Have we passed the last post-? Theorizing post/colonial literature

Social text, 1992

Textual Practice, 1987

2002

2010

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary ...

Textual Practice, 1994

modern or postcolonial arenas. These are shared Jilrgen Habermas's term, starts with the Cartesian issues, even if the articulation, interpretation, and Enlightenment shift from scholasticism and deployment of them differ considerably. to what Stephen Toulmin describes as "a higher, Material History Review 41 (Spring 1995) /Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 41 [printemps 1995

Please note: The many grammatical errors in the footnotes are the sole responsibility of the editor of this long-forgotten collection of essays. In the version of the essay that I originally submitted, I had supplied only my own translations of quotations in French. Unbeknownst to me, at some point over the four-year period between submission of the essay and its eventua,I publication, the editor handed the manuscript over to a student of his and asked that individual to find all the French originals and include them in footnotes. To judge from the results, the student was not a particularly good typist. I was never given the opportunity to look at the proofs, and the editor expressed great surprise, when I eventually gave vent to my feelings of outrage with regard to the published version, that I didn't feel grateful for not having had to undergo the "hassle" of supplying the French origina ls (which, of course, I had ready-to-hand in my original draft of the essay) or of proof-reading my own article! (CB, May 2015). 0 (U1:1-)Ending Colonialism Post-Colonial Identities ' . and Postmodern Ambivalence in Edouard Glissant' s Mahagony -CH~IS -aoNGIE ·.

Post Colonial is the study of the history ,culture ,literature and that was the main concern in the former colonies of England ,Spain ,France and other powers .Post-Colonial study reveals the exploitation done on the colonized country by the colonized powers .Here, the aim of this study is to analyses the theoretical approach in various colonies that is concerned with the impact of colonization in various countries .Post-colonialism represents an ideological response to colonial thought describing a system that comes after colonialism.

1997

Post-colonial theory is a post-positivist/reflectivist/constitutive and non-mainstream International Relations (IR) i theory which posits a critical thinking to dominant IR theories. It is assumed to offer an alternative to the Eurocentric stance and concepts of classical International Relatios theories and carry a potential to move beyond these mainstream theories, even to restructure them. Post-colonial theoreticians, like all critical scholars, have tried to shift the classical thinking in the discipline and save it from the hegemony of Western conceptions by challenging "Western-theorizing" and "decolonizing" it. However, it is not a single theory but a set of different theories. There is an immense diversity of post-colonial theory which focus on different issues such as literature, art, music, linguistics, slavery, migration, discrimination, historiography and discusses different kinds of subjugation like racism, gender, nationalism and identity.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1995

To the Editor: No alleged effect of colonization evokes greater moral indignation or fretful nostalgia than fragmentation. Colonialism breaks things. It shatters an imagined wholeness. Colonialism's will to power creates binaries where a unified field and healthy singularity of cultural purpose once existed. The self of the colonizer explodes a native cultural solidarity, producing the spiritual confusion, psychic wounding, and economic exploitation of a new and dominated other. Coloniza tion imposes evil, fear, and ignorance on the innocent native landscape. What might be termed neo-colonial studies (Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, for example) teaches that colonial rupture is the social, psychological, cultural, and economic equivalent of a paradigm shift, inaugurating a new regime of knowledge. Words and relations on either side of the colonial rupture are incommensurate. Neo-colonial studies, thus, dictates that the project of decolonization is erro neously, or at least naively, conceived if its goal is (as Amilcar Cabral pro poses) to return to the source or to recuperate native wholeness. Cabral writes, "A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if . . . they return to the upward paths of their own culture" (Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral [New York Monthly Review, 1973] 43). If the model of a paradigm shift is accepted, such a happy return is at best problematic. Emancipation from colonial domination never entails, or even suggests, fulfillment of the beautiful poetic dream implied by Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. The return to one's "native" land is a paradig matic impossibility. What then is to be made of the outbreak of supposed freedom-the decolo nizing moment-which carries a force similar in effect to the rupture of colo nization? Answers are legion, and they are complex. The answer that seems most theoretically interesting (and, I believe, most accurate) is that when the obvious chains and shackles are removed, fragmentation reveals its essential uselessness as an explanatory model. The great gift of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is his creative limning of this revelation. Achebe persuasively and subtly suggests that native, pastoral, folk, innocent, utopian, productive wholeness is never the ur-condition of anything that can reasonably be called culture. The things that fall apart in Achebe's fictions are already well on their way to toppling when the colonizers