10.1 Postcolonialism and its influence on British literature

Postcolonialism in British Literature

Postcolonialism examines how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism shaped literature, culture, and identity. It gave voice to perspectives that had been marginalized or silenced under colonial rule, and it forced readers to look at canonical British novels with fresh, more critical eyes. For this unit, the key payoff is understanding how writers like Jean Rhys and Salman Rushdie used fiction to rewrite colonial narratives, blending cultures, languages, and literary forms to reflect the complexities of a postcolonial world.

Defining Postcolonialism and Key Concepts

Postcolonialism isn't just about what happened after colonialism ended. It's a way of reading and thinking that examines the cultural, political, and economic legacies of colonialism, both in literature from formerly colonized nations and in the British canon itself.

Several core concepts come up repeatedly:

• Orientalism is Edward Said's term for the way Western literature portrayed non-Western cultures as exotic, irrational, or inferior. His 1978 book Orientalism became foundational for the entire field.
• Hybridity refers to the blending of cultural identities that results from colonial encounters. People and cultures don't stay neatly separated; they mix, and that mixing produces something new.
• Subaltern studies focus on the voices of people who were marginalized under colonialism. Gayatri Spivak's famous essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" asks whether oppressed groups can truly be heard within systems built by their oppressors.
• "Writing back" describes postcolonial authors who deliberately reinterpret or respond to canonical British texts. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, is the classic example.
• Diaspora and migration explore the experiences of displaced peoples forming new cultural identities far from their homelands. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Zadie Smith's White Teeth both deal with these themes directly.

Fundamental Theories and Approaches

These concepts translate into distinct critical approaches you should be able to identify and apply:

• Orientalism as a critical lens means looking at how Western texts represent Eastern cultures. Said himself analyzed Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, showing how the Bertram family's wealth depends on a Caribbean sugar plantation that the novel barely acknowledges.
• Hybridity, developed further by theorist Homi Bhabha, introduces the idea of a "third space" where colonizer and colonized cultures meet and produce new, hybrid identities. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia captures this through its mixed-race protagonist navigating 1970s London.
• Subaltern studies push readers to ask whose story is being told and whose is left out. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things centers characters from India's lowest caste, people whose voices rarely appear in either British or mainstream Indian fiction.
• Writing back is the most direct form of literary response. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea gives a full interior life to Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic" whom Brontë reduced to a plot device. Derek Walcott's poem Omeros reimagines Homer's Odyssey through Caribbean lives.

Postcolonial Theory's Impact

Re-evaluation of British Literature

One of postcolonialism's biggest contributions is making readers see what was always there in British novels but went unexamined. Classic texts often contain colonial subtexts and power dynamics that earlier critics simply didn't address.

• British literature frequently reinforced colonial ideologies, depicting non-Western peoples and places through what critics call the "colonial gaze": a perspective of assumed cultural superiority. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the most debated example. Chinua Achebe famously argued that Conrad dehumanized Africans even while critiquing imperialism. E.M. Forster's A Passage to India is another text where the colonial gaze operates, despite Forster's sympathetic intentions.
• Postcolonial critics also trace intertextuality between British and postcolonial works. V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, set in a newly independent African nation, is often read in direct conversation with Conrad's depiction of the Congo.

Language and Publishing in Postcolonial Context

English itself is a contested space in postcolonial literature. It was the language of colonial administration and education, which means writing in English carries political weight.

• Some writers reject English entirely. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist, made the deliberate choice to stop writing in English and publish in Gikuyu, arguing that using the colonizer's language perpetuates cultural domination.
• Others, like Rushdie, embrace English but reshape it, mixing in other languages and speech patterns to make it their own.
• The publishing industry also played a role in shaping which postcolonial voices reached readers. Penguin Books' African Writers Series, launched in 1962, was instrumental in bringing African literature to a global audience. The Caribbean Artists Movement in 1960s London created a community and platform for Caribbean writers and artists in Britain.

Challenging Colonial Narratives

Techniques of Counter-Discourse

Postcolonial writers don't just tell different stories; they use specific literary techniques to disrupt the assumptions built into Western narrative traditions.

• Counter-discourse directly challenges dominant colonial narratives. Rather than accepting the version of history told by the colonizer, these writers offer alternative accounts.
• Incorporating indigenous languages and oral traditions disrupts the dominance of standard English prose. Chinua Achebe wove Igbo proverbs throughout Things Fall Apart, making the novel's language itself an argument for the richness of the culture colonialism dismissed.
• Rewriting canonical texts is a pointed strategy. Walcott's Omeros takes the Western literary tradition's most foundational epic and relocates it to the Caribbean, centering fishermen and their communities.
• Centering marginalized voices means telling stories from perspectives that colonial literature either ignored or caricatured.
• Magical realism blends the fantastical with the everyday, challenging Western insistence on rationality as the only valid way of understanding the world. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie's narrator Saleem Sinai is telepathic, born at the exact moment of Indian independence. Ben Okri's The Famished Road draws on Yoruba spirit-world traditions to tell its story.

Subversive Literary Strategies

Beyond counter-discourse, postcolonial writers employ a range of strategies to critique colonial attitudes from within the text:

• Irony, satire, and parody expose the absurdity of colonial power. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things uses sharp satirical portrayals of British characters to undercut any lingering sense of colonial authority.
• Challenging Western literary forms means refusing to follow conventional plot structures or narrative modes. Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place uses a second-person address ("you") that directly confronts the tourist/reader, breaking the comfortable distance of traditional narration.
• Oral storytelling traditions and non-linear narratives reflect ways of organizing experience that predate and exist outside the European novel tradition. Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard draws on Yoruba oral storytelling, producing a narrative structure that feels radically different from a conventional Western novel.

Themes in Postcolonial British Literature

Identity and Cultural Hybridity

The question of who am I? runs through nearly all postcolonial fiction, but it takes on particular urgency when characters must navigate between multiple cultural worlds.

• Zadie Smith's White Teeth follows families of Bangladeshi, Jamaican, and English heritage in North London, showing how cultural identities collide, merge, and resist easy categories. Monica Ali's Brick Lane traces a Bangladeshi woman's gradual self-discovery after an arranged marriage brings her to London's East End.
• The legacy of colonialism doesn't end when a colony gains independence. It continues to shape how people think about themselves, their languages, and their cultures. Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve and Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day both explore how colonial history lingers in personal and family life.
• Language is central to these identity struggles. Writing in English, code-switching between languages, or choosing to abandon English altogether are all acts loaded with cultural meaning.

Displacement and Belonging

Closely related to identity, the theme of displacement asks: where do I belong? For diasporic characters, "home" is rarely a simple concept.

• V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas follows a Trinidadian man's lifelong struggle to own a house of his own, turning property into a symbol of autonomy and selfhood. Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners captures the experience of Caribbean immigrants arriving in 1950s London, facing both the promise and the hostility of the "mother country."
• Postcolonial fiction also rewrites history from marginalized perspectives, challenging the official narratives that colonial powers constructed. These aren't just alternative stories; they're arguments about who gets to define the past.
• Gender and sexuality intersect with colonial and postcolonial power in important ways. Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen follows a Nigerian woman navigating both patriarchal expectations and racial discrimination in London. Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy explores a gay Tamil boy's coming of age during Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, where sexuality and national identity collide.
• The natural environment and its exploitation under colonialism is another recurring concern. Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide examines ecological destruction in the Sundarbans, while Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy connects environmental devastation to the violence of the Nigerian Civil War. Saro-Wiwa wrote in "rotten English," a deliberately broken pidgin that reflects the war's destruction of language and meaning.