Postcolonial writers have this thing they like to do. They take the language of their colonizer (English or French, for example) and turn it on its head. A writer from the Caribbean, for example, m...

Colonizers liked to tell a certain story. In this story, Europeans were created to rule over other, lesser people, from the Irish to the Igbo. Europeans were the designated masters, the rulers of t...

For many cultures around the world, colonialism was a massively traumatic thing. Imagine: all of sudden this stranger shows up in your town or your village, takes all your stuff, forces you to lear...

Discourse is a collection of narratives, statements, and opinions dealing with a certain topic. Discourse can be about anything. There's even Justin Bieber discourse, if you think about all those m...

European colonizers often thought that the people that they colonized didn't have a history before the Europeans "enlightened" them. The colonizers thought that the colonized peoples had no culture...

Freedom fighters in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean fought colonialism. People like Mahatma Gandhi in India, Patrice Lumumba in Zaire (now Congo), Amilcar Cabral in Cape Verde and Gu...

Postcolonial writers are really interested in nationhood and nationalism. A lot of these writers are very patriotic. They write books on behalf of their nations. Their work is often nationalist, be...

You know how a big justification for colonialism was, basically, that the cultures of colonized peoples were inferior to those of Europeans? Well, postcolonial writers challenge this idea, and they...

If there's one characteristic that we could use to lump together all of these different literatures emerging from all over the world, it's that they form part of a counter-discourse to colonialism....

In order to justify colonialism, colonizers had to make themselves believe that the people they were colonizing were somehow lesser than they were. Otherwise, how could they go off and enslave and...