Postcolonialism:

Terminology:

The significance of the prefix "post-" in "postcolonial" is a matter of contention. It is difficult to

determine when colonialism begins and ends, and therefore to agree that "postcolonial" designates an
era "after" colonialism has ended.[4] Colonial history unfolds in overlapping phases: Spanish and
Portuguese expansion begins in the 15th century; British, French, Dutch and German colonization unfold
from between the 16th and 18th centuries until the independence movements of Asia, Africa and the
Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century. It is also difficult to determine the postcolonial status of settler
colonies such as Australia and Canada, or that of pre-colonial-era colonies such as Ireland.[5]
Neocolonialism and the effects of imperialism (i.e. the western attitudes that justify colonial practices),
which persist even after the end of colonialism (i.e. the practice of securing colonies for economic gain),
make it difficult to determine whether a colonizer's physical evacuation guarantees post-colonial status.

Evolution of the term:

Before the term "postcolonial literature" gained currency, "commonwealth literature" was used to refer
to writing in English from countries belonging to the British commonwealth. Even though the term
included British literature, it was most commonly used for writing in English produced in British colonies.
Scholars of commonwealth literature used the term to designate writing in English that dealt with
colonialism's legacy. They advocated for its inclusion in literary curricula, hitherto dominated by the
British canon. However, the succeeding generation of postcolonial critics, many of whom belonged to the
post-structuralist philosophical tradition, took issue with the Commonwealth label for separating non-
British writing from "English" literature produced in England. They also suggested that texts in this
category had a short-sighted view of imperialism's impact.

Other terms used for the writing in English from former British colonies include terms that designate a
national corpus of writing such as Australian or Canadian Literature; "English Literature Other than
British and American", "New Literatures in English", "International Literature in English"; and "World
Literatures". These have, however, been dismissed either as too vague or too inaccurate to represent the
vast body of dynamic writing emerging from the colonies both during and after colonial rule. The term
"colonial" and "postcolonial" continue to be used for writing emerging during and after colonial rule
respectively.[9]

"Post-colonial" or "postcolonial"?

The consensus in the field is that "post-colonial" (with a hyphen) signifies a period that comes
chronologically "after" colonialism. "Postcolonial," on the other hand, signals the persisting impact of
colonization across time periods and geographical regions.[8] While the hyphen implies that history
unfolds in neatly distinguishable stages from pre- to post-colonial, omitting the hyphen creates a
comparative framework by which to understand the varieties of local resistance to colonial impact.
Arguments in favor of the hyphen suggest that the term "postcolonial" dilutes differences between
colonial histories in different parts of the world and that it homogenizes colonial societies.[10] The body
of critical writing that participates in these debates is called Postcolonial theory.

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism,
focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their
lands. More specifically, it is a critical-theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of
(usually European) imperial power.

Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a
common set of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may seek to build a better
understanding of colonial life—based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators
—from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social
and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social,
political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap
with studies of contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography,
political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies
examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian
[Link] times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous
term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view
underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies) generally represents an
ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after
colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to
or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term
postcolonialism itself is modeled on postmodernism.

What Is The Subject Of Postcolonialism?:

As a general domain of intellectual inquiry, postcolonialism addresses those questions that emerge in
relation to the aftermath of imperialism. One of the most-important features of the history of
imperialism has been the emergence of states—either from the consolidation of territories and polities
or from the dissolution of empires (or some combination thereof)—and, along with that, new
conceptions of international order. In that sense, to be concerned with postcolonialism is to be
concerned with a set of questions at the heart of modern political thought.

However, postcolonialism is also closely associated with a more-specific set of questions, and, although it
should not be reduced to these questions, they have proved to be enormously influential. One of the
most prominent has been the relation between imperialism and identity. Fanon, a psychoanalyst and
philosopher born in Martinique, presented one of the most searing and provocative analyses of the
relation between colonized and colonizer in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as well as in his Black Skin,
White Masks (1952). Fanon remains perhaps best known for his explosive justification of violence in The
Wretched of the Earth (highlighted in Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to that work), where it is cast as the
appropriate response to the violence perpetrated by colonialism and as the mediation through which
the colonized can begin to reclaim their self-conscious agency. His is a deeply unsettling argument,
shaped undoubtedly by the brutal period of French colonial rule in Algeria and the war for independence
(1954–62) there, which Fanon experienced firsthand. Violence was inevitable and necessary, Fanon
seemed to be arguing in The Wretched of the Earth, but it also has to be overcome. One has to move
from reaction to the construction of something new, which for Fanon included overcoming the binary
oppositions imposed on the colonized by the geopolitical structures of the Cold War. It is there that the
foreshadowing of some important themes that became central to postcolonialism is found. For example,
Fanon combined a material and psychological analysis of the consequences of colonialism, which looked
to both the micro- and macroeffects and experience of colonial government. Among those
consequences and their effects, as identified and investigated by Fanon and other theorists, are: both
the colonized and the colonizer are implicated in the horrors of imperialism, and both will have to be
decolonized; the colonized have to find a way of overcoming the imposition of alien rule not only over
their territory but also over their minds and bodies; seeking recognition from an oppressor in terms that
the oppressor has set hardly provides a genuine liberation from the grip of colonialism (an effect that
anticipates an important debate in contemporary political theory over the “politics of recognition”); the
colonizers have to make sense of how the brutality of colonialism relates to their own apparent
humanism.

Fanon’s work emphasized the complex relation between imperialism and nationalism that remained a
critical focus of much postcolonial writing. The aspiration for self-determination at the heart of
anticolonial struggles proved difficult to institutionalize democratically in existing postcolonial states
(about which Fanon was remarkably prescient). Most postcolonial theorists—whether writing about
Africa, South Asia, or elsewhere—have been critical of nationalism but also equally critical of the
“nativism” and romantic communitarianism often supposed to be alternatives to it. They have sought to
investigate the ways in which European conceptions of politics, as well as assumptions about secularism
and historical time more generally, have been used to describe and locate non-European peoples’ forms
of collective action and modes of self-understanding along a continuum that terminates with the ideas
and institutions of modern Europe. Postcolonial theorists have also been critical of the assumption, often
made by liberals, that what is needed is simply the extension of existing liberal universals, this time in
good faith, to those to whom they were previously denied (or never seriously intended). For some
theorists, the problem is not simply one of a lack of consistency on the part of liberalism; it instead lies
more deeply within the structure of the universal principles themselves. The conditions attached for the
ascription of rights, for example, or the distribution of liberties were often grounded in narratives of
social or cultural development that justified denying rights and freedoms to those deemed too backward
or uncivilized to exercise them properly. John Stuart Mill’s justification of the denial of Indian self-
government is a classic instance of that kind of assumption, however much he thought it was best for
the well-being of Indians themselves. certain concepts and methods.

Purpose and basic concepts:

As an epistemology (i.e., a study of knowledge, its nature, and verifiability), ethics (moral philosophy),
and as a political science (i.e., in its concern with affairs of the citizenry), the field of postcolonialism
addresses the matters that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives
fromthe colonizer's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonized people; andhow that Western
cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate a non-European people into a colony of the European
mother country, which, after initial invasion, was effected by means of the cultural identities of
'colonizer' and 'colonized'.Postcolonialism is aimed at disempowering such theories (intellectual and
linguistic, social and economic) by means of which colonialists "perceive," "understand," and "know" the
world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for
themselves, in their own voices, and thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society,
and economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-them binary powcolonialism: 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.

Key Terms in Post-Colonial Theory:

You should read over the following definitions in order to understand some of the basic ideas associated
with post-colonialist literature:

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

ambivalence: the ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another. The colonizer
often regards the colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while the colonized regards the colonizer
as both enviable yet corrupt. In a context of hybridity, this often produces a mixed sense of blessing and
curse.

alterity: "the state of being other or different"; the political, cultural, linguistic, or religious other. The
study of the ways in which one group makes themselves different from others.

colonial education: the process by which a colonizing power assimilates either a subaltern native elite or
a larger population to its way of thinking and seeing the world.

diaspora: the voluntary or enforced migration of peoples from their native homelands. Diaspora
literature is often concerned with questions of maintaining or altering identity, language, and culture
while in another culture or country.

essentialism: the essence or "whatness" of something. In the context of race, ethnicity, or culture,
essentialism suggests the practice of various groups deciding what is and isn't a particular identity. As a
practice, essentialism tends to overlook differences within groups often to maintain the status quo or
obtain power. Essentialist claims can be used by a colonizing power but also by the colonized as a way of
resisting what is claimed about them.

ethnicity: a fusion of traits that belong to a group–shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, behaviors,
experiences, memories, and loyalties. Often deeply related to a person’s identity.

exoticism: the process by which a cultural practice is made stimulating and exciting in its difference from
the colonializer’s normal perspective. Ironically, as European groups educated local, indigenous cultures,
schoolchildren often began to see their native lifeways, plants, and animals as exotic and the European
counterparts as "normal" or "typical."

hegemony: the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of
all, often not only through means of economic and political control but more subtly through the control
of education and media.

hybridity: new transcultural forms that arise from cross-cultural exchange. Hybridity can be social,
political, linguistic, religious, etc. It is not necessarily a peaceful mixture, for it can be contentious and
disruptive in its experience. Note the two related definitions:

catalysis: the (specifically New World) experience of several ethnic groups interacting and mixing with
each other often in a contentious environment that gives way to new forms of identity and experience.

creolization: societies that arise from a mixture of ethnic and racial mixing to form a new material,
psychological, and spiritual self-definition.

identity: the way in which an individual and/or group defines itself. Identity is important to self-concept,
social mores, and national understanding. It often involves both essentialism and othering.

ideology: "a system of values, beliefs, or ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted
as natural or inherently true" (Bordwell & Thompson 494)

language: In the context of colonialism and post-colonialism, language has often become a site for both
colonization and resistance. In particular, a return to the original indigenous language is often advocated
since the language was suppressed by colonizing forces. The use of European languages is a much
debated issue among postcolonial authors.

abrogation: a refusal to use the language of the colonizer in a correct or standard way.

appropriation: "the process by which the language is made to 'bear the burden' of one's own cultural
experience."
magical realism: the adaptation of Western realist methods of literature in describing the imaginary life
of indigenous cultures who experience the mythical, magical, and supernatural in a decidedly different
fashion from Western ones. A weaving together elements we tend to associate with European realism
and elements we associate with the fabulous, where these two worlds undergo a "closeness or near
merging."

mapping: the mapping of global space in the context of colonialism was as much prescriptive as it was
descriptive. Maps were used to assist in the process of aggression, and they were also used to establish
claims. Maps claims the boundaries of a nation, for example.

metanarrative: ("grand narratives," "master narratives.") a large cultural story that seeks to explain
within its borders all the little, local narratives. A metanarrative claims to be a big truth concerning the
world and the way it works. Some charge that all metanarratives are inherently oppressive because they
decide whether other narratives are allowed or not.

mimicry: the means by which the colonized adapt the culture (language, education, clothing, etc.) of the
colonizer but always in the process changing it in important ways. Such an approach always contains it in
the ambivalence of hybridity.

nation/nation-state: an aggregation of people organized under a single government. National interest is

associated both with a struggle for independent ethnic and cultural identity, and ironically an opposite
belief in universal rights, often multicultural, with a basis in geo-economic interests. Thus, the move for
national independence is just as often associated with region as it is with ethnicity or culture, and the
two are often at odds when new nations are formed.

orientalism: the process (from the late eighteenth century to the present) by which "the Orient" was
constructed as an exotic other by European studies and culture. Orientalism is not so much a true study
of other cultures as it is broad Western generalization about Oriental, Islamic, and/or Asian cultures that
tends to erode and ignore their substantial differences.

other: the social and/or psychological ways in which one group excludes or marginalizes another group.
By declaring someone "Other," persons tend to stress what makes them dissimilar from or opposite of
another, and this carries over into the way they represent others, especially through stereotypical
images.

race: the division and classification of human beings by physical and biological characteristics. Race
often is used by various groups to either maintain power or to stress solidarity. In the 18th and19th
centuries, it was often used as a pretext by European colonial powers for slavery and/or the "white
man's burden."

semiotics: a system of signs which one knows what something is. Cultural semiotics often provide the
means by which a group defines itself or by which a colonializing power attempts to control and
assimilate another group.

space/place:space represents a geographic locale, one empty in not being designated. Place, on the
other hand, is what happens when a space is made or owned. Place involves landscape, language,
environment, culture, etc.

subaltern: the lower or colonized classes who have little access to their own means of expression and are
thus dependent upon the language and methods of the ruling class to express themselves.

worlding: the process by which a person, family, culture, or people is brought into the dominant
Eurocentric/Western global [Link]-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.

Colonialist discourse:

Colonialism was presented as "the extension of civilization," which ideologically justified the self-
ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over the non-Western world. This concept
was espoused by Joseph-Ernest Renan in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), whereby imperial
stewardship was thought to affect the intellectual and moral reformation of the coloured peoples of the
lesser cultures of the world. That such a divinely established, natural harmony among the human races
of the world would be possible, because everyone has an assigned cultural identity, a social place, and
an economic role within an imperial colony.

Postcolonial identity:

Postcolonial theory holds that decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that is based on
cultural interactions between different identities (cultural, national, and ethnic as well as gender and
class based) which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society.[citation needed]
In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyzes the identity politics that are the social and
cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the
colonizer; how such cultural resistance complicated the establishment of a colonial society; how the
colonizers developed their postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the 'us-and-
them' binary social relation to view the non-Western world as inhabited by 'the other'. According to
Indian academic Jaydeep Sarangi, one of the profound practices of postcolonial discourse is the
celebration of 'the local'. Arguing in favour of voicing the margin/periphery (dalits), in the introduction to
his book, Presentations of Postcolonialism in English: New Orientations, he gives reference to Maoris and
Aborigines.

Difficulty of definition:

As a term in contemporary history, postcolonialism occasionally is applied, temporally, to denote the

immediate time after the period during which imperial powers retreated from their colonial territories.
Such is believed to be an problematic application of the term, as the immediate, historical, political time
is not included in the categories of critical identity-discourse, which deals with over-inclusive terms of
cultural representation, which are abrogated and replaced by postcolonial criticism. As such, the terms
postcolonial and postcolonialism denote aspects of the subject matter that indicate that the decolonized
world is an intellectual space "of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity,
and of liminalities."[8] As in most critical theory-based research, the lack of clarity in the definition of the
subject matter coupled with an open claim to normativity makes criticism of postcolonial discourse
problematic, reasserting its dogmatic or ideological status.

The term post-colonialism—according to a too-rigid etymology—is frequently misunderstood as a

temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically
determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state.
Not a naïve teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post-colonialism is, rather, an
engagement with, and contestation of, colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social
hierarchies.... A theory of post-colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological
construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism.

The term post-colonialism is also applied to denote the Mother Country's neocolonial control of the
decolonized country, affected by the legalistic continuation of the economic, cultural, and linguistic
power relationships that controlled the colonial politics of knowledge (i.e., the generation, production,
and distribution of knowledge) about the colonized peoples of the non-Western world.[8][11] The
cultural and religious assumptions of colonialist logic remain active practices in contemporary society,
and are the basis of the Mother Country's neocolonial attitude towards her former colonial subjects—an
economical source of labour and raw materials.

Notable theoreticians and theories:

Frantz Fanon and subjugation:

In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon analyzes and medically
describes the nature of colonialism as essentially destructive. Its societal effects—the imposition of a
subjugating colonial identity—are harmful to the mental health of the native peoples who were
subjugated into colonies. Fanon writes that the ideological essence of colonialism is the systematic
denial of "all attributes of humanity" of the colonized people. Such dehumanization is achieved with
physical and mental violence, by which the colonist means to inculcate a servile mentality upon the
natives.

For Fanon the natives must violently resist colonial subjugation.[Hence, Fanon describes violent
resistance to colonialism as a mentally cathartic practice, which purges colonial servility from the native
psyche, and restores self-respect to the subjugated. Thus, Fanon actively supported and participated in
the Algerian Revolution (1954–62) for independence from France as a member and representative of the
Front de Libération Nationale.

As postcolonial praxis, Fanon's mental-health analyses of colonialism and imperialism, and the
supporting economic theories, were partly derived from the essay "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism" (1916), wherein Vladimir Lenin described colonial imperialism as an advanced form of
capitalism, desperate for growth at all costs, and so requires more and more human exploitation to
ensure continually consistent profit-for-investment

Another key book that predates postcolonial theories is Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks. In this book,
Fanon discusses the logic of colonial rule from the perspective of the existential experience of racialized
subjectivity. Fanon treats colonialism as a total project which rules every aspect of colonized peoples and
their reality. Fanon reflects on colonialism, language, and racism and asserts that to speak a language is
to adopt a civilization and to participate in the world of that language. His ideas show the influence of
French and German philosophy, since existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics claim that
language, subjectivity, and reality are interrelated. However, the colonial situation presents a paradox:
when colonial beings are forced to adopt and speak an imposed language which is not their own, they
adopt and participate in the world and civilization of the colonized. This language results from centuries
of colonial domination which is aimed at eliminating other expressive forms in order to reflect the world
of the colonizer. As a consequence, when colonial beings speak as the colonized, they participate in their
own oppression and the very structures of alienation are reflected in all aspects of their adopted
language.[16]

Edward Said and orientalism:

Cultural critic Edward Said is considered by E. San Juan, Jr. as "the originator and inspiring patron-saint of
postcolonial theory and discourse" due to his interpretation of the theory of orientalism explained in his
1978 book, Orientalism.[17] To describe the us-and-them "binary social relation" with which Western
Europe intellectually divided the world—into the "Occident" and the "Orient"—Said developed the
denotations and connotations of the term orientalism (an art-history term for Western depictions and
the study of the Orient). Said's concept (which he also termed "orientalism") is that the cultural
representations generated with the us-and-them binary relation are social constructs, which are
mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each other, because each exists on account of and
for the other

Notably, "the West" created the cultural concept of "the East," which according to Said allowed the
Europeans to suppress the peoples of the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia in general,
from expressing and representing themselves as discrete peoples and cultures. Orientalism thus
conflated and reduced the non-Western world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as "the
East." Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the us-and-them Orientalist paradigm
allowed European scholars to represent the Oriental World as inferior and backward, irrational and wild,
as opposed to a Western Europe that was superior and progressive, rational and civil—the opposite of
the Oriental Other.

Reviewing Said's Orientalism (1978), A. Madhavan (1993) says that "Said's passionate thesis in that book,
now an 'almost canonical study', represented Orientalism as a 'style of thought' based on the antinomy
of East and West in their world-views, and also as a 'corporate institution' for dealing with the Orient."

In concordance with philosopher Michel Foucault, Said established that power and knowledge are the
inseparable components of the intellectual binary relationship with which Occidentals claim "knowledge
of the Orient." That the applied power of such cultural knowledge allowed Europeans to rename, re-
define, and thereby control Oriental peoples, places, and things, into imperial colonies.[11] The power–
knowledge binary relation is conceptually essential to identify and understand colonialism in general,
and European colonialism in particular. Hence,

To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of
thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist,
brought into reality by them, or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the
Orientalist's grander interpretive activity

Nonetheless, critics of the homogeneous "Occident–Orient" binary social relation, say that Orientalism is
of limited descriptive capability and practical application, and propose instead that there are variants of
Orientalism that apply to Africa and to Latin America. Said response was that the European West applied
Orientalism as a homogeneous form of The Other, in order to facilitate the formation of the cohesive,
collective European cultural identity denoted by the term "The West."

With this described binary logic, the West generally constructs the Orient subconsciously as its alter ego.
Therefore, descriptions of the Orient by the Occident lack material attributes, grounded within land. This
inventive, or imaginative interpretation subscribes female characteristics to the Orient and plays into
fantasies that are inherent within the West's alter ego. It should be understood that this process draws
creativity, amounting an entire domain and discourse.

In Orientalism , Said mentions the production of "philology [the study of the history of languages],
lexicography [dictionary making], history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing and lyric
poetry." Therefore, there is an entire industry that exploits the Orient for its own subjective purposes
that lack a native and intimate understanding. Such industries become institutionalized and eventually
become a resource for manifest Orientalism, or a compilation of misinformation about the Orient.

The ideology of Empire was hardly ever a brute jingoism; rather, it made subtle use of reason, and
recruited science and history to serve its ends.

— Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient (1994), p. 6

These subjective fields of academia now synthesize the political resources and think-tanks that are so
common in the West today. Orientalism is self-perpetuating to the extent that it becomes normalized
within common discourse, making people say things that are latent, impulsive, or not fully conscious of
its own self.

Gayatri Spivak and the subaltern:

In establishing the Postcolonial definition of the term subaltern, the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak cautioned against assigning an over-broad connotation. She arg subaltern is not just a
classy word for "oppressed", for The Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie.... In
postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a
space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's
not subaltern.... Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most
dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't
need the word 'subaltern'.... They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're
within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak,
use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.

Engaging the voice of the Subaltern: the philosopher and theoretician Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, at
Goldsmith College.

Spivak also introduced the terms essentialism and strategic essentialism to describe the social functions
of postcolonialism.

Essentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to reviving subaltern voices in ways that might
(over) simplify the cultural identity of heterogeneous social groups and, thereby, create stereotyped
representations of the different identities of the people who compose a given social group. Strategic
essentialism, on the other hand, denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the praxis of
discourse among peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can occasionally be applied—by the so-described
people—to facilitate the subaltern's communication in being heeded, heard, and understood, because a
strategic essentialism (a fixed and established subaltern identity) is more readily grasped, and accepted,
by the popular majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important distinction, between the
terms, is that strategic essentialism does not ignore the diversity of identities (cultural and ethnic) in a
social group, but that, in its practical function, strategic essentialism temporarily minimizes inter-group
diversity to pragmatically support the essential group-identity.

Spivak developed and applied Foucault's term epistemic violence to describe the destruction of non-
Western ways of perceiving the world and the resultant dominance of the Western ways of perceiving
the world. Conceptually, epistemic violence specifically relates to women, whereby the "Subaltern
[woman] must always be caught in translation, never [allowed to be] truly expressing herself," because
the colonial power's destruction of her culture pushed to the social margins her non–Western ways of
perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world.[7]

In June of the year 1600, the Afro–Iberian woman Francisca de Figueroa requested from the King of
Spain his permission for her to emigrate from Europe to New Spain, and reunite with her daughter, Juana
de Figueroa. As a subaltern woman, Francisca repressed her native African language, and spoke her
request in Peninsular Spanish, the official language of Colonial Latin America. As a subaltern woman, she
applied to her voice the Spanish cultural filters of sexism, Christian monotheism, and servile language, in
addressing her colonial master.

Postcolonial literary study:

As a literary theory, postcolonialism deals with the literatures produced by the peoples who once were
colonized by the European imperial powers (e.g. Britain, France, and Spain) and the literatures of the
decolonized countries engaged in contemporary, postcolonial arrangements (e.g. Organisation
internationale de la Francophonie and the Commonwealth of Nations) with their former mother
countries.
Postcolonial literary criticism comprehends the literatures written by the colonizer and the colonized,
wherein the subject matter includes portraits of the colonized peoples and their lives as imperial
subjects. In Dutch literature, the Indies Literature includes the colonial and postcolonial genres, which
examine and analyze the formation of a postcolonial identity, and the postcolonial culture produced by
the diaspora of the Indo-European peoples, the Eurasian folk who originated from Indonesia; the
peoples who were the colony of the Dutch East Indies; in the literature, the notable author is Tjalie
Robinson.[42] Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J. M. Coetzee depicts the unfair and inhuman
situation of people dominated by settlers.

To perpetuate and facilitate control of the colonial enterprise, some colonized people, especially from
among the subaltern peoples of the British Empire, were sent to attend university in the Imperial
Motherland; they were to become the native-born, but Europeanised, ruling class of colonial satraps.
Yet, after decolonization, their bicultural educations originated postcolonial criticism of empire and
colonialism, and of the representations of the colonist and the colonized. In the late 20th century, after
the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the constituent Soviet Socialist Republics became the literary
subjects of postcolonial criticism, wherein the writers dealt with the legacies (cultural, social, economic)
of the Russification of their peoples, countries, and cultures in service to Greater Russia.

Postcolonial literary study is in two categories:

the study of postcolonial nations; and

the study of the nations who continue forging a postcolonial national identity.

The first category of literature presents and analyzes the internal challenges inherent to determining an
ethnic identity in a decolonized nation.

The second category of literature presents and analyzes the degeneration of civic and nationalist unities
consequent to ethnic parochialism, usually manifested as the demagoguery of "protecting the nation," a
variant of the us-and-them binary social relation. Civic and national unity degenerate when a patriarchal
régime unilaterally defines what is and what is not "the national culture" of the decolonized country: the
nation-state collapses, either into communal movements, espousing grand political goals for the
postcolonial nation; or into ethnically mixed communal movements, espousing political separatism, as
occurred in decolonized Rwanda, the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; thus the
postcolonial extremes against which Frantz Fanon warned in 1961.

Regarding sociolinguistic interpretations of literary texts through postcolonial lenses we may refer to the
book Indian Novels in English: A Sociolinguistic Study (2005) by Jaydeep Sarangi.

Criticism:

Undermining of universal values:

Indian Marxist scholar Vivek Chibber has critiqued some foundational logics of postcolonial theory in his
book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Drawing on Aijaz Ahmad's earlier critique of Said's
Orientalism[61] and Sumit Sarkar's critique of the Subaltern Studies scholars,[62] Chibber focuses on and
refutes the principal historical claims made by the Subaltern Studies scholars; claims that are
representative of the whole of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory, he argues, essentializes cultures,
painting them as fixed and static categories. Moreover, it presents the difference between East and West
as unbridgeable, hence denying people's "universal aspirations" and "universal interests." He also
criticized the postcolonial tendency to characterize all of Enlightenment values as Eurocentric. According
to him, the theory will be remembered "for its revival of cultural essentialism and its acting as an
endorsement of orientalism, rather than being an antidote to it.

Fixation on national identity:

The concentration of postcolonial studies upon the subject of national identity has determined it is
essential to the creation and establishment of a stable nation and country in the aftermath of
decolonization; yet indicates that either an indeterminate or an ambiguous national identity has tended
to limit the social, cultural, and economic progress of a decolonized people. In Overstating the Arab State
(2001) by Nazih Ayubi, Moroccan scholar Bin 'Abd al-'Ali proposed that the existence of "a pathological
obsession with...identity" is a cultural theme common to the contemporary academic field Middle
Eastern Studies.

Nevertheless, Kumaraswamy and Sadiki say that such a common sociological problem—that of an
indeterminate national identity—among the countries of the Middle East is an important aspect that
must be accounted in order to have an understanding of the politics of the contemporary Middle East.
[47] In the event, Ayubi asks if what 'Bin Abd al–'Ali sociologically described as an obsession with
national identity might be explained by "the absence of a championing social class?.

Postcolonial literature:

Post-colonialism is a broad cultural approach to the study of power relations between different groups,
cultures or people, in which language, literature and translation play role (Hatim & Munday, 2005, p.
106) Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries.[1] It exists on
all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences
of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural
independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism.[2] A range
of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and
challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.

Migrant literature and postcolonial literature show some considerable overlap. However, not all
migration takes place in a colonial setting, and not all postcolonial literature deals with migration. A
question of current debate is the extent to which postcolonial theory also speaks to migration literature
in non-colonial settings.