Metanarrative in Postcolonial Literature
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 the earth. Therefore, they were justified in ruling over others: that was their destiny. And anyway, they weren't really in it for their own profit. They were enlightening the darker peoples, you see. They were civilizing them.
Postcolonial writers have a big problem with this story. After all, from their perspective, colonization wasn't about civilization or enlightenment. It was about brutal economic exploitation. And what really bothers them is the fact that this story was told, and repeated by the colonizers, as though it were a fact. Europeans wanted everyone—including their colonized subjects—to accept it as true.
So postcolonial writers started pointing out that, actually, there's more than one side to the story. In fact, there are often loads of different sides to the same story. A story that we take to be "true" or "factual" is often just one point of view among many. So in their own work, postcolonial writers tend to play around with (jargon alert!) metanarrative: they like to draw attention to the way that stories—or narratives—are constructed, and especially how they're always told from a certain point of view or angle.
Chew on This
Check out these reflections on writing and narrative in J.M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron. How does Coetzee talk about metanarrative?
See how the narrator of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits calls attention to the act of writing in these quotations.