Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory has emerged as one of the most diverse, controversial, and contentious fields in literary and cultural studies in the way it has raised, debated, contested, and reexamined issues of resistance, nationality and nationalism, race and ethnicity, language, culture, and globalization. Postcolonial theory is a term used to refer to theoretical and critical strategies employed to examine the cultures of former colonies of the Western powers and how they relate to, and interact with, the rest of the world. The term was originally employed in literary studies, where it focused on the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries, or the literature of colonizing countries that deals with colonization or colonized peoples. Now, however, it has gained prominence over time and is applied to other areas, such as political science, public relations, history, economics, sociology, and biblical studies. Greatly interested in the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, postcolonial theory seeks to critically investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one of them ideologically fashions itself as superior and assumes dominance and control over the other.

The field of postcolonial studies has itself been hotly contested ever since its rise in the 1970s. It is disputatious among its practitioners even in matters of defining the term postcolonial. Some have insisted on hyphenating post-colonial, arguing that the hyphen is a statement about the particularity of the historically and culturally grounded nature of the experience the term represents, and implicating the use of postcolonial in unlocated, abstract, and poststructuralist theorizing. The precise parameters and indices of categorizing and identifying the field and its theoreticians have also been questioned. Thus there are various approaches to the field.

It has been argued that theorizing about the post-colonial starts with the first colonial subjects who seriously reflected on their state and condition as the colonized. But most of the field's practitioners and commentators begin their discourse with the works of Frantz Fanon, particularly Black Skin, White Masks (1951) and The Wretched of the Earth (1962). These texts' major import for postcolonial studies and theory is in the way Fanon uses the psychoanalytic perspective to read and interpret the colonial person as both colonized and subject. The colonized people are depicted by the colonizer as the other, and inferior to the colonizer, an opposition that serves to assert the superiority of the Self. This Self-Other binary, and other Fanonian concepts like resistance, have been built in to become crucial concepts in the present-day postcolonial theory debates.

But it was Edward W. Said's Orientalism of 1978 that provided the major impetus in the rise to prominence of postcolonial studies and theory. Informed largely by the Foucauldian theories on discursive systems of power, Said's text offers a major critique of the European representations of the Orient. According to Said, the West tried to justify and legitimize its territorial conquests and expansionism by constructing and enhancing the Orientalism discourse, which in turn fashions the Orient as Europe's Other, and hence greatly privileges and empowers Europe.

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