Postcolonial Literature Top 10 List
The Must-Knows of Postcolonial Literature
- Colonialism: The big bad bullies on the block, Europeans invaded other people's lands and pretty much just exploited them. (The truth hurts, Europe.) Colonialism reached its peak in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when huge parts of the world were under the control of empires like the British and the French.
- Decolonization Struggles: This is a fancy way to describe that moment when colonized were like: "Enough is enough. We're kicking you bad boys out."
- Colonial Discourse: This is the sneaky way that colonizers spoke and wrote about colonized peoples in order to make them look uncivilized and backward. Why would they do that? As a means to justify exploitation, of course.
- Counter-Discourse: This is the response of postcolonial writers to Europeans. The postcolonial writers tried to show up all the holes (big and small—there are just so many) in colonial discourse.
- Appropriation of Colonial Languages: When postcolonial writers take colonial languages like English and French and use them to talk back to the colonizers in a way they can't help but understand, that's a fancy little thing we call appropriation of colonial languages.
- Rewriting History: Postcolonial writers tell history from their perspective and show how the history written by colonizers is—you guessed it—totally biased against the colonized and toward the colonizers.
- Nationhood and Nationalism: Postcolonial writers often have a lot of national pride. They like to write about their countries—but they're not always so easy on the corrupt leaders of their countries.
- Valorization of Cultural Identity: Postcolonial writers often take pride in their cultural identity and hold it up as an alternative to colonial culture. Colonizers usually made fun of these cultures, calling them primitive or backward. Postcolonial writers respond by showing us why their culture rocks.
- Metanarrative: You know how sometimes you're reading a book or watching a movie that starts to talk about how it's made? Postcolonial writers do this, too. By calling attention to the way stories are constructed, they point out the shady way that colonizers constructed their stories about colonized peoples. Once they've explained how these stories about the colonized peoples are made, it's harder to accept these stories' biases.
- Challenging Cultural Stereotypes: Postcolonial writers try to show how all those stereotypes about non-Europeans are just, like, not true. Maybe that sounds easy, but boy, these writers are dealing with one tough audience. How often do bullies pay attention to what their victims have to say to them?