CU-MA English-SEM III-Specialization I-Postcolonial Theory

universal. The danger lay in the fact that this viewpoint could easily become part of a European model, wherein it operated against the thesis supporting supremacy of the Whites. White supremacy was a novel universal paradigm. Wole Soyinka harped on this point while analysing the concept of Negritude in his Myth, Literature and the African World. He declared that Negritude may have been an important part of Europe’s intellectual tradition. It may have tried to leave its tenets alone and alter its concepts. Regardless, Negritude was still a foundling. It was necessary for European ideologies to consider it for benign adoption. In modern times, Negritude has acted as a philosophy. Its derivative form proved to be extremely effective in the consciousness movement initiated by Afro-American Blacks. Senghor’s influence in America can be traced to prominent Black intellectuals who began writing in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; the latter, significantly, spent most of the latter part of his life’s journey in exile in Paris. The Black Power movements share several characteristics of the Negritude philosophy in their assertion of the particularly distinctive features of Black thought and emotion. Modern Afro-American critics continue to assert the presence of a unique Black consciousness in their analyses of texts and theory. The collection of essays ‘Black Literature and Literary Theory’ illustrates how such concepts as ‘soul’ or the necessity of repetition in Black musical structure may be utilised to propose a distinctive Black aesthetic. However, the actuality that these features are subject to analysis and that structuralism and discourse analysis are employed in these accounts would suggest how far the literary theory of the Blacks has come from the broadly polarizing assertions of early Négritudinist criticism, and the depth to which it acknowledges its European critical and epistemological assumptions. Black writers have been critical of what have appeared to be new hegemonic categories like ‘Commonwealth literature’, and it has encouraged critics and writers from colonised white countries to consider their own attitudes to race and to their often-ambiguous positions as both colonised and colonisers. Black criticism has been exciting and theoretically adventurous, but it has sometimes run the risk of adopting, in Said’s terms, ‘a double kind of possessive exclusivism . . . the sense of being an exclusive insider by virtue of experience’ Wider Comparative Models It has been difficult to take up a wider approach in comparison of the various literatures since no name has sufficed to provide them with an appropriate description. True, there were some attempts made earlier. However, there was no consensus towards encompassing the global range of English literature under a common umbrella (name). To illustrate, Joseph Jones had suggested that ‘terranglia’ might prove adequate to describe all the English literature 51 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

scattered across theglobe. However, not everyone found this acceptable. Similarly, the 1960s witnessed the emergence of the term, Commonwealth Literature. People seemed to find this more appropriate. Regardless, its political and geographical limitations proved to be a hindrance to worldwide approval. The term subtly emphasised upon a shared history, as well as the political grouping that formed. In other words, it described the set of national literatures that came from nations belonging to the British Commonwealth. However, accits exhibited widespread acceptance. Therefore, even more vigorous conceptions arrived, suggesting that a common condition that linked former colonies be the basis. Therefore, Commonwealth Literature became the term under which these conceptions either existed alone or co-existed with others. The world has tried to discover an improved name for these literatures. It had to be theoretically and politically better than the one in usage – Commonwealth literature. Certain universities had resorted to using the term, Third World Literatures. However, this term had its limitations, and received disapproval from the majority. New Literatures in English received greater approval. The latest addition to the naming ceremony has been Post-colonial Literatures. The original term of Commonwealth literature reveals no link to colonialism at all. Therefore, nationalists, who desired to break off their links with the colonial past, may have found it highly acceptable. However, the term tends to mislead in other ways, implying that there is a European perspective to the whole thing. This became evident in regions, such as African and India. Additionally, the term offered neither a comparative framework, nor a theoretical direction. Another disadvantage was that this term served to compare new literature to the old one, altogether avoiding any reference to the hegemonic power that the British tradition exhibited. As for the title, Colonial literatures, it talks about a shared thread amongst the earlier colonies, and also provides a theoretical direction. Regardless, to the territories that had gained their independence via hard struggle, such terminology offered unpleasant political connotations. Therefore, Post-colonial literature seems to be the best choice. It encompasses two things. One is historical reality. The other is the relationship that has been responsible for unearthing the psychological and creative prompts leading to good writing. The term does not create the impression that literature should be limited only to publications in the English language. The term does not indicate that the discussion pertains only to publications in English. It also refers to the fact that the members of the group have had links to a common past. Similarly, it points towards a future vision, which is more positive and liberated. Viewed practically, the definition of post-colonial is more extensive in comparison to that of the term, Commonwealth. In other words, post-colonial has a link to the new publications in English in that it encompasses non-English-speaking nations too. Thus, the combined grouping may 52 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

include the English publications of the USA and The Philippines that are authored by the Whites, as well as those authored by the Whites and Blacks in South Africa, and the Maori tribes in New Zealand. Regardless of all the arguments, post-colonial publications seem to be the best choice. It grants a direction to the potential study of the impact of colonialism over various issues. One of them is writing in English. The second is the differences that show up while expressing thoughts in English, and while expressing thoughts in indigenous languages (in Indian and African contexts, for example). The third refers to writings in the context of diverse language diasporas, such as Portuguese, French, and Spanish. It would also be good to explore the writings of Irish authors in light of contemporary ideas about post-colonialism. This should serve to bring to the fore new knowledge about the literary tradition existing in Great Britain. It might also permit the emergence of new terms. For instance, Dorsinville came up with a novel term – post-European – while comparing the publications of the Black diaspora and Quebec. Of course, this term has not come into extensive usage in the field’s critical accounts. However, the term has theoretical and political implications, which have much to offer. Several comparative models related to post-colonial publications have been developed. An early and influential example, proposed by D.E.S. Maxwell (1965), concentrated on the disjunction between place and language. Place and displacement, as the introduction has suggested, are major concerns of all the post-colonial communities and Maxwell’s model for examining their literatures focused on this characteristic, questioning the ‘appropriateness’ of an imported language to express thoughts about interactions with ‘place’ in post-colonial societies. Maxwell observed the similarity between these societies in their use of a non- indigenous language for reducing the differences, which was always to some extent ‘alien’ to that place. He identified the settler colonies and the invaded colonies. The settler colonies were New Zealand, USA, Australia, and Canada. Here, the European colonists were responsible for taking control of the indigenous populations. They dispossessed them, thereby establishing a politically-independent, transplanted civilisation. The colonists even popularised a non-indigenous language. They had no ancestral connection with the land. The people residing in these colonies handled their displacement by clinging to a certain belief, without questioning it. They believed that the imported language was adequate to get by. There could be no overlooking of any kind of mistranslation. If anything was wrong, it was the season or the land. However, writers, who arrived in various ways to these regions, never failed to wonder at the appropriateness of a connection between place and imported language. 53 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Maxwell’s theory suggests that in the case of invaded societies like those in India or Nigeria, where indigenous peoples were colonised on their own territories, writers were not forced to adapt to a different landscape and climate. They could offer their own sophisticated, albeit ancient responses. Additionally, these responses had undergone marginalisation via the global viewpoint. This was implied through the acquisition of the English language. Maybe, English was a substitute for the author’s native tongue. Maybe, English was simply an alternative medium of communication, which reached out to a wider audience. Whatever was the case, the usage of English resulted in a disjunction between the communication about, and the comprehension of, the global environment. For Maxwell, wherever post-colonial writers originated, they shared certain outstanding features which distinguished their efforts from the indigenous literary tradition of England: There are two broad categories. The first category comprises of the writer bringing his own tongue – English – to an alien environment, and a fresh set of experiences: Australia, Canada, New Zealand. The other category comprises of the writer introducing a foreign language, such as English, into his/her native inheritance. This introduction takes place, both culturally and socially: West Africa and India. Nonetheless, there is a fundamental bonding between both categories. . . . [The] ‘intolerable struggle with verbalisations and their respective meanings’ suggests the desire to discard the experience in favour of the language, the unusual life to the foreign tongue. Indigenous populations that have not undergone colonisation cannot avail of the type of double vision that is the outcome of Maxwell’s analysis of post-colonialism. This vision is one in which identity is constituted by difference; intimately bound up in love or hate (or both) with a metropolis which exercises its hegemony over the immediate cultural world of the post-colonial. There are two major limitations to this model: first, it is rather incomprehensive in that it does not consider the case of South Africa or the West Indies, which are exceptional in several important respects; second, its lack of linguistic subtlety risks encouraging a simplistic and essentialist view of the link between place and language. The events that occurred in the West Indies are an illustration of the first point. Within a century of the invasion by Europeans, there was virtual extermination of Caribs and Arawaks, the indigenous populations of the West Indies. As a result, the contemporary populace underwent displacement, or rather an exile.These people were from the Middle East, India, Europe, Africa, and China – an entire population. Admittedly, the scenario in the West Indies is an example of the immense destruction and violence caused by colonialism. All West Indians have suffered displacement, similar to the populations that had resided in settler colonies. Yet this displacement includes for native Africans, the violence of enslavement, and for many others 54 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

(Indian and Chinese) the only slightly less violent disruption of slavery’s ‘legal’ successor, the nineteenth-century system of indentured labour. As in African nations and India, the dominant imperial language and culture were privileged over the peoples’ traditions. Deluding themselves into believing that they had a fililative connection with the predominant culture, could help Settler colonies to survive. In contrast, the colonies that had suffered exploitation and intervention, depended upon the coexistence of pre-colonial and traditional cultures with new imperial forms, to survive. However, the scenario is different on the West Indies islands. Whilst individual racial groups continued to maintain fragments of pre- colonial cultures brought from their original societies and whilst these remain connected to the complex reality of contemporary West Indian life (e.g., the many African features in contemporary West Indian culture) the actions of maintaining continuity or of ‘decolonizing’ the culture are much more obviously problematic. In part, the reason is the cascade of disruption brought about by imperialism was not only more violent but also more self- consciously disruptive and divisive. English displayed a greater taint via its historical, cutting the ground policy in the region of the Caribbean Islands, where slaves were deliberately separated from other members speaking their native language, and, to minimise the potential event of rebellion, forced to talk in the tongue that plantation owners used. For the slaves, then, this signified an imported language aimed to divide, thereby facilitating exploitation. Maxwell’s list of settler colonies did not include South Africa. Regardless, white South African literature has clear affinities with those of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. However, Black South African literature might more fruitfully be compared with the literature of other African countries. But the racist politics of South African apartheid creates a political vortex into which a major part of the literature of the area, both White and Black, is drawn. The common themes of the settler colonies’ literatures – exile, the issue of finding and defining ‘home’, physical and emotional confrontations with the ‘new’ land and its ancient and established meanings – are still present in literature by white South Africans but are muted by an immediate involvement in race politics. Pervasive concerns of Nigerian or Kenyan writing, dispossession, cultural fragmentation, colonial and neo-colonial domination, post-colonial corruption and the crisis of identity still emerge in writing by Black South Africans, but again are necessarily less prominent than more specific and immediate matters pertaining to race, as well as personal and communal freedom under an intransigent and repressive white regime. As to the second point, although Maxwell’s formulation goes a considerable way towards identifying the scope and unity of post-colonial publications, it could be viewed as encouraging an assumption that a native tongue may somehow be inherently inappropriate for use elsewhere. This insinuates that there is an essentialism present. If this essentialism moves 55 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

towards its logical end, it will give rise to the thought that post-colonial publications in English do not exist at all. Thematic Parallels Critics of post-colonialism have discovered several thematic parallels pertaining to the diverse literatures in English. For instance, a theme, such as the celebration of the struggle towards independence in community and individual emerges in novels as different from one another, as Rao’s Kanthapura (India), Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (Kenya), and Reid’s New Day (Jamaica); the central idea of the dominating influence of an alien culture over the traditions and lifestyle of contemporary post-colonial societies is present in works as diverse in origin and style as Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (Nigeria), Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (Barbados), and the poems of Honi Tuwhare (New Zealand). Other themes with a powerful metonymic force have also been viewed as coming to the fore. For example, post-colonial regions have witnessed the construction or destruction of buildings/houses on a recurrent scale. This evocative figure suggests an issue with highlighting post-colonial identity in the texts offered by vastly varied communities, as in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (Trinidad), Sinclair Ross’s as For Me and My House (Canada), Santha Rama Rao’s Remember the House (India), Janet Frame’s Living in the Manototo (New Zealand), and Peter Carey’s Bliss (Australia). Or the theme of the journey of the European interloper through unfamiliar landscape with a native guide is a feature of texts as wide-ranging as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (Guyana), Patrick White’s Voss (Australia), and Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King (Guinea). Similarities across the different post-colonial literatures are not restricted to thematic parallels. As recent critics have noted they extend to assertions that certain aspects, such as a distinctive use of allegory, irony, magic realism and discontinuous narratives are characteristic of publications related to post-colonialism. In W.H. New’s Among Worlds (1975), a book on thematic parallels, which mark the literary contemporaneity of each commonwealth culture . . . and the manner in which writers have used their culture’s preoccupations to construct separate and multiple worlds’, the author makes a very interesting claim for a predominant ironic mode in post-colonial texts where ‘time, place and community . . . lead towards comparable attitudes and constricting dilemmas’ The prevalence of irony (and the emergence of a species of allegory observable across the various cultures) emphasizes the necessity of the language–place disjunction in the construction of post- colonial realities. New’s book emphasises the comparative nature of this experience too, finding ‘recurrent structural patterns in each literature’ which ‘offer a direction towards the underlying cultural 56 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

sensibilities’. Significantly, ‘the degree to which they overlap provides . . . a guard against easy cutting-the-ground assertions about national distinctiveness in literature’. A recurrent structural pattern that New elucidates is about the term, exile, which had already been explored by Matthews (1962) and later by Gurr (1981). Ngugi (1972) and Griffiths (1978) also deal with exile, focusing on African literatures, the Black diaspora, and Caribbean, in general. The existence of these shared themes and recurrent structural and formal patterns is no accident. They emphasise upon the existence of a common historical and psychic environment, despite the presence of differences that helped to separate one post-colonial community from another. To illustrate, the theme of exile is in some sense present in all such writing, as it is a manifestation of the ubiquitous disquiet regarding displacement and place in such communities, and the complex material circumstances implicit in the transportation of language from its original location and its imposed and imposing relationship on and with the new place. As a result, accounts of comparative features in post-colonial publications are bound to tackle the more important issues of how these literatures bear the imprint of the material forces of politics, economics, and culture which act upon them within the imperial framework, and of how this connects with the re-placing of the imposed language within the framework of a fresh cultural and geographical context. Another major post-colonial approach, derived from the discussions of political theorists like Frantz Fanon (1959, 1961, 1967) and Albert Memmi (1965), locates its principal characteristic in the image of the imperial–colonial dialectic itself. In this model the act of writing texts of any kind in post-colonial areas is subject to the political, imaginative, and social control involved in the relationship between coloniser and colonised. This relationship posits important questions; for example, the potential act of ‘decolonizing’ the culture. Quite a few extremely vigorous debates in post-colonial societies have centred on exactly what such ‘decolonisation’ implies and the manner in which it should be achieved. Some critics have stressed the need vigorously to recuperate cultures and languages in existence prior to colonialization. For the most resolute of these critics, colonisation is only 28 The Empire Writes Back a passing historical feature which can be left behind entirely when ‘full independence’ of political and cultural organisation is achieved. According to Williams (1969), other people have emphatically suggested that this is impossible. They have also argued that cultural syncretistic goes hand-in-hand with post-colonial communities. These communities thrive on this valuable and inescapable characteristic. In fact, it is the origin of their specific strength. In African countries, as well as in India, that is in post-colonial countries where viable alternatives to English continue to exist, an appeal for moving back towards writing 57 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

exclusively, or mainly in the pre-colonial languages, was found to be a recurring feature of calls for decolonisation. Politically attractive as this is, it has proved problematic by those who insist on the syncretic nature of post-colonial communities. Syncretistic critics argue that even a Bengali or Gikuyu novel is inevitably a cross-cultural hybrid, and that decolonizing projects must recognize this. Avoiding this is to confuse decolonisation with the reconstitution of pre-colonial reality. Nevertheless, especially in India, where the majority of publications show up in indigenous Indian languages, the relationship between writing in those languages and the much less extensive communication in English has made such a project a powerful element in postcolonial self-assertion, that the same situation may become increasingly become true in African countries. In settler colonies, where decolonizing projects underlay the drive to establish national cultures, the issue of language at first seemed a less radical one. The observation that the language seemed to sit uncomfortably with the local ‘reality’ was perceived as a minor irritant that would be solved at the right moment, and, in any case, there was no other available language (though movements like the Jindyworobak in Australia which turned to Aboriginal culture and tongue for an ‘authentic’ inspiration in creating a ‘native’ voice suggested directions such a search might take). Nevertheless, as later critics have perceived, this position, too, glossed over major problems of tongue and ‘authenticity’. This debate between theories relating to cultural recuperation before colonialism and theories which suggest that post-colonial syncretistic is both inevitable and fruitful emerges in quite a few places. For example, it emerged in Africa, in the famous debate between Wole Soyinka (Nigerian writer) and the so-called ‘troika’ of Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike which raised important questions intent on cutting the ground, about national or group exclusivism and the futility of avoiding syncretism (particularly in the fusion of cultures which is implied in the usage of English). These questions are also implicit in Caribbean publications in the perspectives exemplified by Edward Brathwaite’s early writing, as well as Derek Walcott’s and Wilson Harris’s writings later on. Brathwaite and Chinweizu regard moving back to African roots as crucial to contemporary West Indian and Nigerian identity: Soyinka and Harris espouse a cultural syncretism which, while not denying ancestral affiliations, sees Afro-Caribbean destiny as inescapably enmeshed in a contemporary, multi-cultural reality. These clashes have succeeded in isolating certain highly important theoretical problems in post-colonial criticism. A different viewpoint suggests that the input from European structuralist, post-structuralist, and Marxist criticism has been significant in giving clarity regarding the link between the coloniser and the colonised. A stress on the pre-eminence of textuality has application to the imperial-colonial literary encounter, and structuralists like Tzvetan Todorov and discourse 58 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

analysts like Edward Said have been important in elucidating the dialectical encounters between Europe and the Other. Feminist viewpoints have begun to acquire higher importance with regard to criticism about post-colonialism. In fact, the current post-colonial theory and the current feminist strategies have begun to overlap. They have even managed to keep each other informed. Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Margaret Atwood have all drawn an analogy between the relationships of men and women, and the relationship existing between the colony and the imperial power, while critics like Gayatri Spivak have articulated the relationship between feminism, the discussion on post-coloniality, and post-structuralism. A comparative approach closely related to that based on the confrontation between coloniser and colonised is that, wherein Max Dorsinville (1974, 1983) emphasises the connection between the subdued and authoritarian communities. Dorsinville explores this distinction in his studies of the literary and social relations of oppressor and oppressed communities in French Africa, Quebec, the Caribbean and Black America. Clearly, by dispensing with the special historical relationship produced by colonialism, and by laying emphasis on the essentiality of domination politics, this model can embrace a much wider hierarchy of oppression. While Dorsinville is not specifically concerned with post-colonial societies, his approach can easily be adapted to cover them. Cultural change, both within communities and between communities, can be neatly accounted for by this hierarchy. In this respect, Dorsinville’s model can be used to extend Maxwell’s .For example, one might explain changes in theme, emphasis, and design in American writings belonging to the 19th century, and moving towards those in the 20th century on the foundation of a relative change in international importance as the USA moves from a dominated to a dominating position, giving its literature greater affinities with those of Europe in alignment with its power to produce ‘canonical’ texts and to influence other literatures. Dorsinville’s model also accounts for the productions of cultural and literary minorities within one country or area, and accounts for conflicting postures of the authoritarian society which might itself be subtly dominated by another power. In Australia, for instance, an excellent instance of dominated writings is Aboriginal writing. In contrast, the writings of White Australians display the characteristics of a dominating society. Yet white Australian literature is dominated in its turn by a relationship with Britain and English literature. An observation of the contradictions which emerge in such situations, and an observation of the reflection of changes through time of imperial–colonial status within, say, the American or British traditions, would be a fascinating one. 59 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

A model such as Dorsinville’s also makes less problematical the standing of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish literatures in comparison to that of the English ‘mainstream’. While one may comment that these societies were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the cutting the ground British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonised peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial. Dorsinville came up with the dominated-dominating model. It lays emphasis on imposition in two ways – cultural and linguistic. The model also permits an interpretation. The interpretation suggests that the history of British literature was a process, wherein a hierarchical interchange took place. The interchange focussed on external and internal group interactions. Dominated publications tend to move towards subversion. It is a notable characteristic. An observation of the subversive strategies that post-colonial publishers employed, would reveal two things. One was the configurations of authoritarianism. Another would be the innovative and imaginative responses to the first condition. According to Salman Rushdie, The Empire Writes Back approaches the imperial centre, both indirectly and directly. First, it does so via national assertion, suggesting that it is both, self-determining and central-determining. Second, it goes in for radical questioning of the foundations of British and European metaphysics. This way, the publication offers a challenge to the world view, which is capable of polarising both, periphery and centre in the first place. It follows, therefore, that specific terminologies, such as ruled and ruler, governed and governor, and polarity, have to confront challenges. It is the essential manner of creating order in reality. Authors like Margaret Atwood, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Patrick White, J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Wilson Harris have undertaken re-writing of specific publications from the English canon. The idea was to present a restructuring of realities related to Europe, in post- colonial terminology. They did this by questioning the philosophical hypotheses that formed the basis of the order, and not by presenting a reversal of the hierarchical order. Models of Syncreticity and Hybridity While the theory on post-colonial literature has drawn on European theoretical systems it has done so cautiously and eclectically. Alterity implies alteration. It is not possible for any European theory to be perfect for diverse cultural situations unless it itself undergoes some kind of radical rethinking. This radical rethinking refers to another discourse taking over. Whenever Homi Bhabha (a critic), Wilson Harris (writer), or Edward Brathwaite (writer) outline theories, they take note of what post-colonial communities are like. They also observe what kinds of hybridisation, the diverse cultures of these communities have produced. European thought processes incline towards the past, history, and ancestry. These elements come together as a tremendous point of reference for epistemology. Regardless, Les Murray (1969), the poet from Australia feels that time expands into space in the post-colonial mindset. Several publications strove to disturb the European thought processes about history, 60 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and about time order. They include Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie - 1981), All About H. Hatter (G. V. Desani, 1948), Wilson Harris’ novels, and Such is Life (Joseph Furphy – 1903). There were many others too. For instance, In Theatre (Leichhardt - 1952), Eyre All Alone (Francis Webb – 1961), and Voss (Patrick White – 1957) ran European history into the ground through an overwhelming and novel space. This space annihilated imperial purpose and time. The first two publications are sequences in poem format, while the last is a novel. Whenever history is received from elsewhere, rebel writers tamper with the content. They rewrite it and realign it in accordance with the viewpoints of the victims who have witnessed the destructive progress of history. This is evident in Kanthapura (Raja Rao – 1938), The Temptations of Big Bear (Rudy Weibe – 1973), and New Day (V. S. Reid – 1949). All these authors have ensured that history’s perspective emphasises colonists as the ‘other’. According to Homi Bhabha, there has been complicity between history, the realist mimetic perusals of literatures, and the narrative mode. He cites A House for Mr. Biswas (V. S. Naipaul) as an illustration for emphasising the dangerous effects of perusing post-colonial literatures in a certain way. For instance, the historically and socially mimetic encourage themselves to absorb English traditions once more. In turn, this leads to domestication of radicalism. These readers tend to avoid giving serious thought to the colonial disturbances that subtly affect the English ‘surface’ of these literatures. Derek Walcott, the poet from St. Lucia, is the author of The Muse of History. This essay gets into an analysis of why and how the writers from the West Indies seem obsessed with the destructive outcomes of the historical past. He requests them to come out of the self-created prison of eternal recriminations. He urges them to enter a world without history, such that they may launch a fresh start in life. Here, there could be a refreshing ‘Adamic’ titling of place. This would serve to provide writers with an indefinite supply of raw materials, as well as the possibility of encountering a naïve and new vision. E. K. Braithwaite is a historian and a poet from the West Indies. He offers a model that resolves two issues. One, it emphasises the importance of awarding the African connection a greater privilege than to the European one. Secondly, it highlights the syncretic and multicultural personality of the West Indian reality. Similarly, Wilson Harris, the critic and novelist from Guyana has his own viewpoints to offer, He echoes the same thought as others that it was high time that cultures moved away from history’s damaging dialectic. It is possible to do this if writers used their imagination well. According to Harris, the oppressed populations should seek refuge in imagination. It is the only way to escape the horrors of the past. It had been adopted in Ancient times too. Imaginative mindsets could also aid in setting up a spectacular avoidance of the politics related to subjugation and dominance. He uses Anancy, the spider man as an example for demonstrating this process. Anancy is a folk character, well-known to Akan folklore. He has the capacity to change his form at will 61 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

anywhere. He does so, when moved to a West Indian stage. Harris views Anancy as the inspiration for creating a Middle Passage between Africa and the Caribbean. This was a notorious pathway for enabling slaves to move from the enslaved nation to the free one. Anancy is a trickster personality. He is similar to the limbo pathway of the Middle Passage. He provides a psychic space, which is narrow, yet capable of permitting a radical changeover to take place. Thus, Harris deliberately tries to adopt a novel language, and a unique way of viewing the world, by creating a mixture of various cultures within his own work. These cultures come from the past, exist in the present, and will be seen in the future. He also includes the colonial and imperial cultures too. His opinion does not take into consideration the seemingly inescapable polarities related to language. Instead, it utilises the damaging energies that comprise European culture to serve a future society, wherein individual/group perceptions no longer depend upon the concepts of categorisation and division. Harris suggests ways for utilising the philosophy mentioned in Womb of Space, for radical perusal of literatures. His work was published in 1983. Similar to Jameson, Harris has the capacity to bring to the fore the creative multicultural ideas that exist below the antagonism visible on the surface structures of any kind of literature. Harris debates that post-colonial literatures may appear to tackle the divisions created by culture and race, on the surface. These divisions seem to be inflexible, as determined by stubborn mindsets. However, every publication possesses the seeds of society/community. As these seeds germinate, they take root in the minds of readers too. Once settled in, they crack open the seemingly inescapable dialectic connected to history. Harris articulates that hybridity is eternally struggling to set itself free from the past and enter the present. The past had harped on ancestry and granted greater importance to ‘pure’ rather than to ‘composite’, its fearful opposite. Hybridity ensures that spatial plurality takes over the place of a temporal linearity. The encounter between time and space is a complicated one within the framework of historiography and literary theory. The complication is more when there is an accompanying confrontation between the hybrid and the pure. These complications come through clearly via the contradictions that show up in the Canadian scenario. The mosaic model has always been a vital determinant of culture in Canada. While striving to break away from the domination of the Europeans, the Canadian literary postulate has managed to cling on to a nationalist attitude. While doing this, Canadians put forward the argument that the mosaic model is typically Canadian in nature, unlike the American melting pot. There has been nothing to take the place of the nationalist viewpoint, despite the internal feeling of a mosaic being present. There has been no generation of corresponding postulations regarding literary variegations. Canadian writings are examples of mosaic, according to internal perception. However, they tend to incline towards the monolithic, 62 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

asserting that Canadian literatures are distinct from canonical British literature. They are supposed to be different from the neo-colonialism that seems so much a part of American culture and so threatening in appearance. Canadian literature has even tried to obtain external recognition, as an alternative. Towards this end, it has moved away from the dynamics of variance, and adopted the stance of neo-universalist internationalist. This literature is acutely aware of the complexities of culture. Therefore, it could have created a climate, wherein cross-cultural/cross-national comparative research would have proved advantageous. However, it appears as if not much work of this type has been performed. The post-colonial postulate displays itself in the form of literatures. These writings strive to tackle issues, such as the present emerging from the past, creating space from time, and attempting to build a future (many of the current post-colonial writings focus on this point). However, what exactly is a post-colonial world like? It comprises of damaging encounters amongst cultures converting into accepting of distinctions without bringing the concept of equality into question. The cultural historians and literary theorists agree that the period of conquering and annihilating may be ending. This possible termination may be attributed to cross-culturists. Thus far, the colonists had perpetuated their actions by justifying a myth. This myth suggested that the colonists were trying to purify populations. However, this very myth would become the foundation for the creative stabilisation of the post-colonial world. The criticisms proffered by the Blacks and nationalists have sufficed to clarify the confusions surrounding the enforcing of authority and the continuing existence of hegemony. However, they have not managed to discover a method to avoid the philosophical and historical impasse. In contrast to these models, current approaches to this issue have discovered the secret of the power surrounding the post-colonial theory. The theory may be deriving its strength from its intrinsic comparative methodology. The source of its strength could also be attributed to the syncretic and hybridised observation of the contemporary world, which the methodology implies. This kind of observation offers a special framework. The framework suggests that there is a difference, albeit on equal terms. Therefore, it becomes possible to fruitfully explore the multi-cultural postulates functioning both, within communities, and between them. Diverse models come into play during discussions about the traditions and texts highlighted by post-colonial literatures. These models cut across one another at diverse points. Nonetheless, all the models grant great importance to place. Even epistemologies that have come into existence over the years, feel that space deserves more attention than time. They liken space to the greatest ordering conviction of reality. Similarly, there is the reversal of poles, such as ruler-ruled, governor-governed, etc. The world does recognise that the concept of dominance serves as the main regulator of human communities. Regardless, it continues to challenge this dominance. Language also offers value, as well as localises, in response to the 63 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

cutting-the-ground English norm. Eventually, it disturbs the definition of norm itself. It refuses to accept the idea of hegemony as the centre of norm’s existence. Above all, it becomes clear that cultures connected with post-colonialism cannot nurture monolithic perceptions. The reason may be attributed to the historical differences between a colony and a metropolis , which has led to double vision. 2.3 SUMMARY  The growing spurt of English literature may be attributed to the experiences of the colonised, as well as the challenges offered by the post-colonial world.  These literatures are distinctly powerful and diverse. They have encouraged diverse cultures to express their thoughts through writing, in the post-colonial scenario. These diverse cultures include Canada, Australia, India, and the West Indies. The writings have issued challenges to both, the prevailing and dominant thoughts regarding culture and literature, and the traditional canon ideology about the same.  The progress of post-colonial writings has gone through several phases. Parallel to this growth, has been the development of regional/national consciousness, also in stages. Then again, there has been the project of claiming differences from the colonial regime.  Imperialism is the initial stage, wherein the literatures echoed the language of the colonial rulers. It is because literate elites authored them, granting the impression that the writings were representatives of the power at the centre.  Some authors were sightseers and travels. Examples are The Travel Diaries (Mary Kingsley), and The English in the West Indies, and Oceana (Froude). Others were gentrified settlers, such as Wentworth, who wrote Australia. There were volumes of memoirs too, as indicated by the literatures presented by boxwallahs and their memsahibs, administrators from West Africa and the Anglo-Indian communities, and soldiers.  This stage emphasises the importance of the term, home, as against ‘native’. It also grants greater importance to ‘metropolitan’, instead of to ‘colonial’ or ‘provincial’. Suffice to say that these writers use many other terms similar to the ones mentioned above. They focus on narratives and descriptions about culture, landscape, and language of a select region.  Then, it is time for the second stage to appear. Here, the literatures that came to the fore, were accompanied by the imperial license, as Ashcroft et al. declared. These licensed publications were from the pens of the natives. There were also literatures that were authored by the ‘outcasts’. These authors were from the African missionaries or from the upper-class and English-educated Indians. Nonetheless, within the British-ruled colonies themselves, the colonists still retained control of the 64 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

establishment of ‘Literature’. They would not permit writers to express their thoughts against the imperial establishment.  An example is James Tucker’s novel, Ralph Rashleigh. Thereafter, four models came into being during the post-colonial period. They suffice to peruse diverse literatures.  The regional/national models come under the umbrella of the first post-colonial model. They concentrate upon the specific aspects of the concerned regional/national culture. The second post-colonial model is focussed on race. Here, it picks out specific shared features across diverse national writings. One such feature is the Black Writing model, which points towards the writings from the African diaspora. These writings believe in a common racial inheritance.  The third model comprises of comparative models. These models display diverse complexities, since they are keen to explore and explain specific cultural, linguistic, and historical aspects across a couple or more of post-colonial writings. The fourth model also comprises of comparative models. It is quite comprehensive. Here, the comparative models provide debates regarding syncreticity and hybridity. These organised elements are ingredients of all types of post-colonial writings.  Nationalism is a key theme in plenty of post-colonial writings, proving that people are highly engrossed with it. The dictionary defines nationalism in several ways. One definition suggests that it is devoting self to the culture or interests of the concerned country. Another suggests that it is all about natives holding the belief that their respective countries may benefit by behaving independently. Nations should not go in for collective action that focuses upon national goals and discards international goals. A third definition suggests that nationalism refers to the dream of national independence that a country facing foreign rule, faces.  According to Benedict Anderson, ‘nation’ stands for sovereign, imagined, and limited societies. In other words, there is a difference between an imagined society and an actual one. An imagined community cannot be, or is not, founded on the everyday one-to-one encounters between the members of the community.  According to Anderson, a nation refers to an idea, albeit a small one, that people residing in a geographically limited region share. Nonetheless, the limitation of the area does not prevent the impact that it has upon the sovereignty of the natives, and upon the greater area. Even a small area is powerful. The concept of ‘nation’ acquires more clarity as the region begins to rid itself of traditional monarchies, diversity in languages, and religious authority.  It is not possible for even the tiniest country in the world to become an actual community. Therefore, a nation is an imagined community. It is because no resident will be able to know or meet every single fellow member of his/her country. It is not possible for an individual to hear of every single person living in his/her country 65 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

either. Regardless, every native carries the image of a communion in his/her mind. This is because, despite the very real presence of exploitation and inequality that persists in every country, the citizens feel bound together by a horizontal and deep comradeship. They belong to one nation.  It is not possible for any member of the vast community to know the others personally. Regardless, members may come together due to possessing common interests, or even as belonging to a certain region of the nation. Anderson felt that print capitalism was the contributing factor for the emergence of imagined societies.  Media and books began appearing in vernacular languages when capitalist entrepreneurs took control. They avoided the usage of high-class languages for their writings. An example is Latin. This ensured that their publications reached a larger audience. It also enabled readers, well-versed in local dialects, to communicate with each other. Since they spoke a common language, it became possible for readers to engaged in common discussions too. Anderson suggests that national print languages were responsible for the creation of the original European nation-states. 2.4 KEYWORDS  Postcolonial Spaces: Any space that has a direct/indirect contact with colonisation and its lasting effects.  Postcolonial Literature: Any writing that tackles the topic of colonisation and its aftermath, may it be physical or psychological.  Critical Models: When an awareness about the special aspects of post-colonial writings became evident amongst authors and critics, it left them with the feeling that they should construct an appropriate ‘model’ to explain them.  Nation: An ‘imagined’ space sharing collective ideas.  Black writing model: Literatures addressing the African diaspora’s common racial inheritance. 2.5 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. The complex ideas of nation can be analysed better if Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Indian critic Partha Chatterjee’s Whose Imagined Communities? Are read In comparison ………………………………………………………………….………………………… ……………………………………………………………….….……………………….. 2. An analysis of Journey to Ithaca by Anita Desai could be key to understanding a more contemporary aspect of post-colonial communities and the biased mindsets of the West. 66 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

……………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2.6 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Give a brief glimpse of the main theme of the literature, The Empire Writes Back. 2. Give examples of a few postcolonial writers. 3. What can you say about the various postcolonial spaces elucidated in the unit? 4. What role does language play in the theory related to post-colonialism? 5. Briefly explain the idea of Negritude. Long Questions 1. Give a detailed explanation about the model used by Black writers. 2. How does the colonial experience in each colony differ? Elaborate with examples. 3. Outline some of the major concerns addressed by postcolonial authors, 4. Explain in detail about the wider comparative model. 5. Why do you believe that charting out models for understanding the postcolonial experience is important? B.Multiple Choice Questions 1. Which author has talked about ‘self-apprehension’? a. Chinua Achebe b. V S Naipaul c. Wole Soyinka d. Gareth Griffith 2. In which country is Patrick White’s novel Voss situated? a. Australia b. Canada c. Nigeria d. England 3. In which model does ‘negritude’ appear? a. Black writing model b. Wider comparative model c. Hybrid Model 67 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

d. Regional model 4. Who is the author of A House for Mr. Biswas? a. Raja Rao b. Mulk Raj Anand c. V. S. Naipaul d. Gayatri Spivak 5. Who is the author of Midnight’s Children? a. Salman Rushdie b. James Tucker c. E K Braithwaite d. Chimamanda Adiche Answers 1-(c), 2-(a), 3-(d), 4-(b), 5-(c) 2.7 REFERENCES Textbook  Ashcroft et al,(2002) The Empire Writes Back. Routledge, Oxon.  Memmi, Albert (1965) The Coloniser and the Colonised. New York: Orion Press  Jones, Joseph (1976) Radical Cousins: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Writers. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.  Holst-Petersen, K. and Rutherford A. (1976) Enigma of Values: an Introduction to Wilson Harris. Aarhus: Dangaroo.  Holst-Petersen, K. and Rutherford, A. (eds.) (1985) A Double Colonization: Colonial & Post-Colonial Women’s Writing. Aarhus: Dangaroo. References  Harris, Wilson (1970) History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. Georgetown, Guyana: National History and Arts Council and Ministry of Information.  Gurr, Andrew and Calder, Angus (eds) (1974) Writers in East Africa. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.  Frame, Janet (1962) The Edge Of The Alphabet. New York: Braziller.  Frey, Charles (1979) ‘ “The Tempest” and the New World’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 30, 1 (Winter). 68 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Findley, Timothy (1984) Not Wanted on the Voyage. Markham, Ontario: Penguin Websites  http://postcolonialweb.org/  https://literariness.org/  https://www.academia.edu/ 69 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 3: ASHCROFT, BILL, ET AL., “RETHINKING THE POST-COLONIAL: POST-COLONIALISM IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY” IN THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN POST- COLONIAL LITERATURES Structure 3.0 Learning Objectives 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Post-colonial Identity 3.3 Theoretical Issues 3.4 Post-Colonial Futures 3.5 Summary 3.6 Keywords 3.7 Learning Activity 3.7 Unit end Questions 3.8 References 3.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, student will be able to:  Identifypostcolonial theory developments.  Employ the understanding of postcolonial theory during modern times.  Appraise about the postcolonial theory’s new formations. 3.1 INTRODUCTION Since the publication of the first edition of The Empire Writes Back in 1989, theory about post-colonialism has proven to be most diverse and contentious cultural and literary fields. ‘Postcolonialism’ has referred to many items and to embrace a string of critical practices. 70 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Many different post-/postcolonialisms, with different, and sometimes contesting interests, have characterized themselves as post-/postcolonial studies these periods. Edward Said’s analysis of imperial culture remains de rigeur, and the colonial discourse theory of Bhabha and Spivak has continued to attract a considerable following. But an increasingly diverse array of interests and approaches, and a growing number of theoretical concerns have come to characterize the field. Also, many subjects like politics, sociology, anthropology and even economics have accepted the ideal of post-colonialism and its concerns. We are actually in extinction for intellectual history and correct provenance. No positivity or accepting the concept. Many learning effect on imperial discourse on local cultures have been influenced by the momentum of learning of post-colonialism but would not consider themselves post-colonial and might even see as actively opposed to what they perceive to be its main thrust and methodology. Most contentious among the various term is ‘post-colonial’ by itself. The Empire Writes Back uses the term ‘post-colonial’ to refer to “all the culture affected by the imperial process from time of colonization till date”. These broad definition has been opposed by those who believe it necessary to limit the term either by selecting only certain periods as genuinely post-colonial (most notably after the independence), or by suggesting that some groups of peoples affected by the colonizing process are not post-colonial (notably settlers). Finally, it also suggest that some societies are not yet post-colonial, that is, free of the colonization attitudes. The best instance for the latter addressed argument is people belong to settler societies. Some arguments about the learning post-colonialism are to assist the total and absolute decolonization of societies in psychological and political terms, involving massive and powerful recuperations of the pre-colonial cultures. Others argument, with equal passion, is that any society can never stay free entirely of such effects and that contemporary forces such as globalization are the proof for continuing control of the “West” over the “Rest.” This debate over the term has become striking one among the many and most baffling characteristics of the ever-increasing field’s popularity. In what other field do its exponents earn their place in it by fervently criticizing against the field itself? Yet this has become the results of its pluralism and the apparent inability of the ‘post’ to separate itself from chronology or from spatial boundaries. Even though the definition for post-colonial is refined one, it actually refers to cultural production in a way of engaging with real colonial power (which includes the newer form of manifestations). ‘Post-colonial’ is employed in a best way and was in first edition which refers to post-colonization. In this process, many colonized societies will engage over a time using different engagement modes and various phases with colonizing power, during and after the actual period of direct colonial rule. It refers to social as well cultural production 71 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

post-independence, it also insist on pre-occupation continuity during colonial time to post- independence period. It draws more attention for which independence in itself did not eradicate the influence of the colonizing powers. It insists on power of Kwame Nkrumah called ‘neo-colonialism’ (1962). This definition also meant that post-colonialism neglect the acknowledgement which the colonized can ever free from colonial influences. It is true since it never discards the history in any way but transforms it to many ways and recuperation as well re-acknowledgment of pre-colonial is belongs to such a transformation. In fact, as many commentators have shown over the last decade, colonizers never eradicated the pre-colonial culture. It remained vigorous and persistent throughout the colonial period, though often unacknowledged or denigrated by the colonizing forces. Indeed, large areas of colonized countries escaped the effects which are direct impact of colonialism entirely. Nevertheless, despite this persistence of pre-colonial cultures, the societies on which colonialism acted could not hope to remain entirely unchanged using pressure of imperial ideology. In analysing the issues of chronological definition which draw attention to these debates, Anne McClintock has suggested that the term is “haunted by the very figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle. Incidentally, post-colonialism has put a mark in the pages of history as epochal way of ‘pre-colonial’ to re-thinking the post-colonial,then to ‘the colonial’ and furtherto stage of ‘the postcolonial’ which is an unbidden commitment to linear shape of time and its idea of development”. In this view, in ‘post-colonialism’ is doomed perpetually to being satisfied with linearity spectra and with teleological development which wants to contest. But the alternative view which suggests that despite being the state of disable, this type of instability may have given vibrancy, plasticity and energy which become part of its strength. Another characteristic objection to the term post-colonial is made by Shohat and Stamm who claim that: “Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term ‘postcolonial,’ postcolonial theory has curiously failed to address the politics of location of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself”. This objection arrives from exclusive focus, apparent in many ‘Introductions’ to the field, upon those metropolitan-based exponents like Said, Bhabha and Spivak who gained higher focus in this high theory rarefied. That post-colonial discourse which formed the greatest transformative energy stems from material grounding and colonial experience. Among the many, one debate which mainly focused by post-colonial critics in these years is the ‘post-coloniality’ of the main theorists lies in this field. In its narrowest form it is a misguided assumption about the “authentic” post-colonial subject but has formed to a more pressing set of questions. Arif Dirlik, for example, wants to know who might be called post- colonial intellectuals. His suggestion is that “Postcolonial intellectuals are truly the creators of postcolonial discourse,” but then asks, “Who really are postcolonial intellectuals?” Dirlik’s problem making, because, in statements preceding this, he presented himself to think that 72 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

different post-colonial definitions disable any clear understanding of ‘post-colonial’ intellectual work. He has considered ‘post-colonial’ as “regroup intellectuals of not certain area or place under the postcolonial discourse. Intellectuals may produce many themes which formed the part of postcolonial discourse. Actually, it is the participation which defines these people as postcolonial intellectuals.” However, Dirlik’s objections may also act as a reminder of the need to hold the historical event of colonization and its material effects firmly in view (something he stops to do), but the engagement of colonial power that ‘the post-colonial’ defines itself. Post-colonial intellectuals, in this view, are those who continue to mingle the cultural, social and political effects of colonial discourse if they had perceived as or perceive themselves to be subscribers to the emerging academic definition of “post-colonial studies”. Nevertheless, the descriptions of intellectuals in the period of post-colonialism are bound to be as numerous as approaches to post-colonialism itself.It was mainly used by political scientists and various historians after 2nd world war then had a visible chronological way of meaning which represents the period of post-independence time. Few critics characterize this term to different cultural effects in late 1970s. Although it was still not in general currency with these specific cultural studies focus. The colonial theory development using the Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha works following on from Edward Said’s masterpiece work Orientalism (1978), provided a more theoretically stringent and conceptually original intervention into the debate on these issues, an intervention which drew heavily on poststructuralist studies. But ‘post-colonial’ term was not actually used during early study period of discourse theory. Initially it was referred for the interaction in cultures of colonial societies present in the literary circles. The first edition of The Empire Writes Back has argued about the cultural and literary analysis whose history involved a series of overlapping movements from Commonwealth Literature Studies to national and regional studies, to learning of so-called ‘New Literatures in English,’ could benefit greatly from being adhere with more intensely theoretical approach that had found sustenance in various branches of contemporary critical theory. The hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ has come to increase diverging strategies, emphases, assumption and re-thinking the post-colonial practices in reading and writing in these years. The hyphen usage seemed to put us an emphasis on discursive effect as well material effect of colonialism which resists an indiscriminate attention to difference in culture and types of marginality. The usage of ‘post-colonialism’ now a days finds left with the colonization and its effect altogether. The spelling of “post-colonial” has caused an issue due to hyphenated sign in between since the hyphen represents the culturally as well historically nature of experience. For the critics 73 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

related to the writings of colonized peoples, it has come as a theory oriented towards the cultural and historical experience of many colonized people which is a concern with textual production despite towards the fetishization theory by nature. The hyphen sign in “postcolonial” term particularly denotes the materialistic nature of political oppression. So, the hyphen distinguishes the term from abstract, unlocated and poststructuralist theories for which Shohat as well Stamm objected. One fascinating area of the developing interest in post-colonialism, and its growing diversity, has obsessed with origins. It must be often accepted as fact that Edward Said initiated the discourse of post-colonialism. Yet the Empire Writes Back emerged not from that intervention but from the work of Caribbean, African as well Indian authors, social theorists and artists who engages the imperial discourse power who were ‘writing back’. The last decade of the nineties Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak have had a complicated and unreal relationship for thepostcolonial studies. Both, for different reasons, have arrived to reject the post-colonial: Said from an aversion to any systematic theory (which he considers as ‘theological’), and Spivak in favour of what she regards as the more inclusive term ‘subaltern’. Nevertheless, these theorists of colonial discourse like seminal work of Homi Bhabha, continues to provide useful theoretical stimulus to the tasks of later post-colonial theorists, whether by a positive use of their insights, or using their innovations as critical ‘stalking horses’. The great history of the troubled relationship between ‘post-colonial’ 198 empires write back theorists and ‘post- colonialism’ reinforces the meaning that post-colonial studies might best be regarded now as a term for an object of diverse and often contesting formulations of cultural productions for thecolonized people despite discipline or methodology per se. It is probably more analogous to an area such as feminist studies than to something like deconstruction. As the Empire Writes Back demonstrated, post-colonial theory was a creation of literary learning. As we argued in Ist edition, the subject of ‘English’ operated as a specific site of cultural exclusion as well cultural indoctrination, becoming at once a quantity of civilization (in its imperial exponents) and barbarity (in its colonized pupils). Post-colonial societies were never simply ‘culturally’ controlled because culture went together with economic domination, political domination and military domination. But imperial culture, as well literature, had an especially important function in enabling comparatively small occupying forces to exert hegemonic control over large populations. For this very reason it became a medium of resistance since the cultural orientation of post-colonial writing opposed, interpolated and then transformed the canon of Literature in English language itself. Writers from formerly colonized countries writing in English mainly, demonstrated the counter-discursive potential tools appropriated from the colonizers. Writers also engaged the cultural power of colonialism asmore subtle and pervasive accompaniment to its political power. The post-colonial theory in year 1980s, started as it had mainly from within English 74 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Literature Departments, was therefore principally concerned with literatures in English (although Francophone African intellectuals like Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon were important). But since the inception of post-colonial theory, its adoption by other disciplines has been rapid. In few cases, the field has functioned as a rallying point for work already under way, in others it has provided the discursive framework for new analyses of contemporary cultural relations and political relations. 3.2 POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITY The question: Who is post-colonial? may be misleading and we raise the issue for suggesting the types of problems post-colonial theorists can create for themselves. The clean idea of creating a boundary between post-colonial and the not-really-post-colonial is that has arisen due to controversy surrounding the term. There were innumerable attempts to draw boundaries around such words, boundaries designed to include or exclude various groups (Irish/ settlers/ Americans/ African Americans/ Indigenes, etc. The disputes became vital part in defining the field. But the ideas behind the cultural fixity which these boundaries promote have seemed to some people to contradict post-colonial enterprise nature. To these critics the post-colonial experience is, in a sense, only perceivable when such boundaries are brought into conscious and critical scrutiny. The Empire Writes Back argument is about the post-colonial’s different understanding ways. It is no longer way of simple binary opposition but defined as black versus white colonizers; Third World versus the West but having an engagement with every varied manifestations of powers of colonialism, including those in settler colonies. The very attempt to define the post-colonial by putting barriers between those who may be called ‘post-colonial’ and the balance, contradicts the post-colonial theories to show the very complexity of the imperial discourse operation. The suggestion is that we have to ground the post-colonial in the ‘fact’ of experiencing colonialism. But probably impossible to say absolutely where that experience and related effects begin or end. If we take the example of slavery, we can clearly find a major incentive for imperial expansion, but it was also in existence prior and after that period. Can we really say that slavery and its effects (e.g., the black diaspora) are not a legitimate element of colonialism and must not belong to what we study to try and understand how colonialism worked? These and similar problems have argued over for a decade or more and seem as little likely to be resolved in the next ten years as they have been so far. Some scholars insist that unless the post-colonial has been clearly and strictly limited to the learning of direct effects of historical colonization it will lose focus. Others argue that postcolonialism is a ‘reading strategy’ that can illuminate diverse contemporary and historical cultural phenomena, since the effect of colonialism has been too widespread and so endemic in shaping the 20th century and its effects. Lastly the debate over post-colonial validity may 75 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

well come down about regarding its efficacy as an historical context, an analytical tool or a cultural relation theory. Certainly, the theory about post-colonialism has provided a focus for new areas of concern since its development. For example, it might be used to investigate political relations in Ireland and, increasingly, the different culture’s relations previously lumped together like Wales and Scotland, under a political label like ‘United Kingdom’ or a vaguer, grander term such as ‘Great Britain’. Considering their historical relationship with Elizabethan, Stuart and Cromwellian colonialism, cultural/political analysis in these countries has found a new dimension in post-colonial theory. Similarly, post-colonial theory has used in these times to investigate earlier imperial period and also the colonial periods, and to find imperial domination in other locations of the globe and also for examining cultural encounters other than those provoked by the post-Renaissance expansion of Europe. Are these existing and new additions to the field legitimate or not? Should the boundary exclude or include these areas and cultures and if yes, why? The revisions, extensions and proliferations of the contexts within which the post-colonialism idea is deployed will doubtless continue. But as we survey, a decade on, the increasing array of cultural and political issues approached by critics of post-colonialism, a more useful question might be: How did post-colonial theory be most fruitfully deploying? One way in which it has come to be deployed has to do with issues of cultural diversity, ethnic, racial and cultural difference and the power relations within them. The first begins with the explorer Colón and the major event of the Renaissance: the “old” world’s “discovery” of the “new.” Engaging with the actual complexity and diversity of European colonization, as well as with the pervasiveness of neo-colonial domination may open the way for useful new applications of the strategies of post-colonial analysis. Another way in which post-colonial analysis has been deployed is in approaches to the black diaspora scattered by centuries of slavery. While work on the Indian diaspora in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean continues to hold an important place, work on the African diaspora has expanded to overlap African American studies. Like the question of slavery itself, this field emphasizes the flexible boundaries of post-colonialism, for while the society of African American is not specifically a result of colonization, it is real consequence of colonialism. Like slavery and indenture and settlement have reached proportions far greater and far wider than ‘post-colonial’ societies. Consequently, the field of African American studies is the study regarding race, much larger than post-colonial studies, but the relation between these two people, as in work by bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates and Cornell West, has both lively and argumentative. One obvious omission from the early development in post-colonial theory would be study of the oldest, 76 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

second largest and most complex modern European empire which is Spain. The book The Empire Writes Back suggested that although it is concerned with writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain ‘much of what it deals with is of interest and relevance to countries colonized by other European powers, such as France, Portugal and Spain’. Santiago Colas retorted that ‘developments in former Spanish colonies may also be “of interest and relevance” to the study of English postcolonial culture and indeed may fundamentally change understanding of that culture’. Indeed, Latin America may well fundamentally change our view of the post-colonial. The antiquity and character of its colonization, the longstanding reality of its hybridized cultures, the ‘continental’ sense of difference which stems from a shared colonial language, the intermittent emergence of contestatory movements in cultural production – all radically widen the scope of post-colonial theory. 3.3 THEORETICAL ISSUES In the decade since The Empire Writes Back was first published, several theoretical issues have risen to prominence, while a number have remained as contentious same way as these were. One persistent issue has been the question of resistance. In very late eighties the debate between colonial discourse theory and Fanonesque formulations of resistance such as Benita Parry’s (1987) indicated a polarity of views regarding the political validity of theory of post- colonialism. At one period of time, this was an argument about the rarefied poststructuralist approach of colonial discourse theorists. This should remind us that questions of resistance remain relevant in the broader debate about the relationship of Western Academy and people lives in post-colonial period. Has post-colonial theory, for instance, served to re-colonize the post-colonial world by re- incorporating its agendas into metropolitan academic concerns, as few critics have been argued? Is some post-colonial theory too rarefied for its subjects; better suited to serving the requirements of the Academy than to decolonizing actual societies? This has led to one question: who reads the ‘postcolonial’ texts? Is there a gap between local product and international practices of consuming that product? Again, the answer here may be that the post-colonial’s validity is its efficacy. Whatever its function which is an academic discourse, we have to ask how well it has served the purpose of empowering post-colonial intellectuals and assisted in implementing strategies of decolonization. The most important vehicles for such strategies has been language and been always a contentious issue in learning of post- colonialism. Ngugi wa Thiongo’s well known rejection of English for writing his novels in Gikuyu, indicated the extremely sensitive way of the language question. The argument about whether 77 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

using a colonial language keeps the speaker or writer colonized has raged up to the present day. The Empire Writes Back is principally interested in literatures written in ‘English’, for it seems that these literatures demonstrate most clearly the political and cultural agency achieved by writers who appropriate the dominant language, transform it, and use it to open up the cultural reality to audience of the world. This capacity is evident in all those writers who appropriate the colonial language, be it English, French, Spanish or Portuguese. The discussion mentioned under the heading ‘Re-placing re-thinking the post-colonial’, Language’ is, if anything, even more relevant today as ever-increasing writers appropriate these languages. By abrogating the ideas of the language, appropriating it to local requirements, and marrying it to local syntactic and grammatical forms, post-colonial writers provide a role-model for agency of the local in the face of apparently overwhelming global pressures. However, one longstanding angle of the language issue, and the one which is growing in importance as we move into the Twenty First Century, is the translation of literary texts from local languages to world languages, especially English. Translation has long been a hotly debated topic in nations like India. In many cases novels are written in languages from cultures with no backup data having novel form, like Ngugi and hundreds of writers in India. The form, if not the language, has been proper for the purposes of communicating to indigenous readers. But these works are also accessible, through translation (e.g., Ngugi’s Gikuyu novels), to a much wider audience. By creating a readership, post-colonial writing in English has opened an opportunity in which a vastly greater number of translated texts may be circulated. The English language novel, for example, represents a tiny portion of pros written in India’s languages. The translation of literary texts in indigenous languages therefore promises to greatly expand the volume and cultural spread of writing which, by any definition, must be post-colonial. For last few years, several critical discussions of post-colonial translation have formed, and a huge number of scholars are beginning to address the issue i.e., theoretical problems of translation present in post-colonial countries attracts their attention. The standard problem – ‘is translation really interpretation’ – familiar to all translation theory becomes magnified in the post-colonial setting. Who translates who becomes a crucial issue? Questions of cultural familiarity, the implied construction of the audience, the problems of constructing the ‘other’ have relevance in this context. In addition, language is a deeply political issue in locations such as India where various language groups prefer English as a lingua franca to stem the internal colonialist pressure of Hindi. In many cases Dravidian cultures express a greater fear of 204 the empire writes back Sanskrit languages such as Hindi than of the comparatively neutral English. Local language groups see the development of literatures in their languages as a precious cultural resource. But the translation of huge body 78 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of indigenous writing into English opens a potentially huge readership both in India itself and the rest. Such a cultural resource becomes, through translation, a vehicle of cultural communication, and perhaps a mode of cultural survival. Whatever may be this issue, there arises least doubt which will act as a significant role in post-colonial landscape. Despite its usefulness for decolonization activities, the theory about post-colonialism has often produced an ambivalent reaction from intellectuals present in the societies of post-colony. It has certainly had a wide distribution in these societies and has drawn a good deal of attention, often regarded as useful by many local critics. But fears about its homogenizing effects, and its dominance by metropolitan-based critics have caused a suspicion sometimes erupting into open hostility and not been helped by the strength of the study of some areas over others, with South Asia dominating other regions such as Africa, where widespread resistance against postcolonial as a category. The continued assertion of older and more limited models based on nationalist cultural categories has not always yielded to the arguments by the critics of post-colonialism, for all their power and cogency. Curiously, these resistances to post-colonial theory find themselves an integral study part of post-colonialism, an important aspect of its fractious diversity, and may attend to more diligently by postcolonial critics. Notwithstanding these resistances, theory about post- colonialism has provided an important strategy for intellectuals present in post-colonial period to participate in global discourses with analyses of decolonizing cultures. The most controversial features of contemporary postcolonial theory: ambivalence and hybridity, are of relevance, both in the post-colonial world and in the metropolitan centres, if sometimes for different reasons. These concepts are clearly central to the post-colonial critique of simplistic, binary definitions of resistance and resistance literature. Theorized extensively by Bhabha and demonstrated lavishly in the assignments of internationally fêted authors such as Salman Rushdie, ambivalence, re-thinking etc, the post- colonial 205 hybridity have sparked a continuous argument amongst critics because of their apparent failure to consider the material status of the operation. Ella Shohat’s comment is representative of this criticism: ‘A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence’ (1992: 109). Nevertheless, with such caveats in mind, ambivalence and hybridity have extended to be useful amongst post-colonial critics because they guaranteed subtler and more nuanced view of colonial subjectivity and colonial relationships than the usual ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinctions. The women status as colonized subjects has remained a significant issue. In 1988, Holst- Peterson and Rutherford produced a collection with the evocative title A Double Colonization, which has proved a durable description of the women status in colonialism. But some questions remain open to debate: Is that imperialism was essentially patriarchal enough 79 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

grounds for saying that women are, by definition, ‘post-colonial’? Or does the idea of‘double colonization’ refer to two comparable and overlapping forms of dominance – patriarchy and imperialism? Whatever the answers to these questions, women in colonialism has found steady growing area of study. Central to it, provides continuing debate between Western and post-colonial feminisms in which changing assumptions and agendas, different priorities and concerns choose to remain an area of sharp and productive argument. Findings of the link between feminism and postcolonialism now constitutes a substantial proportion of all work on the post-colonial (see Reader’s Guide). A similarly complex development concerns the marginalized groups within societies present in the post-colonialism and the indigenous minorities. Such groups have experienced an unbroken colonization in various manifestations, and the analyses of their situation cross all discipline boundaries. The issue in association with indigenous minorities is the about the race. During the studies of post-colonialism, race has become a problem each time, but it considered as prickly one since this theory normally strives for more complicated view of colonial relations which provides in many different views of racial difference. The vexed concepts of ambivalence and hybridity are an instance of ever-increasing desire in this theory to avoid binary formulations of difference. Race studies themselves constitute an enormous and productive field of enquiry but the tendency over the past decade has employed the term ‘ethnicity’ to work with human variation in the areas of culture, traditions, social patterns and ancestry rather than ‘race’, with its lingering assumption of a humanity divided into fixed biologically determined types. Race has been continued as relevant to a post-colonial theory because for mainly two reasons. The first reason as it is very central to advancing power of imperial discourse of the 19th century and the second reason may be remained an unavoidable and central ‘fact’ of modern society that race is used as the dominant category of daily discrimination and prejudice. While we may argue that race is a flawed and self-defeating category which traps its users in its biological and essentialist meshes in practical terms race remains a real issue in contemporary social and personal relations. While race encompasses a phenomenon much larger than post-colonial experience, the two have produced a productive interrelationship based on an increasing awareness about the benefits of construction of race to imperial domination maintenance activities. Always race have the representational problem which was central to post-colonial studies. the representation of the colonial other by imperial discourse and the contest of self-representation usingthe subjects of colonialism. The main important vehicles of colonial representation was travel and plethora for various travel writing from the colonial travellers. The global travel phenomenon has become the main feature of Imperial writing for many centuries. Sir Richard Burton, Lord Curzon, Henry Morton Stanley all come quickly to mind when we dream about the fascination with which Europeans explored and represented the colonial world. Since the first edition of The Empire 80 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Writes Back, discussions of travel writing, sometimes associated with the topic of autobiography Whitlock 2000, have become rapidly growing subject of postcolonial study. Some of these analyses have formed for response to Said’s study of Orientalism and it emphasize the benefits about travel writing, and subsequently tourism in representing the colonial other. The tropes by which this representation re-thinking the post-colonial take place have been astutely identified by David Spurr in The Rhetoric of Empire (1994). But Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), which sees travel writing in relation to transculturation has been influential in suggesting the very complex nature of all colonial interaction. Transculturation was the main concepts where the hierarchical structure idea for imperial power has been questioned. The fact that it started in the English-speaking countries which is related to travel writing suggests the significant part played by travel writing in the dialectical changes instigated by colonial contact. Hence the travel writing promises a very important and growing area of concern in the investigation of Orientalist constructions and the more complicated interactions of colonial contact. It remains a most complicated feature of learning of post-colonialism as it continues to overlap along with the post-modern discourse strategies. Asking the question ‘is the post in post-colonialism the same as the post in postmodernism?’ Anthony Kwame Appiah says All aspects of contemporary African cultural life including music and some sculpture and painting, even some writings with which the West is largely not familiar and been influenced which is powerful using the changes of societies in Africa through colonialism but are not in relevant post-colonial sense. For the post in postcolonial which is similar to postmodern is the space-clearing gesture. The idea of the ‘post’ as a space-clearing gesture is a useful one if it can free the term from the tyranny of chronology. But the comparison between the post-colonial and the postmodern generally crops up a little too speciously. The problem concerned with terminology, relation between post-modernism and post-colonialism is the fact that they are different and cultural ways with elaborations of Post-modernity. It is as imperialism and enlightenment philosophy were discursive elaborations of Modernity. The relationship of post-modernism and post-colonialism has been interpreted very widely. But our approach continues to emphasize their distinctive differences. 3.4 POST-COLONIAL FUTURES As post-colonial theory was an invention of literary study, given importance by the development of English as a vehicle of cultural propaganda, it has therefore been at the cutting edge of developments in that discipline. Literary studies become crisis topic for some time as their methodologies and assumptions have challenged both cultural studies and post- 81 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

colonial theory. The debate continues to revolve around the Raymond Williams inspired distinction between culture as ‘art’ or as ‘way of life’. Post-colonial cultural discourse of all kinds problematizes this distinction and indeed problematizes the concept of culture itself. For when decolonizing countries appropriate imperial cultural discourse, they must either appropriate its universalist assumptions – including its own culture is unimportant – or appropriately find confirms all intellectual and artistic discourse as various aspects of the life, strands of cultural texture, intimately and inextricably linked with textual fabric of our society. Curiously, the initial exclusion of post- colonial cultural production from the literary canon provided the room for a large heterogeneous inhalation of the cultural text than we find in literature studies. Hence Edward Said’s notion of ‘worldliness’ is the main principle for societies in the post-colonialism. It continues to counter to the ‘unworldly’ abstraction of contemporary theory. Its affiliation with the social world, its production of experience, Said sees as the most resonant confirmations of the worldliness. What causes to stay live for the concepts like ‘literature’ in place is a massive structure of cultural power, deployed in educational, publishing and economic institutions. Almost by definition, writing in post-colonial societies becomes inextricable from a network of cultural practices; exclusion from canonicity confirms its worldliness. re-thinking the post-colonial. In its engagement with the culturalist myth of ‘literature’ then, postcolonialism brings to cultural studies its own well-established concepts of diversity, particularity and local difference. The global term ‘culture’ only becomes comprehensible as a multiplicity of local ‘cultures’. Consequently, the egregious distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, is disrupted by the very much energetic and contested politics having cultural difference. Cultural Studies, on the contrary, tends implicitly to support this distinction since it tends to concentrate its cultural analyses on the complex but circumscribed fields of mass media and most popular culture. The problem of cultural difference, particularly as it is mediated in textuality, suggests that in most cultures there is least supportable distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ – culture is whatever people do. Thus, we may see more clearly that notions of high culture are the subtle hence not always hidden, agents of cultural imperialism. But one future of the field itself hinges on the balance between the articulation of theoretical generalizations and the analysis of material post-colonial realities. The literary heritage of theory of post-colonialism encouraged criticism of individual works, and increasingly, as this literature remained removed from part of literary study, an extreme analysis of political and cultural relations these texts constructed. The importance of the ‘worldly’ affiliations of the text meant that the study of local conditions was always important. This, however, was not highlighted by post-colonial critics as readily as it should have been, and, in the area of globalization, analyses of local cultural 82 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

production and specific historical and social developments are becoming highly important. As the field has developed over the last decade or so, it becomes clearer that perhaps post- colonial theory needs to be further grounded in specific analyses of the effects of large movements and ideologies on localities. In Robert Young’s words, there shows an increasing tendency to point to the problem of the generalized assumption that ‘colonial discourse operates identically not only across allspace but also throughout time’ .Such concern about the need to recuperate historical differences within a time-period of homogeneity seems indisputable. Yet as Young also said: In facing of such objections we mustremind ourselves that these increasingly troublesome general categories like ‘the West’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘neo- colonialism’ [or ‘post-colonialism’] and even ‘colonial discourse’ are themselves in their current usage often the creation of Third World theorists such as Fanon, Nkrumah or Said, [and other theorists and creative writers such as C.L.R.James, Wilson Harris, Raja Rao, Judith Wright, Robert Kroetsch who needed to invent such categories precisely as general categories in order to constitute an object both for analysis and resistance. Young concludes this telling rebuttal by noting that: At a certain level, most forms of colonialism are, after which in the final analysis, colonialism, the rule by force of common people by an external power . . . Those who today emphasize its geographical and historical differences may in effect be only repeating uncritically colonialism’s own partitioning strategies. Yet at this point in the postcolonial era, as we seek to understand the operation and effects of colonial history, the homogenisation of colonialism does also need to be set against its historical and geographical particularities. The question for any theory of colonial discourse is whether it can maintain, and do justice to, both levels. The theory of post-colonialism has remained as the literary maid and various cultural production despite its master version. It is abductive despite deductive, and systematic. For this case, it remains useful for providing access to analyses that manage to extend existing formulations (race, capitalism, imperialism, nationalism etc) yet remain prioritized on the particularity of cultural difference. A contentious issue in post-colonial studies appears to be, and will probably always be, the difference between theoretical formulations and the specifics of local cultures. But while post-colonial societies share strategies for engaging colonial power, theory will remain useful in analysing the local. Post-colonialism and the sacred Debates concerning the traditional and sacred beliefs of colonized, indigenous, and marginalized peoples have increased in importance. Since the Enlightenment, the sacred has been an ambivalent area in a Western thinking that has uniformly tended to privilege the secular. As Chakrabarty and other critics have reminded us, economic rationalism, progressivism and secularity have been dominated, while ‘the sacred’ has so often been relegated to primitivism and the archaic. However, at the end of the 83 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

twentieth century, debates about the sacred have become more urgent as issues such as land rights and rights to sacred beliefs and practices begin to grow in importance. A grand shift has been occurring in this field, bringing a new consideration of the complex, hybrid and rapidly changing cultural formations of both marginalized and first world peoples. The sacred has still followed the path of other ‘denied knowledges,’ as Bhabha puts it, entering the dominant discourse and estranging ‘the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’. A misleading direction was given by Edward Said’s well-known preference for ‘secular criticism’ over what he termed the ‘theological’ bent of contemporary theory. Although by ‘theological’ Said meant schools of contemporary theory that were dogmatic and bounded, that encouraged devotees and acolytes rather than rigorous criticism, the term seems suggesting the theological and the sacred were not the province of enlightened post- colonial analysis. Such an assumption reminded the void which often exists between the theoretical agenda of the Western academy and the same types of postcolonial societies themselves.4 The sacred has empowering tool of post-colonial experience in two ways. Analyses of the sacred have been one of the most neglected and may be one of the most rapidly expanding areas of post-colonial study. The empire writes back Postcolonialism, animals and the environment the sacred has frequently entered post-colonial debates in relation to environmental issues. Place has surely become greater importance to theory of post-colonialism. The more global problem of environmentalism becomes very important aspect of the mentioned concept. The destruction of the environment has been one of the most damaging aspects of Western industrialization. The truth is that the scramble for modernization has enticed developing countries into the destruction of its own environments, now under the disapproving gaze of a hypocritical West, is further proof of continuing importance ofpost-colonial analysis of global crises. Post-colonial societies have taken up the ‘civilizing’ benefits of modernity, only to find themselves the ‘barbaric’ instigators of environmental damage. In this way the global dynamic maintenance of imperial power is done. But while these broad questions remain important, the focus has shifted, in the work of anthropologists, geographers, historians, literary critics and philosophers, to relationships between post-colonial and/or neo-colonial interests and eco-centred or eco-critical perspectives. Alfred Crosby (1986) outlines the destructive effects – for both places and peoples – of the European colonization of much of the rest of the world. More detailed, historically informed studies of this impact, often with an aim on contemporary legacies and problems, are now being undertaken. One historian has also argued that, notwithstanding its destructive legacies – perhaps even because of them – colonial governance, particularly in some island realms, laid the basic foundations of the conservation ethic well before the 1864 establishment of first ‘National Park’ in US. While 84 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the main part of contemporary environmentalism may lie in colonial damage in both settler colonies and colonies of occupation, neo-colonialism, often in association with the colonial past, continues to produce clashes of interests between ‘West and Rest’. This case, for example, in areas of land and food scarcity, where the well-being of humans and endangered animal species may be at odds. Ironically, as the anthropocentric Western drive responsible for so much land and species degradation yields place to more bio-centric paradigms of ‘the human place in nature’, formerly colonized subaltern groups are accused of insensitivity to animals and land as they focussed in economics from its own (often bio-centric) pre-colonial world views and practices into competing for survival by means of the high industrial and agricultural capitalism which dispossessed them of their original way of living. Such clashes do not always occur, however. There are numerous examples of co-operation aimed at redressing balances, and regrettably, still many instances of ‘Western’ (or global capitalist) exploitation of the environment generally and of poorer human communities dependent on it. The death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was attempting to prevent oil company destruction of Nigeria’s Delta region, is a notorious example of the result of multinational damage. It offers a smooth reminder that (neo)colonial depredations, sometimes in collusion with local individuals or cadres continues. The destructive connections between global capital, local politicians, NGOs and some unwitting International Agencies have recently been explored by Arundhati Roy in her scathing action against Narmada Valley Project. Given that, environment is not least importance than human communities, a backward walk to a pre-colonial primitive state is impossible, some post-colonial writers and critics began to explore the garden (and the Western myth of the Garden) as offering newly ambivalent versions of the trope of loss and possibility. The re-constituted and post-Biblical Garden thus happen to become a space redolent of possibility for the human/animal/ environmental community. While the needs of environmentalists and animal rights groups often coincide, they also clash, over, for example, the eradication of ‘feral’ plants and animals, or over indigenous hunting rights. Interrogation and exploration of the relationships between powerful human groups and what they have traditionally designated as ‘animal’ is increasingly main agenda in post-colonial studies. Critique of the apparently obdurate concept of the ‘species boundary’ is coming from genetic research, philosophy, literature, its criticism and has significant implications for existing problems of ethnicity, racism, race and (human and animal) genocide. Cary Wolfe, drawing on Bataille, and particularly Jacques Derrida, notes that ‘the humanist concept of subjectivity is inseparable from the discourse and institution of speciesism’, through our acceptance that the category of ‘the human’ itself requires the sacrifice of ‘the animal’ and the animalistic which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we can engage in a ‘noncriminal’ putting to death (as Derrida phrases it) not only of animals, but of other humans as well, by 85 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

marking them as animal. The ‘effectiveness of the discourse of species, when applied to social others of whatever sort’ is dependent, as Derrida and Wolfe note, on the ‘taking for granted of the institution of speciesism – that is, upon the ethical acceptability of the systematic, institutionalized killing of non-human others’. While animal terms and tropes are employed derogatively in our languages, the way of dismantling such a boundary is necessarily vitiated. Post-colonial environmentalism then, must deal with deeply problematic issues and conflicting interests, but as it begins to execute, the foundational importance of animal and environmental concerns to theorizing ‘the post- colonial’ becomes clear. Post-colonialism and globalization Perhaps the ultimate and unavoidable future of post-colonial studies lies in its relation to globalization. What, we might ask, is the place of post-colonial studies in terms of this phenomenon? How can this field happen to see in continuing to emphasize the maturity of local experience, also the significance of colonial relations, while addressing such a mega-discourse? The answer is twofold: first, we cannot understand globalization without understanding that sort of power relations which flourish in the twenty-first century as an economic, political, cultural legacy of western imperialism. 2nd post-colonial theory, and specifically the instance of postcolonial literatures, can provide very clear models for understanding how local communities achieve agency under such pressures. Theories of globalization have moved, over the last half century, from expressions of the process as ‘cultural imperialism’, the ‘compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole’. There have even been some suggestions that imperialism has been superseded as a model for global processes and replaced by much more sophisticated look of the systems which operate in world culture (for example, the formation of ‘critical globalism’. But this stem, invariably, from a somewhat limited view of imperialism itself. Such classic activist definitions of imperialism as the development of a kingdom by a nation which exerts a centripetal and hierarchical power over a large number of colonial territories, says little or nothing about the circulation of that reign within the empire, nor anything about the transcultural exchanges involved, since it tends to find the subjects of empire as the passive objects having imperial dominance. This simple view may therefore act to reinforce rather than dismantle the imperialist practices and institutions that it wishes to supersede. It can be more useful to recognize that imperialism is not ideally a deliberate and active ideology, but a collection of conscious ideological programs and unconscious ‘rhizomic’ structures of unprogrammed connections and engagements. This interaction and circulation are correctly the way for which the ‘global’ is produced. When we observe the actual problems of the cultural interchanges in imperial relationships and ideally the activities of the supposed passive subjects of imperialism, we find the start of existing global energies for interchange, circulation and transformation. These energies may become the weapons of 86 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

resistance, not merely the instruments of control. The theory of post-colonialism is therefore extremely useful in its analysis of various strategies by which the ‘local’ colonized engage large hegemonic forces. This should not be mistaken for an assumption that somehow globalization is the same thing as neo-colonialism – the two phenomena are very different and result in a different range of material effects. But the principles and strategies of engagement are similar, and the analysis of those principles are far more advanced in post- colonial theory than in globalization studies, itself a recent field. If anything seems to characterize globalization at turn of the century, it is the phenomenon of extraordinary and accelerating movement of peoples around the globe. The increasing refugee crisis in every Western country is just one manifestation of the longstanding circulation of peoples in what Edward Said has called ‘the voyage in’. The notion of ‘diaspora’ does not seem at first to be the province of post-colonial studies until we examine the deep impact of colonialism upon this phenomenon. The most extreme consequences of imperial dominance can be seen in the radical displacement of peoples through slavery, indenture and settlement. More recently the ‘dispersal’ of significant numbers of people can watch to be results of the disparity in wealth between West and the rest of world, extended by the economic imperatives of imperialism. It rapidly opening a gap between colonizers and colonized. The movement of refugees, in particular, has often re-ignited racism (and Orientalism) in many communities world-wide. Diaspora does not simply refer to geographical dispersal but also the vexed questions of identity, memory and home which such displacement produces. For the impact of the dominant discourse such as imperialism is not only upon the local society, for the disruption it causes means that global culture itself is affected and transformed by this movement of peoples. A post-colonial analysis of globalization is extremely interested in the ways in which the global is transformed at the local level – what Robertson calls ‘Glocalization’ (1995) – but also inevitably interested in this global circulation itself. The problem has not only one of cultural engagement but also the cultural rotation. For James Clifford there arises a new world order of mobility, of rootless histories, and the paradox of global culture is it is ‘at home’ with this motion despite particular place. Clifford’s book Routes examines the extent to which practices of displacement ‘might be constitutive of cultural meanings rather than their simple transfer or extension’. The diasporic production of cultural meanings occurs in many areas, such as contemporary music, film, theatre and dance, but writing is one of the most interesting and strategic ways in which diaspora might disrupt the binary of local and global and problematize national, racial and ethnic formulations of identity. For if, as Stuart Hall suggests, the crucial concern of diasporic identity is not subjectivity but subject position, then the diasporic writer provides the prospect of a fluidity of identity, a constantly changing subject position, both 87 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

geographically and ontologically. More importantly perhaps, diasporic writing, in its crossing of borders, opens the horizon of place. What does ‘home’ mean in the disrupted world of colonial space? How can ‘home’ become the transformative habitation of boundaries? For certainly that unheimlichkeit, that ‘unhousedness’ or ‘uncanniness’ which characterizes much colonial displacement, is a primary force of disruption in postcolonial life. Can it be the source of liberation? The phenomenon by which diaspora, with its exemplary model of dislocation and displacement begins the answer for the above question. Nevertheless, even here dangers exist. Some post-colonial intellectuals have promoted the message of the diasporic subject as the decolonized subject par excellence, whose very disrupted, non-essentialist in-betweenness promotes more energy, power resident in the hybrid and disrupts the fixity of colonizer-colonized binaries. Others have raised concerns that this emphasizes an example of the ‘liberated’ subject not accessible to the larger body of ex-colonized ‘subjects-in-place.’ Since diaspora is also often the pre-condition for a specific class of ex-colonized people and often involves access to greater educational and economic opportunities, ‘class’ becomes a main issue in diaspora studies. Its importance as way of prizing opens the fixities of colonial binary is undeniable, but it can be balanced by a care not to over-privilege these subject’s vis a vis the broader ‘masses’ of the ex-colonized. This is specifically the case where opportunities offered by class, wealth and shift to the metropolitan centre, give the diasporic subject access to the sort of cultural capital favoured by the ‘global’ marketplace which is not easy access to the colonial ‘subject in place’. The final decade of the 20th century period, the term ‘postcolonial’ has experienced one among the steepest trajectories of any theoretical concept. Seldom used in 1989, it now raises over 10,000 entries in the Congress Library catalogue. Debate over its use has been fast and furious. But for all the vituperation and heat of the final decade few would deny that the concept of the post- colonial has been one of the most powerful means of re-examining the historical past and re- configuring our contemporary world-wide cultural concerns. More than any other concept, the post-colonial has guided the slow disturbance of Eurocentric dominance. This is according to academic debate and which empowered the intellectuals of post-colonialist period for redirecting the discussion of issues belongs to political relevance to the non- Western world. 3.5 SUMMARY  The contemporary art, philosophy, and literature produced by postcolonial societies are in no sense continuations or simple adaptations of European models.  It has argued that a much more profound interaction and appropriation has taken place. Indeed, the process of cultural decolonization has involved a radical 88 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

dismantling of the European codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses.  This dismantling has been frequently accompanied by the demand for an entirely new or wholly recovered pre-colonial ‘reality’. Such a demand, given the nature of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, its social brutality and cultural denigration, is perfectly comprehensible. But, as we have argued, it cannot be achieved.  The culture of post-colonialism is mainly a hybridized phenomenon which involves dialectical relation of ‘grafted’ European culture and indigenous ontology with impulse for creating or recreating local independent identity.  Such construction or reconstruction only occurs as a dynamic interaction between European hegemonic systems and ‘peripheral’ subversions of them. It is impossible to return or rediscover absolute purity of pre-colonial culture nor possible to create regional or national formations which is completely independent about historical implication in enterprises in European colonies.  Hence it has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and between two worlds; to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world. Thus, the important and even inescapable work of post-colonial enterprise were rewriting and re-reading of history and fictions of Europe.  These subversive manoeuvres, rather than the construction of essentially national or regional alternatives, are the characteristic features of the post-colonial text. The literatures and cultures in post-colonial period constitute the counter-discursive practice more than homologous ones.  Not only the canon of ‘classical texts’, the disruption of which by new, ‘exotic’ texts can be easily countered by a strategy of incorporation from the centre, but the very idea of English Literature as a study which occludes its own specific national, cultural, and political grounding and offers itself as a new system for the development of ‘universal’ human values, is exploded by the existence of the post-colonial literatures.  Despite the situation still does not remain as desired. There are still lot of struggles to be won. There are main three conclusions which post-colonial literatures enforce about the future of institution for English studies.  First, in the same way that the existence of varieties of English has meant that the concept of a standard English has been exploded, the very existence of post-colonial literatures completely undermines any project for literary studies in English which is postulated on a single culture masquerading as the originating centre. Second, as a 89 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

further implication of this decentring, the English canon is radically reduced within a new paradigm of international English studies.  The works of traditional canon remain and can reflect a radical re-reading and revision. For instance, what words from ‘tradition’ are considerably selected and study can change greatly. Haggard and Kipling can be replaced by George Eliot and Hardy as the relationship to historical realities as well the political realities can come to seem as much more significant.  The strategy of post-colonial reading acknowledge about the formation and readings which helps in bringing into corrigible nature and are not immutable ‘truths’ but changing political and social constructions.  Finally, the literary study concept will be revitalized using the perception which all words are travelled by complex learning of post-colonial literatures. Since the Ist publication of The Empire Writes Back has become clear that post-colonial theory has grown far beyond its genesis in literary study.  Although we do well to remember its origins and remind ourselves that post-colonial theory is not a grand theory of everything, its usefulness to other disciplines, and its usefulness as a framework in which post-colonial intellectuals can intervene in Western dominated discourses have become evident.  As the hey-day of European imperialism recedes further into past, the theoretical issues raised by postcolonial theory: questions of resistance, power, ethnicity, nationality, language and culture and its transformation of dominant discourses by ordinary people, provide important models for better understanding the location of the local in an increasing globalized world. 3.5 KEYWORDS  Orientalism: The East looked at from a Eurocentric perspective, the concept, coined by Edward Said.  Eurocentrism:A world view justifying the superiority of Europe.  Diaspora: People of an ethnic/racial group dispersed to different locations far from their mother land.  Subversion: Established ideas and principles contradicted or reversed.  Neo-colonial: Propagation of colonial values and ideology by the elite of colonized country or by another dominating power. 3.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is an interesting take on neo-colonialism post independent Nigeria. 90 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

……………………………………………………………………………………………. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2. The effects of dictatorship and subsequent painful shift to democracy can be found inLatin American play Death and the Maiden. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 3.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Differentiate between post-colonial and postcolonial. 2. Does postcolonial writing only interrogate Eurocentric discourse? 3. Write a brief note on Orientalism. 4. Define the term canonical texts? 5. Write a note on Neo-colonialism. Long Questions 1. How has postcolonial theory developed to include complex aspects of space and identity? 2. What have you understood by ‘re-thinking the postcolonial?’ 3. In your opinion, do the older models of postcolonial theory need re-working? 4. Define neo-colonialism? What is the current scenario in postcolonial societies? 5. Attempt the analysis of any contemporary postcolonial text. B.Multiple Choice Questions 1. The ideology behind thecolonized space from a western space is called- a. Dialogism b. Eurocentrism c. Imperialism d. Colonisation 2. The book Orientalism is written by _____. 91 a. Helen Tiffin b. Mary Louise Pratt c. Edward Said d. Frantz Fanon CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3. Other than English, in which language does Nguigi write? a. Igbo b. Gikuyu c. Spanish d. French 4. The literature written in ____ language became symbolic of colonial hegemony. a. Spanish b. Sanskrit c. English d. French 5. Which author and activist has criticized the Narmada Valley project? a. Arundhati Roy b. Mahasweta Devi c. Gayatri Spivak d. Anjali Gera Roy Answers 1-(b), 2-(a), 3-(d), 4-(b), 5-(c) 3.8 REFERENCES Textbooks  Derrida, Jacques (1967) Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.  Derrida, Jacques (1967) Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.  Dash, J. Michael (1973) ‘Marvellous realism – the way out of Négritude’, Caribbean Studies, 13.  Dauber, Kenneth (1977) ‘Criticisms of American literature’, Diacritics 7 (March).  Clarke, Marcus (1874) For the Term of his Natural Life. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 92 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

References  Clark, Steve (ed.) (1999) Travel Writing and Empire: postcolonial theory in transit. London and New York: Zed Books.  Brown, L.W. (1978) West Indian Poetry. New York: Twayne.  Brown, Russell M. (1978) ‘Critic, culture, text: beyond thematics’, Essays in Canadian Writing, no. 11 (Summer).  Brathwaite, E.K. (1967–8) ‘Jazz and the West Indian novel’, Bim, 44, 275–84; 45, 39–51; 46.  Brathwaite, E.K. (1971) The Development of Creole Society 1770–1820. London: Oxford University Press. Websites  https://www.docsity.com/  https://www.eckleburg.org/  http://prelectur.stanford.edu/ 93 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 4:ERNEST RENAN,‘WHAT IS A NATION?’ IN HOMI K. BHABHA, ED. IN NATION AND NARRATION STRUCTURE 4.0 Learning Objectives 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Homi K Bhabha 4.3 Homi K Bhabha’s Nation and Narration 4.4 ‘What is a Nation? by Ernest Renan 4.5 Summary 4.6 Keywords 4.7 Learning Activity 4.8 Unit End questions 4.9 References 4.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, student will be able to:  Criticize the concept of a nation.  Explain the identities of nations in postcolonial studies.  Discuss Homi K Bhabha’s nation and narration. 4.1 INTRODUCTION The concept about the country is a complicated idea. In the words of Anderson, they are supposed to be communities being imaginative. Nations are not only defined by demarcations only, but it can be compiled as one with its unique identities. The conceptualization of a country refers to composition of multiple level concepts. It refers to terms which imply to any location having boundaries as well as governments, it is 94 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

structuring of inhabitants within those limits. Countries began coming into shapes in 18th&19th century era. There was creation of uniquely different entities. There was existence of larger kingdoms through that period, but not being arranged properly as the country. The history of nation stresses on looking after in permanent and solid solutions for temporary political forms known as nations. In the words of Mulheren,where the memories which are traditional are specific: Traditions are referred to as realities where there is continuous activities of selecting, revising and making inventions so as to provide defences with respect to threats relating to heterogeneous, discontinuous as well as contradictory nature. The identities of nations come together at a point: Where there is nationalization, the people are taken to be matters who are different and unique with traditions, at the same time having transparency and equality among each other. Benedict in his works known as ‘Imagined Community’ looks into how the countries were formed with imaginative concepts. It builds on foundations given by Renan for the memories of country, providing way of using these memories in routine activities. One such example in which he talks about the concept of newspapers, according to him it is a deflection from events happening in the world for a group of imaginary reader, how relevant the group is to the concept of steady, solidified, simultaneous times. The concepts of steady, solidified, simultaneous times is a defining the country, which is based on association of politics and laws, which reflects permanent memories of the countries. The emphasizing on imaginary, legendry building of the country. The book mentioned here talks about talks about defining the art of demarcating nations considering them as communities which are imagined. The mentioned book is a mix of a cover of a book and a movie’s beginning and end which resemble the national borders that are defining the nations. Due to interconnections, history has shown responses happening simultaneously between the two. Reading through the book, it allows people to imagine the communities they are surrounded by. To read it alone or in a group is looking into communities believing that others are reading too at the same timing. It became mythology for the country, becoming a story for national identity, providing agendas for nationalisation as well as fragmentation of lives. In the constructs of mythology, whether being in a movie or book, memory is selectively representation, canonizing and reading through the country. Everyone knows about the novels of Finn and Revere about national building. The category of movies during times recent equals the powers of nation’s memories as well as questions it. The movie, just like a book, works on its boundaries, analysing the visible ideas as well as viewpoints that the book will not be addressing in the same way. Providing education is playing an important role in knowledge standardising and assisting in familiarity along with national memories. Educating is serving as creation of single foundations from where every member comes to form societies. Hobsbawm has written about education being a tool of creating nations identity in his books For instance, In USA, 95 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

education is a process of forceful socialization with standard syllabus. The schools in the country from the year 1880 have made every child participate in worshipping of the flag, being a daily ritual in order to show Americanism made by their choices. Those not participating in the rituals are termed as not Americans.Further,systems of education in the United States provided an easy way of socially comparing persons and their families based on a wider scale, establishment of similar behavioural patterns and their values with institutions being strong platforms established within generation for stabilizing continuous performance.Hence,education in 19th century became common as well as easy criteria for categorizing of society. Both of them help serving within the country to have memories of nation in order to have a same time period for the country. 4.2 HOMI K BHABHA Homi Bhabha is a person of literature as well as cultural critic as well as influencing person of the postcolonial era as well as engaging advocating for humanity. From being known as theoretician, having interests in a variety of things such as providing importance to his work on pertinence. He was born in Mumbai, who completed his education from various universities of Britain before moving to Chicago University and finally to Harvard University, where he is faculty in Department of English as well as Director of the Centre for Humanities. Building on the works of psychoanalytical and thinkers of postcolonial era, he has been a prominent voice in the pre and post colonialization eras dealing with globalization. The most influencing ideas in his works talks about hybrid nature, causing mental disharmony, mimicking were features of the theories of post colonization, in turn were inspirations for the various fields like arts, architectures, management field, theoretical development and many more relevant fields. The works provides as important reference for people interested in cultural hybrids point of view which is related to colonising and globalising. Considering various theorists and their works on history as well as culture, he gives explanation on various terms of colonizing resisting done by person colonizing, authorities being uncertain and apprehensive.Buthis works from the archives is not only of historical importance. He helps to identify and analyse development, where there are complexities in world networking along with facing off against one another. His work talks about ways of colonising by not remaining in historical past and not being in battles of anti- colonising.He used idioms to define his works where there is presence of colonizing. There should be description of the present colonizing system. The implications of ongoing symmetric ideas, continuation of half a decade of resisting, negotiating as well as translation of cultures. His work continue towards engaging with complex situations as the examples and making demand that translates it further going beyond its limitation. Though,his works in recent times have been rare and not systematic. His influences have been going beyond just postcolonial literatures. 96 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The contexts of history on which he is focused on, tools he uses has put him in the field of post colonialization.But thinkers as Derrida and Faucalt,in the same field make him an important personality in theory of post colonialization. 4.3 HOMI K BHABHA’S NATION AND NARRATION In his narrations as well as in his books, Bhabha mentions that Nation will lose its origin to the time period and it will be captured in the minds of people. It seems impossible from the start; this book brings up real concepts of nations as people live and their uncertainties of languages as they are given. Starting from Virginia Woolf’s book, Bowlby books on cultural history of Tom’s cabin as well as Mulher’s studies done on Ethics of English, Sommer study in magical reality of American fictions and finally analysing of writing of Australians. A country and its narrations are celebrating the facts that the language is no longer restricted to a region, but it also has given world outlook. According to him, countries just like narrations are losing their origin to the time and realization is carried on in the mind of the person. Having such an image for the country, it seems impossible romantic and more metaphoric, where traditions of political thinking and languages, those countries are emerging as a strong and powerful ideas in the western countries. Any ideas where compulsions of culture are lying in the unities of nations symbolically. There is no denying that attempts by nationalist continuously producing the ideas of nations as a continuing narration of nations progress or exploiting such ideologies. Neither will such ideology excel by the facing reality of multinational identities or delayed capitalism, which get recognised when the past of such world recognised concepts are not written so that the powerful can be protected in their country with their influences. Bhabha’s view of the country as a dimension is multiphase.Firstly,he agrees with Renan and Anderson’s assessing that the country is built, but Bhabha will interrogate national space is a dimension limited to our modern society. He looks into the identity of countries as narration and being made by it. It essentially implies that country keeps evolving due to changes, so they are just reduced to statistical identity. Countries are changing frequently, “It is arrived at from cultural instabilities that nations culture to be made into a mix of modern,colonial,post as well as natives that do not have understanding that stabilizing is in its formation.”Lack of knowledge here creates problems for the country as it claim to be stabilized and complete. The memories of nations bring out pictures which show unity is an important mechanism for getting people together. Rejecting such past will be like rejecting the whole country, as both are interlinked. For those who do not carry good memories find difficulties in participation of national interests, as well as country, it is with respect to migrant population. The other 97 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

people are challenging the memories and its past, such people take the opportunity to place the narrations in order to expose the fragile nature of the country. Just as Burrunat exposed as well as challenged the authoritative narration of the Israeli Governments, which meant keeping himself and his fellow people away from their farms and lands, there is another narrative. The book called Five Broken Cameras exposes the memories of the Palestine, proving the unrecognized but true narrative given. His primary focus is on building countries with stories and their people.Hence,more work needs to be done around the narratives. Countries can have their own narratives formulated in two ways: pedagogy and performative countries. Such entities are different but interrelated. A helping as well as good talk, between the two types, as they are contesting against each other. The first is an authoritarian narration of the narration, a simple controlled narration which defines nations and its people. The controlled narrative is controlled and controlled, hiding the reality in favour of continuous and fixed identities. The latter always questions the former is far more stable and truthful. The difference between the two is seen as between anxiety and uncertainty as routine, Performative continuously calls for pedagogy to be valid and true. The dialect between the two methods is shown as balancing between certainty and anxiety as reimaging the nation that questions the countries pedagogy, which in turns leads to anxieties. The narratives of the countries are occurring at two levels continuously. David Huddart has written on his works, “In the pedagogy dimension that is the basis of total social facts as well as there is a performative dimension that reminds us that total facts are open and can be changed daily”. In other way, countries show them as strong, static and solid identities, but Bhabha has argued that national identities are changing frequently within the given space. This open as well as closed qualities of the country is allowing both imagined and historical processing in the communities. It is within the nation, persons are competing.”The persons like the nations, are strategies as well as rhetoric strategies. The movements between the performance and its pedagogy, having certainty and anxieties, go simultaneously.” Anjali Gera discusses his perspective of both the types of narratives, “By the first, he is implying an already given core culture countries returning to form them. The latter shows the building of a country as a distinct identity through the acts of imagination”. He rejected the insisted on the pedagogy as strong and real country. The hybrids, altered are among the types where the identities are in a fix, opposing as well as resisting a strong country. The narration in which we are living. he says “there is a process of more dialogues that are attempting to track displacing and realigning the effects of cultural values and traditions, providing rational of alternatives, hybridplaces of negotiating. “The narrative is the process of turning back fixed narrations of the country and thereby implying that an identity and cultures are coexistent. 98 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Huddart said “If you are aware of where the identity comes to an end and the whole universe will begin, it is easier to provide definition to the complete world, as they are different from one another, inferior and threatening the identity as well as interests. If the cultures are stable, then discretion in identities, their division will become hard. “The definition is simple with hybridity. Hybrid nature as he writes “The complexity of living life as it is interrupted by the complete nature of life, any difference, small movements, at the timing of the change, reduced by the origins through different forms of meaning of culture are opening up for translations as there is resistance for the changes in total. “Then the hybridity will get overturned, and reflections of unease and anxiety will be shown. Huddart in his explaining of hybridity says “In case where there are culture related identity, it is referring to the facts that are not distinct in nature, but they are in contacts with each other and thus lead to mix of cultures. “It can resist in total and be in a fix. He has employed the concepts of sub altering which means” the voices of oppressing people is going beyond reach of colonialism “As colonial nature will prefer historical identity being firm, not changed, the voices of the persons exposes the false nature of these histories.But,on the other hand, their voices are limited between that is not brought down properly in the histories of Eastern countries as well as Western countries opposing each other. He gives importance to sub altering as it is favouring the” unexpecting, hybridity and unexpected culture. “above authenticity of cultures. Gayatri Chakravorty in her essays writes, Will the subalterns speak? the subalterns are subjected to the presence of whom is questioned under debates. The pedagogy narration of the countries is not complete, specially through experience of the migrant as well as in exile for example Rushdie as well as Bhabha, as there is no places for those people in the narrations. Where he speaks about imaginary communities of the country, he refers to migrants people and exile from new transplanting, from whom homes are often abstract concepts instead of fixed locations. The existing people in exile and migrants having problems in the nation as the persons have no real place to stay in the country. He thinks of himself as a migrant person and simultaneously asks privileges to the migrants, who are entangled between various cultures, which represents the conditions of after colonization space and being fully equipped to writing about the country. Migrants are the displaced, existing between, not acceptable or fixed to any one area or cultures and hence having different ideas on the national identity. Minor disturbance sets the actions of emerging in the powerful images and signs, the accommodating as well as temporary existence in the form of proxies. It asks for proves of origins that can lead to claiming of importance in cultures as well as history, acknowledging the status of country and its cultures as well as the persons are content having their spaces for a life amidst the pedagogy presentation of lives “The facts seems stemming in large from the fact that migrant 99 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

will never feel at home. He writes about his experience of being displaced, having noted the ideas of home, which is not to be found, but seems like an ideal place somewhere. The identification of emerging identities after colonial era, of the migrants is always moving unable to find their real homes. These identities destabilize as well as question the memories of nations, functions as an alternative, narration and countering it. The authenticity of the narration is being underwritten with routine anxieties within the country as well as disagreeing with who controls the narration, this can lead to disturbing the strong identities that have been built about the strong country. These hybrids challenge the powers of colonizer whose unlawful demands and power, identify strategy of undermining the people by discrimination using the powers. Suddenly, the controlling narrations of the person in power brings in anxieties. Huddart says “For Bhabha in analysing towards illumination of the agencies of colonization, and the anxiety, where it has to remain open to resistance in colonizing. “He has referred to the opening of the country, moment where the people colonized are capable of going against the actions in protests. The sub alteredhybrids as well get expressed through the action of the persons. The permatives, in creating the narrations, in the processes of writing as well as rewriting them, in ways that does not change the drafting. Evidence of original pedagogy in countries are still seen, even as performatives reacts to it and creative narrations are made. He is offering metaphors for understanding the same, “Manuscripts where there is overwriting, heavy explanations are provided on them which were visible below the writings: offering a suggesting model of hybridity” Further, the whole process is never ending,and, in a fix, resistance is shown on the identities. Performance going against the pedagogical, the dramatic performances create an identity among the persons who are participating. In consequence, the persons on both sides of the nation become objects for performing in those narrations. The countries are made, built as well as changed by lots of narrations, speaking against the same can lead to disturbances in the identities of the country, destroying the image of the country. The narrations of modern society seems to be coexisting with confidence, talking about the progress of democracy along with technology.Butthe coexistence and calmness has been bought at the expenses of history. The nation’s memories shows problems to those who are not fitting in the construction of the same. In such cases, voices of migrants are buried below the total national memories, the possibilities for responding to the memory comes in countering it. Bhabha writes further, “Countering narrations of the countries that continuously invoke and remove the total boundary both in real as well as actual are disturbed by ideological operations through imaginative communities which are given as essential identity. The said boundaries of the nations in questions are forms of counternarratives.This expose the building 100 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)