnered critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
Conclusion
--------------> here I conclude this literary term postcolonial with his definition and brief history and some colonize Nations and the literature and their major writers and their works I have written it.
