Key Postcolonial Studies Texts: Critical Approaches
Essays: Critical and Theoretical Approaches
Edward Said, *Orientalism*
Orientalism is a book in which the author establishes the eponymous term “Orientalism” as a critical concept to describe the West’s common, contemptuous depiction and portrayal of “The East,” i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power. The term “Orientalism” denotes the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the Oriental world. As such, Orientalism is the pivotal source of the inaccurate cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world, specifically in relation to the Middle East region.
Frantz Fanon, *The Fact of Blackness*
The work displays incredible literacy in major intellectual trends of the time: psychoanalysis, existentialism, phenomenology, and dialectics, as well as, most prominently, the early Négritude movement and U.S.-based critical race work in figures like Richard Wright. Modest in length, the book is notable for its enormous ambition, seeking to understand the foundations of anti-Black racism in the deepest recesses of consciousness and the social world. The book is Fanon’s major work on blackness. Fanon’s method in *Black Skin, White Masks* is a complicated question and one of the more interesting bits of scholarly discussion. The primary approach in the text is existential-phenomenological, something borne out in the rich, textured personal narratives that seize upon the essential structures of the narrativized event of anti-blackness, and also indicated in the title of the fifth chapter.
Chinua Achebe, *The African Writer and the English Language*
I am sure that Obi Wali must have felt triumphantly vindicated when he saw the report of a different kind of conference held later at Fourah Bay to discuss African literature and the university curriculum. This conference produced a tentative definition of African literature as follows: “Creative writing in which an African setting is authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral.” We are told specifically that Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness* qualifies as African literature while Graham Greene’s *Heart of the Matter* fails because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, *The Language of African Literature*
Is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ’s best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a preeminent voice theorizing the “language debate” in post-colonial studies. Communication between human beings propels the evolution of a culture, he argues, but language also carries the histories, values, and aesthetics of a culture along with it. As he puts it, “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation, and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.” Lovesey notes that while Ngũgĩ’s continuing “advocacy of African languages and their use in aiding the process of decolonization has roots in Fanon’s thinking,” his interests have ultimately moved beyond Fanon. Ngũgĩ remains “sincerely committed” to the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and it is important to note that many liberation movements in Africa have had Marxist roots. As Ngũgĩ once said in an interview: “The political literature of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was important and soon overshadowed Fanon. Or rather, Marx and Engels began to reveal the serious weaknesses and limitations of Fanon, especially his own petit bourgeois idealism that led him into mechanical overemphasis on psychology and violence, and his inability to see the significance of the rising and growing African proletariat.”
Kamau Brathwaite, *On Nation Language*
“Nation language” is the term coined by scholar and poet Kamau Brathwaite and now commonly preferred to describe the work of writers from the Caribbean and the African diaspora in non-standard English, as opposed to the traditional designation of it as “dialect”, which Brathwaite considered pejorative.