Postcolonial Literary Theory: Key Developments in the 1980s
Postcolonial Theory’s Rise in the 1980s
Sensitised by the work of Said and others to the operations of colonial discourses, a new generation of critics turned to more ‘theoretical’ materials in their thinking. Three forms of textual analysis in particular became popular:
Re-reading Canonical English Literature
Critics examined if past representations perpetuated or questioned the latent assumptions of colonial discourses. In one direction, critics looked at writers who dealt manifestly with colonial themes and argued about whether their work was supportive or critical of colonial discourses. Texts that seemingly had little to do with colonialism, such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), were also re-read provocatively in terms of colonial discourses.
Representing Colonized Subjects
A group of critics began to dwell in particular upon the representation of colonised subjects across a variety of colonial texts, and not just literary ones. The West produced knowledge about other peoples in order to prove the ‘truth’ of their ‘inferiority’. Was it possible to read these texts against the grain and discover in them moments when the colonised subject resisted being represented with recourse to colonial values?
The Empire Writes Back: A Postcolonial Landmark
In the 1980s, a seminal book titled The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures appeared. This work epitomised the increasingly popular view that literature from once-colonised countries was fundamentally concerned with challenging the language of colonial power, unlearning its worldview, and producing new modes of representation.
New Englishes and Linguistic Resistance
English was being displaced by ‘different linguistic communities in the post-colonial world’ who were re-marking it as an attempt to challenge the colonial value-system it enshrined, and to bear witness to these communities’ sense of cultural difference. Writers were creating new ‘Englishes’ through various strategies:
- Inserting untranslatable words into their texts;
- Glossing seemingly obscure terms;
- Refusing to follow standard English syntax and using structures derived from other languages;
- Incorporating many different creolised versions of English into their texts.
The Empire Writes Back asserted that postcolonial writing was always written out of ‘the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a vernacular tongue, the complex of speech habits which characterise the local language’. The new ‘English’ of the colonised place was ultimately irredeemably different from the language at the colonial centre, separated by an unbridgeable gap. The new ‘Englishes’ could not be converted into standard English because they had surpassed its limits and broken its rules. As a consequence of this irredeemable difference, new values, identities, and value-systems were expressed, and old colonial values wholeheartedly rejected.
Critiques of The Empire Writes Back
Three criticisms of The Empire Writes Back are useful to list here because they can serve as warnings regarding some of the problems within postcolonialism as a whole:
Gender Differences in Postcolonial Writing
The Empire Writes Back neglects gender differences among writers. Important social facts of a writer’s identity are passed over by the authors in an attempt to isolate an identifiable, common mode of postcolonial writing.
Regional and National Distinctions
There is little sustained attempt to differentiate within or between writings from divergent places.
Prevalence of ‘Writing Back’ Questioned
Some critics have voiced their concern with the supposition that all writing from once-colonised locations is writing against colonial discourses.