190

Beginning theory

Drakakis, John, cd. Allernalh'e Shakespeares (Methuen, 1985).

The term 'cultural materialism' is not used of these essays, but they
arc generally representative of this approach; they seek 'to accelerate
the break with established canons of Shakespeare criticism', exemplifying 'explorations of the ways in which historically specific readings
are generated'.
Grady, Hugh, The MfJdernist Shakespeare (Oxford University Press,
1991).
Pages 225-35 are on the new historicism. An excellent book, always
sharp and readable. Chapter four on Tillyard (the 'old historicism') is
very useful. Chapter five discusses the application of contemporary
critical trends to Shakespeare.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearian Ne[!.fJliaflom: The CirculatifJTI of
SIJcial Ener/{y In Renaissance ETI[!.land (California University Press,
1991).
The essay 'Fiction and Friction', on cross-dressing in Shakespearian
comedies, is a good starting-point on new historicism. The essay
'Invisible Bullets' is the best-known piece in the hook.
Hawkes, Terence, Thai Shakespeherian Ra[!. (Methuen, 1986).
Examples of cultural materialism in practice. The whole book is a
lively read which makes some startling juxtapositions of Shakespeare
and the circumstances in which we encounter him.
Holderness, Graham, The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester University
Ptess, 191111).
Studies of the 'culturally-produced and historically-determined
Shakespeare myth', along with 'interviews with prominent mediators
of Shakespeare in education, theatre, the press, and television'.
Levinson, Marjorie, cd. Rethlnlml[!. jltstfJI'ICl.'/Il: CritIcal ReadiTlJ',s III
RfJmaTltic IIl.lttl~)1 (Blackwell, 19119).
New historicism applied to Romanticism.
Veeser, H. Aram, cd. The New IIlSlorIClS1lJ (Routledge, 1989).
A useful and valuable source.
Wilson, Richard & Dutton, Richard, cds, New IlISlo"cism and RenalJSance
Drama (Longman, 1992).
A useful collection of key articles, well inlroduced.

10

Postcolonial criticism

Background
Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the
1990s. It is not mentioned, for instance, in the first edition of
Selden's A Reader's GUIde to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985)
or Jeremy Hawthorn's A Concise Glossary oj Contemporary LIterary Theory (1992). It has gained currency throug., the influence
of such books as: In Other Worlds (Gayatri Spivak, 1987); The
Empire Writes Back (Bill Ashcroft, 1989); Nation and Narration
(Homi Bhabha, 1990) and Culture and fmperialtsm (Edward Said,
1993). An important collection of relevant essays (though it does
not use the term 'postcolonial ism ') is I Race', Writmg and Difference (1986), reprinted from two issues of the journal CritIcal
InqUIry, and edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, one of the bestknown American figures in this field.
One significant effect of postcolonial CrItICIsm is to further
undermine the universalist claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics. If we claim that great literature
has a timeless and universal significance we thereby demote or
disregard cultural, social, regional, and national differences in
experience and outlook, preferring instead to judge all literature
by a single, supposedly 'universal', standard. Thus, for instance,
a routine claim about the 'Wessex' setting of Hardy's novels is
that it is really a canvas on which Hardy depicts and examines
fundamental, universal aspects of the human condition. Thus,
Hardy's books are not thought of as primarily regional or histor-

_._-_._--192

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Beginning theory

Postcolonial criticism

ical or masculine or white or working-class novels - they are just

novels, and built into this attitude is the assumption that this way
of writing and representing reality is the unquestioned norm, so
that the situations depicted can stand for all possible forms of
human interaction. This universalism is rejected by postcolonial
criticism; whenever a universal signification is claimed for a work,
then, white, Eurocentric norms and practices are being promoted
bv a sleight of hand to this elevated status, and all others correspondingly relegated to subsidiary, marginalised roles.
The ancestry of postcolonial criticism can be traced to Frantz
Fanon's The Wretched oJthe Earth, published in French in 1961,
and voicing what might be called 'cultural resistance' to France's
African empire. Fanon (a psychiatrist from Martinique) argued
that the first step for colonialised people in finding a voice and an '
identity is to reclaim their own past. For centuries the European
colonising power will have devalued the nation's past, seeing its
precolonial era as a pre-civilised limbo, or even as a historical
void: Children, both black and white, will have been taught to see
history, culture and progress as beginning with the arrival of the
Europeans. If the first step towards a postcolonial perspective is
to reclaim one's own past, then the second is to begin to erode
the colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued.
Hence, another major book, which can be said to inaugurate
postcolonial criticism proper is Edward Said's Orientalism (1978),
which is a specific expose of the Eurocentric universalism which
takes for granted both the superiority of what is European or
Western, and the inferiority of what is not. Said identifies a European cultural tradition of 'Orientalism', which is a particular and
long-standing way of identifying the East as 'Other' and infe~ior
to the West. The Orient, he says, features in the Western mmd
'as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (Literature in
the Modern World, ed. Dennis Walder, p. 236). This means, in
effect, that the East becomes the repository or projection of those
aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to
acknowledge (cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, and so on).
At the same time, and paradoxically, the East is seen as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive. It also
tends to be seen as humogenous, the people there being anony-

193

mous masses, rather than individuals, their actions determined by

instinctive emotions (lust, terror, fury, etc.) rather than by conscious choices or decisions. Their emotions and reactions are
always determined by racial considerations (they are like this
because they are asiatics or blacks or orientals) rather than by
apsects of individual status or circumstance (for instance, because
they happen to be a sister, or an uncle, or a coJector of antique
pottery). As Said says, after quoting the example of a colonial
administrator's 1907 account of life in Damascus, 'In such statements as these we note immediately that "the Arab" or "Arabs"
have an aura of apartness, definiteness, and collectIve self-conSIStency [my italics] such as to wipe out any-traces of individual
Arabs with na~ratable life Histories'.

Postcolonial reading
Reading literature with the perspective of 'Oriental ism' in mme
would make us, for instance, critically aware of how Yeats 'in his
two 'Byzantium' poems ('Sailing to Byzantium', 1927, and
'Byzantium', 1932) provides an image of Istanbul, the Eastern
capital of the former Roman Empire, which is identified with
torpor, sensuality, and exotic mysticism. At such. moments Yeats
adopts an ethnocentric or Eurocentric perspective, seeing the East
as an exotic 'Other' which becomes the contrasting foil to his own
pursuits and concerns, all of which the poem presents as normative. Interestingly, Edward Said has written an essay on Yeats
which reads him in the context of postcolonialism (reprinted in
Said's Culture and Imperialism ). Said views the desire, frequently
expressed in Yeats's work, to regain contact with an earlier, mythical, nationalistic Ireland as typical of writers whose own position
is postcolonial, and this is closely related to Fanon's idea. of the
need to reclaim the past. Characteristically, postcolonial writers
evoke or create a precolonial version of their own nation, rejecting the modern and the contemporary, which is tainted with the
colonial status of their countries. Here, then, is the firSt characteristic of postcolonial criticism - an awareness of representations
of the non-European as exotic or immoral Other'.
For Yeats, as often with the postcolonial writer, an uneasy ani-

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Postcolonial criticism

Beginning theory

tude to the colonial language is evident: his injunction to Irish

poets, that they should learn their craft, implies the need to serve
a humble apprenticeship. This 'humble' attitude to language may
remind us of Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about the English language in James Joyce's A Portrait oj the ArtIS! as a Younl!. Man
(published in serial form in 1914-1915), especially the early scene::
in which Stephen is patronised by an English priest because of
his use of a local dialect word. Stephen tells himself 'the language
in which we are speaking is his before it is mine ... My soul frets
in the shadow of his language' (Portrait, chapter five). More
recently, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, in a poem entitled 'The
Ministry of Fear', recalls his childhood unease and self-consciousness about his pronunciation of English ('Those hobnailed
boots from beyond the mountain / Were walking, by God, all
over the fine / Lawns of elocution') and remarks that 'Ulster was
British, but with no rights on / The English lyric' (see the collection North, 1975). This linguistic deference amounts to a sense
. that the linguistic furniture belongs to somebody else, and therefore shouldn't be moved around without permission. Some postcolonial writers have concluded that the colonisers' language is
permanently tainted, and that to write in it involves a crucial
acquiescence in colonial structures. Language itself, then, is a
~econd area of concern in postcolonial criticism. (For an essay on
poetic. language from this postcolonial perspective see Stan
Smith's 'Darkening English: Post-imperial contestations in the
language of Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott' in Enf[/ish,
Spring 1994).
As this implies, Yeats, being a member of the Protestant ruling
class in Ireland, has a double identity as both coloniser and
colonised, and it is the recognition of such double identities which
is one of the strengths of the postcolonialist view. Thus, the
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, publishing his first novel,
Things Fall Apart, in 1958, was criticised by an early reviewer for
affecting to identify with African villagers when actually his university education and his broadcasting job in the capital city of
Lagos should make him identify, it was implied, with the values
of 'civilisation', supposedly brought to Africa by Europeans. (See
Achebe's paper 'Colonialist Criticism' in Literalure In the Modem

1.:

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195

World, ed. Dennis Walder, Oxford University Press, 1990). This

emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable is a hird
characteristic of the postcolonial approach.
At one level Achebe's use of a village Africa corresponds to
Yeats's evocation of a precolonial, mythological Ireland of hcrces
and heroines. At another level, the double or hybrid identitv is
precisely what the postcolonial situation brings into being. -[he
shift in attitudes in the 1980s and 1990s is towards postco!oPo'al
writers seeing themselves as using primarily African or Asi.:n
forms, supplemented with European-derived influences, ra h~r
than as working primarily within European genres like the novel
and merely adding to them a degree of exotic Africanisation. A,l
postcolonial literatures, it might be said, seem to m.ake this transition. They begin with an unquestioning acceptance of the
authority of European models (especially in the novel) and with
the ambition of writing works that will be masterpieces entirdy
in this tradition. This can be called the 'Adopt' phase of colonia:
literature, since the writer's ambition is to adopt the form as it
stands, the assumption being that it has universal va!iditv. The
second stage can be called the 'Adapt' phase, since it aims t~ adapt
the European form to African subject matter, thus assuming partial rights of intervention in the genre. In the final phase here is,
so to speak, a declaration of cultural independence when:by
African writers remake the form to their own specification, without reference to European norms. This might be called the
'Adept' phase, since its characteristic is the assumption that the
colonial writer is an independent 'adept' in the form, not a
humble apprentice, as in the first phase, or a mere licensee, as in
the second. This stress on 'cross-cultural' interactions is 2. fou.rth
characteristic of postcolonialist criticism.
This notion of the double, or divided, or fluid identity which
is characteristic of the postcolonial writer explains the great
attraction which post-structuralism and deconstruction have
proved to be for the postcolonial critic. Post-structurajism is centrally concerned to show the fluid and unstable nature of personal
and gender identity, the shifting, 'polyvalent', cont,adictorv currents of signification within texts, and the way literature j;:;df IS
a site on which ideological struggles arc acted out. This mind-set

196

Beginning theory

i~adQlirably suited to expressing the numerous contradictions

and multiple allegiances of which the postcolonial writer and
critic is constantly aware. This post-structuralist perspective is
seen ,iOdhe work of such representative figures as Henry Louis
Gates Jr, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. In all three of these
a complex Derridean-Foucauldian notion of textuality and fields
of discourse is immediately apparent. Similarly in all three, the
surface of the writing is difficult and the route through to any
consequent political action (or stance, even) is necessarily indirect. This kind of postcolonial criticism roughly corresponds,
then, to the theoreticised 'French' feminist criticism associated
with figures like Julia Kristeva or Helene Cixous. The example of
postcolonial criticism offered later is from the work of Edward
Said, who is less overtly theoretical, seems to accept some of the
premises of liberal humanism, and has a more 'up-front' political
affiliation (his identification with the Palestinian Arab cause). His
work is in this regard reminiscent of the 'Anglo-American' variety of feminist criticism, which likewise seems (to me) more
overtly political and certainly more immediately accessible.
If the three stages mentioned earlier (Adopt, Adapt, and
Adept) provide a way of seeing postcolonial literature, then a way
of seeing the stages of postcolonial criticism would be to suggest,
as we have just been doing, that they closely parallel the developmental stages of feminist criticism. In its earliest phase, which
is to say before it was known as such, postcolonial criticism took
as iilil main subject matter white representations of colonial countries and criticised these for their limitations and their bias: thus,
critics would discuss the representation of Africa in Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness or of India in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, or of Algeria in Albert Camus's The Outsider. This
corresponds to the early 1970s phase of feminist criticism when
the subject matter was the representation of women by male novelists like D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller - the classic instance
is Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. The second phase of postcolonial
criticism involved a turn towards explorations of themselves and
their society by postcolonial writers. At this stage the celebration
and exploration of diversity, hybridity, and difference become
central. This is the stage when, in the title of the well-known pio-

Postcolonial criticism

197

neering work in this field, 'the empire writes back'. This corresponds to the 'gynotext' phase of feminist criticism, when there
is a turn towards the exploration of female experience and identities in books by women. The analogy between these two types
of criticism might be pushed a little further, so that a parallel
might also be perceived with the split in feminist criticism
between 'theoretical' and 'empirical' versions, as suggested above.
Thus, in postcolonial criticism we might see a split between variants very directly influenced by deconstruction and post-structuralism - such as the work of Homi Bhabha - and work like
Said's which accepts a good deal from liberal humanism, is written in a more accessible way, and seems perhaps to lend itself
more directly to political engagement.

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STOP and THINK

Postcolonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural
difference in literary texts and is one of several critical
approaches we have considered which focus on specific issues,
including issues of gender (feminist criticism), of class (Marxist
criticism), and of sexual orientation (lesbian/gay criticism).
This raises the possibility of a kind of 'super-reader' able to
respond equally and adequately to a text in all these ways. In
practice, for most readers one of these issues tends to eclipse all
the rest.
For instance, the example of feminist criticism, from Gilbert
and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (Chapter 6) doesn't
comment on aspects of Wuthering Heights which would
interest postcolonial critics, such as Heathcliff's being described
by Emily Bronte in terms of a racial 'Other' (a gipsy, 'a little
Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway'). He is described by
Gilbert and Gubar as Catherine's 'alter-ego or Id', and
contrasted in his darkness with the blond Edgar who presides
,over the Grange, which is presented, however ironically, as
'heaven', 'society', and 'reason'. This is a conflating of racial
Otherness with the irrational forces of the id or the
subconscious which might be thought insensitive.

198

Postcolonial criticism

Beginning theory

Postcolonial criticism: an example

Should we, in general, try to become super-readers, with

multiple layers of sympathy and awareness, or will trying to do
so merely produce blandness and superficiality?
Obviously, it is impossible for anybody to answer this
question for anybody else. My own feeling is that while an
even spread of awareness across all these issues is theoretically
possible, in practice aiming for this, merely in the interests of
political correctness, is almost bound to produce superficiality.
A genuine interest in one of these issues can really only arise
from aspects of your own circumstances. These perspectives
cannot be put on and off like a suit - they have to emerge and
declare themselves with some urgency.

What postcolonial critics do

. '.

"

I. They reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of

canonical Western literature and seck to show its limitations
of outlook, especially its general inability to empathise across
boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
2. They examine the representation of other cultures in literature as a way of achieving this cnd.
3, They show how such literature is often evasively and crucially
silent on matters concerned with colonisation and imperialism
(sec, for instance, the discussion (If Jane Austen's Mansfield
- Park in the example described below).
4. They foreground questions of cultural difference and diversity and examine their treatment in relevant literary works.
5. They celebrate hybridity and 'cultural polyvalency'. that is,
the situation whereby individuals and groups belong simultaneously to more than one culture (for instance, that (If the
coloniser, through a colonial school system, and that of the
colonised, through local and oral traditions),
6. They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and
perceived 'Otherness' are seen as sources of energy and potential change.

199

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.

Let us take the essay by Edward Said on Jane Austen's Mansfield

Park, an essay rapidly achieving something of a definitive status
and available in Mulhern's Contemporary MarXIst CritiCIsm, in
Newton's Theory into Practice, in Eagleton's Raymond Williams:
Critical Perspectives and in Said's own Culture and Imperialism.
Under the title 'Jane Austen and the Empire' Said car~fu!ly 'foregrounds the background' of Austen's novel, which is the estate in
Antigua which Sir Thomas Bertram owns, and through which the
estate of Mansfield Park is maintained. The central irony, then,
is that the estate in England which represents an ideal of order
and civilisation is sustained by another estate a world away, so
that Mansfield Park would 'not have been possible without the
slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class' (Mulhern, p.
111), for as Said remarks, 'Sir Thomas's property in the
Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by
slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)' (p. 106). Said thus
makes central the 'moral geography' of the novel, and sees Austen
as the start of a line in fiction which leads to Conrad and Kipling
in which the processes of colonialisation are examined. As Mu;hern puts it in his introductory note, the consequence is that the
'dating of British culture's imperial phase must be revised backwards from the beginning of formal Empire into the eighteenth
century' (p. 97). Thus, Sir Thomas, returning home and rapidly
re-establishing order, without ever the thought that his views and
instincts could be narrow or mistaken, is the quintessential co!onialising figure who takes himself as the norm of civilisation. He
is, says Said, 'a Crusoe setting things in order', Nothing prevents
our assuming, he says, that he 'does exactly the same things - on
a larger scale - in Antigua ... to hold and rule Mansfield Park is
to hold and rule an imperial estate in association with it' (p. 104).
This reading involves 'concretising' a dimension of the novel
which is largely left implicit: it involves, not necessarily arguing
that all these things an: 'there' in the novel, but that this is the
right way to read it. All the same, Said insists, precisely, that
these things are there: 'all these things having to do with the outside brought in, seem to me unmistakably there in the sugges-

200

Beginning theory

tiveness of her allusive and abstract language'. So Said invokes

the processes of close reading in his support, for the most part
convincingly, but in the end his appeal seems to be to the conscience of the (especially) white and middle-class reader:
Wc cannot easily say that since Mansfield Park is a novel, its affiliations with a particularly sordid history are irrelevant or transcended, not only because it is irresponsible to say that, but because
'0 we know too much to say so without bad faith. (p. liZ)

There is, I think, no doubt about the effect of reading Said's

essay. Any 'innocence' we might have had about this aspect of the
novel goes: it is impossible henceforth to read it without a constant awareness of that absentee settler-planter who is at the
centre of everything, in one sense, and yet constantly withdrawn
and marginal in another. Said's reading likewise locates the centre
of the book in an absence, in things unsaid and unspecified. In
this sense it is a form of Marxist criticism influenced by poststructuralist views, contrasting with Krieger's much 'straighter'
Marxism. It also, like new historicism, comes closer to actually
naming the details of a specific social/colonial situation (the
absentee planter-landlord class of eighteenth-century Antigua)
~ther than just evoking a generalised notion of colonial exploitatIOn.

201

Postcolonial criticism

inconcei vable without referencing Mr Hhabha'.

Ccsaire, Aimc, Return III My NatIve Land, (Penguin Poets, 1969).
This and the next title arc early founding texts of postcoloniaJism,
their status corresponding to that of 'classics' like The Female EUlluch
or The Femimne Mystique within feminism ..
Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched I//the Earth (Penguin, J961).
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, cd. 'Race', Writin/{ and Difference (Chicago,
1985).
Said, Edward, Omllta/ism (Pantheon, New York, 1978).
Said's work has been a major influence in this field, and he is a useful
entry-point since his writing has an ~mmediate accessibility and clarity of impact.
Said, Edward, The WI/rid, the Text and tlte Critic (Harvard University
Press 1983).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays

l1/

Cultural PI/litics

(Routledge, 1987).
Spivak is another major figure, but her close involvement with poststructuralism makes her writing quite demanding. A starting point
might be her essay 'Draupadi' (on a Bengali short story, which she
translates and reprints) in Newton's Theo~y intI/ PractIce.
Walder, Dennis, cd. Literature l1/ the Modern WI/rid (Oxford University
Press, 1990).
Contains Chinua Achebe's paper 'Colonialist Criticism', and other
useful material in the ~clcvant section.

Selected reading
Ashcroft, Bill, ~t al., The Empir~ Writ~s Back: Theory and Practice in Postcl/lo"ia/ Literature (Routledge, 1989).
A readable and comprehensive book which provides an excellent start
on this topic.
Bhabha, Homi K., cd. NatlOll and NarratlUn (Routledge, 1990).
A definitive early collection in this field, with pieces by several of the
major figures.
Bhabha, Homi K., The Locatllln I/[Culture (Routledge, 1994).
Examines 'the cultural and political boundaries which exist in between
the spheres of gender, race, class and sexuality'. Discusses Morrison,
Gordimer and Rushdie. Not an easy writer, but (says Toni Morrison)
'any serious discussion of post-coloniallpostmodern scholarship IS

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