Postcolonial Literature - Critical Approach

Critical Approach

Post-colonial literary criticism 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.

An exemplar post-colonial novel is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, a predecessor story to Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Brontë, a literary variety wherein a familiar story is re-told from the perspective of a subaltern protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, who, within the story and the plot, is a socially oppressed minor character who is renamed and variously exploited. As such, in post-colonial literature, the protagonist usually struggles with questions of Identity — social identity, cultural identity, national identity, etc. — usually caused by experiencing the psychological conflicts inherent to cultural assimilation, to living between the old, native world and the dominant hegemony of the invasive social and cultural institutions of the colonial imperialism of a Mother Country.

The “anti-conquest narrative” recasts the natives (indigenous inhabitants) of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonisers. This depicts the colonised people in a more human light but risks absolving colonisers of responsibility for addressing the impacts of colonisation by assuming that native inhabitants were "doomed" to their fate.