Rewriting History in Postcolonial Literature
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, had made no contributions to human progress, and were ignorant—so from that perspective, colonialism was a wonderful thing for them. Weren't they just so lucky to be taken out of their ignorance and darkness and civilized by benevolent colonizers?
Postcolonial writers don't like this version of history. It's a version that casts colonizers as heroes, as rescuers who "saved" everyone from ignorance and darkness. So postcolonial writers set about writing history from their own perspective, showing how colonialism was actually a pretty violent, terrible thing. More importantly, these writers also show how history is a matter of perspective, and there are always many perspectives: there is no one "true" history.
Chew on This
Memory and history are both pretty unstable in these quotations from Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Saleem Sinai puts himself right at the center of Indian history from the very first page of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.