Postcolonial studies is a critical approach to texts, most of them written by the colonised or the formerly colonised but others by the coloniser or former coloniser - all of which involve traces the material and psychological set of relationships generally known as colonialism. In its crudest form, colonialism arises from the establishment of power and authority in given country without consent of the“native” population. The means concerned in this undertaking are primarily (or at least initially) those of economic and military might and afterwards those required for the imposition of the culture of the colonising society or nation on their colonised subjects.

A form of culture which results in the imbrication of the social subject (or individual) in the meaning-systems of the dominant class are usually called“hegemony”, after the term coined by the Italian Marxist Antoni Gramsci in the 1940s.[1]. Hegemony, as distinct from conquest, implies the consent of the colonised subject - or, at least, his/her unknowing participation in a culture that maintains him/her in a position of permanent subordination. Cultural hegemony is the means by which the colonising power enter into and controls the consciousness of the colonised.

In order to decolonise effectively it is necessary not simply to repel the military and economic forces of the coloniser but also to“decolonise the mind” (in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s phrase) - in other words, to reconfigure consciousness so that it no longer reflects the colonisers’ conception of the colonised. Colonialism is a matter of identity no less than property or possession. The power of representation must be repossessed and the image must be remade.

The freedom to “be oneself” is the ultimate freedom - both for the coloniser and the coloniser. In postcolonial theory it is generally held that the distortions of the colonial system are such that this freedom is denied to both parties, since each is embroiled in falsifications generated by that system which locates them at opposite ends of a scale of values: white, black; good, bad; industrious, lazy; intelligent, stupid; honest, liars; loyal, treacherous; sexually monogamous, sexually promiscuous, &c., &c.

In colonial ideologies, the colonised are generally assumed to be“primitive” and“uncivilised”, and therefore in need of the guiding hand of a“superior” or more advanced culture not only to progress but to save them from the effects of their own barbaric nature. This view is rationalisation of conquest and invasion and typically follows after it; in the preceding phase, the native may even be represented as a sort of edenic figure - pastoral or heroic, unspoilt, unfallen, innocent.

In either case, the effect of such assumptions is a structure of feeling that fixes certain traits and capabilities pertaining to each party in the colonial relationship in an array of stereotypes which restrict the free development of identities. In their extreme form such stereotype invoke responses such as enslavement and genocide on one side, and insurrection, rebellion or even suicidal vengeance on the other.

These extremes reveal an essentially pathological ingredient in all colonial relationships; for, in spite of the colonists’ claim to possess a monopoly on rationality, the system he inhabits (and which renders that claim necessary) constitutes an affront to the normal standards of healthy civic life - thast is an atmosphere of communality with social justice and mutual advantage oiling the relation between constituent groups and classes. (Whether those conditions are actually realised in any society - ancient or modern,“primitive” or“civilised” - is another matter.)

The earlier postcolonial theorists insisted that the colonial system is necessarily divided into different and opposite zones, that of the colonist and that of the colonised, and that these zones are usually inscribed on the geography of the colony itself, determining for example the lay-out of the towns and the relation between the metropolitan and rural areas inhabited by underdeveloped or unregenerate natives, peasants, tribesmen, and so forth. Ghettoes, kasbahs, &c., are all part of this bipolar urban geography.) This idea is most forcefully conveyed by writers such as Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon.

More recently, however, postcolonial scholars have come to acknowledge an area of activity and awareness between the extremes of colonist and colonised where the colonised subject is seen as mimicking the coloniser, both in the attempt to achieve assimilation (i.e., being“as good as” the other) and in the more complex endeavour to undermine and deconstruct the malignant stereotypes by which the colonial system is actually perpetuated.

According to Homi Bhabha, the effect of this mimickry is to alert the coloniser to the limitations his own stereotype, thus propelling him towards a new form of self-awareness which recognises the ambiguity of his identity. In this view, the outcome of such exchanges for both the coloniser and the colonised (though chiefly for the latter, since the former has generally removed himself or been removed by the time the latter begins to engage with the true complexity of his situation) is known as“hybridity” - a term with obvious overtones of inter-breeding borrowed from the language of animal stock.

Postcolonial theory has a double aspect: on the one hand, it is concerned with what happens during the colonial phase and (more crucially) the period of decolonisation. On the other, it is concerned with what happens after the phase of political decolonisation is over. In its former character, it is really about anti-colonial resistance. In its latter character, it is about the development of the postcolonial subject as a socially and psychologically autonomous being.

The concept of hybridity belongs exclusively to the latter phase since during the former the colonial subject is intent on establishing his separate identity on the basis of identitarian properties (physiology, culture, custom and belief) which have been repressed or“stolen” by the colonist. This is therefore the period of revivalism and can also be a period of religious fundamentalism. Those two phases seem to belong to different historical moments. In reality, however, colonisation, anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial hybridity are not entirely distinct or separate in time: that is to say, they can subsist in the same subject at one and the same moment without fatal contradiction.

By“contradiction”, in this context, we mean not simply a state of logical incoherence but a state of identitarian confusion which, in extreme cases, may render the subject incapable of affective relations and may even lead to psychological defeat with its correlate, self-killing. Yet some degree of confusion is inevitable in any state of historical change and particularly in a postcolonial context where large social and cultural structures have been opposed to each other with violent consequences.

In Gramscian theory, ideology is not a monolithic structure which expresses itself as certain knowledge or belief (i.e., dogma) but rather a set of shifting ideas and practices which define what is taken to be“common sense” in any period. This appears to be an appropriate way of viewing the state of sometimes conflicting“realities” which is inhabited by the postcolonial subject. In a play by the Irish writer Brian Friel, for instance, one character faced with the language-shift from Irish to English of the 1830s, declares that ‘confusion is an honourable condition’.

What is the proper object of Postcolonial criticism as distinct from postcolonial theory? Postcolonial criticism takes as its primary object texts that deal with or involve the conditions of a colonised and decolonising world. This refers in the first instance to the literature of colonised or formerly colonised countries rather than the literature produced by colonisers in those countries - although the latter serves very well to illustrate colonial stereotypes and the efforts made by the colonisers to adapt them to a wider human vision - or, in certain nefarious cases, to perpetuate a narrow, self-serving version. (Writers such as Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, J. G. Farrell and Paul Scott are interesting in this connection.)

Yet, for obvious reasons, postcolonial literature is a term more or less reserved for writings produced by authors residing in or originating from former colonies - including many involved in a“diaspora” who have resettled in the colonising country either for economic advantage or because life in the decolonised homeland is too dangerous to permit them to remain. (In modern Britain the voluntary immigrant is much more common than the asylum seeker - though the latter makes up an increasingly significant part of the multi-cultural population.)

In spite of being about the postcolonial subject, however, postcolonial literature is not uniquely of interest to that subject. In other words - as Booker prizes and book-sales amply demonstrate - the Salmon Rushdies and Monica Alis of modern English literature are in no way less popular with novel readers than the Ian McEwans and Helen Fieldings (of Bridget Jones fame). Postcolonial literature interests the general reader because its subject-matter is interesting. It also speaks to the former colonisers about their own cultural history and social attitudes, and does not cease to speak to him/her after the colonial episode is over.

On the contrary: postcolonial literature serves to unteach the former coloniser to believe in his/her own ideology in any absolute sense while teaching him and her to understand the nature of hegemonic power. Inevitably, it also speaks to feminists, members of specific ethnic groups with or without colonial histories, and finally to members with“minority” sexual orientations - gays lesbians, and transexuals who experience the workings of stereotypes and have to negotiate the“normative” standards of the dominant ideology in closely parallel ways.

From this standpoint, postcolonial literature represents the front edge of changing social and cultural awareness in a rapidly changing world. In a similar way, postcolonial studies gathers together a powerful battery of existing intellectual approaches to the description of the modern world with particular emphasis on language considered as a system of signs and culture considered as a medium of psychological experience. In this respect it follows on the linguistic revolution associated with Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught that all signs - and hence all culture - are ultimately arbitrary and that the“meaning” of a given sign is predicated on its ‘difference’ from other signs in the same meaning-system.

The effect of this was to neutralise the self-valorising characteristics of European culture considered as the unique embodiment of value since (in Derrida’s terminology) it“deferred” to a time/location beyond the present moment of utterance and hence rendered it a kind of“nothing” in the special sense that it was no longer considered to have an intact and static meaning secreted within it. This fits in well with the generally agnostic climate of modern times and with the theme of“nothingness” which dominates existentialist thinking.

In such a climate, all cultures begin to seem arbitrary and relative, their differences seeming as accidental as those existing between two neighbouring snowflakes. One efect of this mode of thinking is to radically undercut the tendency towards racism which is a founding ingredient of all colonial and imperialist ideologies: that is, the supposition that members of developed, Western societies are more highly evolved in Darwinian terms than those of undeveloped or“primitive” societies.

The reasons for differential social history and the“advance” of Northern European countries in intellectual and technological terms during the eighteenth and nineteenth century are very complex but do not, on any credible evidence, include the supposition that the biological and neurological ingredients of humanity were, in these regions,“superior” to that in other parts of the world labelled as“primitive” in the same period. Such words can be easily be used as counters in an ideological game rather than terms describing specific forms of development. Here the error is to apply them globally as though they refer to the essential nature of the persons or peoples concerned: the error known as“essentialism”.

Notwithstanding this, it is quite tenable to use the words“modern” and“civilised” in a critically-aware sense as meaning something more than a hollow form of self-adulation. Modern refers to a stage of social development that privileges the individual in relation to the market for his/her skills while civilised (from civis, -ium, a ‘city’) refers to a form of society in which the consent of the participants is a prerequisite for the rule of law and order. This is distinct from“civic order”, a term that can be readily hi-jacked by dictatorships; yet civil society is generally considered to be an adequate term for the version of popular liberal humanism which forms the dominant ideology of world society at the present time. (The chief“enemies” of civil society are totalitarianism and theocracy.)

One of the marks of the shift in cultural relations between colonisers and colonists in the twentieth century was the use of so-called“primitive” materials for modernist art - a development which coincided in ambiguous ways with the emergence of a heavily sexualised conception of human personality sponsored by Freudian psycho-analysis. This shift was dramatically exemplified by such works as Igor Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring (1913) which was seen by contemporaries as drawing on the magic and ritual of a pre-Hellenic world which looked and felt a good deal like the African world contemporaneously revealed in jazz music.

(Paradoxically it was known by musicians and scholars from the outset that the actual sources of Stravinsky’s innovative art was Russian folk music, particularly the music of the Ukraine, which had already supplied material for the Russian nationalists. What was different was the international context in which the music was now produced in conjunction with Diaghelev’s brilliant Ballet Russe, then overwhelmingly the most exciting cultural development in Paris when Paris was synonymous with the cultural avant garde.)

Postcolonial theory aims to overturn the racist stereotypes and fascistic practices of colonial discourse and in this sense it involves an explicitly revolutionary motive. It belongs to a family of human sciences which includes structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism along with the obviously partisan form of modern critical thought deriving from the same analytic tradition such as feminism, black studies and gay studies. As such it draws heavily on ideas and terminology associated with dialectical materialism (Marxism), phenomenology, psycho-analysis and existentialism.

What all of these share is a belief that society need not be the way it is, since its structures and current values are, in the last analysis, the product of codes created by specific classes for their own advantage. (Ironically, moreover, that advantage is ultimately lost insofar as the rigidity of the system condemns its ‘owners’ to cultural paralysis.) Yet, while theory has a vital role to play in critiquing the hegemonic forms of culture that condemn individuals and communities to living a life dictated by hostile systems and semiologies, literature retains a crucial role in its capacity as the intuitive form of revolutionary thought.

The case can also be made that literature is intrinsically anti-ideological in that it resists the formalism of any definite synthesis and represents instead the ambiguity that characterises the actual state of consciousness in any social situation or historical period. In this sense, literature corresponds to the immediacy of actual perception and gives a more accurate and compelling version of the drama of experience than any theoretical analysis. Clearly, however, literature and theory (or text and discourse) go hand in hand, the one assisting the other to uncover, interpret and illustrate actual cases of social and cultural interaction and the states of consciousness which attend them.

Arguably the novel is the most effective way of revealing the contents of the colonial and postcolonial world. Here, however, there is a problem for the postcolonial author since this form of literary art is one which was engendered by European bourgeois society during its expansionist phase. From this standpoint, the novel is the imperialist genre par excellence. Foremost among early examples of the novel in its modern form - as distinct from the Elizabethan“picaresque” tales of travel and adventure - was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).

This tells the story of a shipwreck in order to demonstrate the ability of the individual, separated from society, to create and maintain a habitable world with a few servicable tools: hammer, nails, a fire-arm and enough powder and ball to kill“game” for food or to resist human intruders with a display of unparalleled technicology violence in the“native” world in which he unwittingly finds himself. For James Joyce, Robinson Crusoe was the ‘true symbol of the British conquest’.

Hence

For the postcolonial reader what is chiefly striking in this novel is that fact that it incorporates an episode in which the encounter with a“savages” and that the manner in which he is described enacts a specific form of the dominant colonial trope by measuring the positive resemblance between a friendly example of the species and the physically traits of an European in the“white” (Hellenic) mould of accepted beauty established at the Renaissance while conjugating all the various physiologies of the newly-discovered colonial regions which represent variant - and inferior - positions.

Thus, of Man Friday, Defoe writes in terms what are implicitly racist, although they serve to redeem Man Friday from disfavour and to establish that there is indeed a“good” sort of native - capable and deserving of tutelage and advancement:

This neatly inserts Man Friday into a relatively comfortable niche between the negritude of Africa and the yellowness of native Americans, according to the prejudicedl ideas of colour circulating in the English metropolis at the time. Yet the“creature” whom Crusoe has rescued from cannibals - and whom he will shortly baptised in keeping with the day on which he was discovered (the Englishman’s diary being, in effect, his breviary or prayer-book) - has a few behavioural problems from the Western standpoint:

Now that he understands his servile relation to his white master, much can be done with him; but first to cure him of most reprehensible habit - the very practice, as it happens, for which Crusoe clubbed one of his pursuers to the ground and shot dead another.

Man Friday is no less a cannibal than the others, and no less than the original Carob islanders on whom William Shakespeare’s Caliban was based - the first colonial“native” of English literature and, in some sense, an foretaste of all the others. What is astonishing about The Tempest, in retrospect, is the way in which the playwright seems to have grasped intuitively the structure of colonial culture inasmuch as the the one who is instructed in the semiologies of the new culture turns them, in the end, against the instructor: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / for learning me your language.’ [6]

The West Indian writer George Lamming has pointed out that, in this exchange, Shakespeare summarises the power-relations involved in the transfer the colonist’s imposition of his own language on the colonised:

A little dangerously for his own argument, Lamming appears to assume that Caliban had no language before Prospero bestowed one on him - a supposition which suggests that the colonist’s gift really is as indispensable to the humanity of the colonised as the colonist likes to think. In reality the colonial subject does have a language before he is forced to exchange it for the materially more powerful language of the colonist. It is obvious that the colonised, in rejecting colonisation, will consider rejecting the language of the colonist as a first stage towards decolonisation. Whether is the best measure is a long-standing point of debate in postcolonial discourse.

A little further up the road of cultural forms than language is the genre of novel-writing whose historical connection with Western bourgeois social organisation has been thoroughly understood since the publication of Wayne Booth’s classic study The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).[8] Whatever its origins, the novel is a peculiarly transparent form, having no fixed or necessary relation to any given race, nation, or belief-community. It takes only a command of ordinary language and a writing tool such as pen, typewriter or wordprocessor to produce it once the principle of prose narrative has been picked up by example; and it remains the most powerful of all the communicative art forms, not least because it can readily be transposed into film.

Given the will to write novels, it is perfectly natural that colonial subjects should want to write novels about their own community and experience. What is not to be taken from granted is that they should want to write novels at all - given that the genre is heavily imbued with suppositions about the place of individual lives in society and the possibility of individual judgement from the standpoint of the independent observer with all the inflections of opinion, explanation, and simple preference or taste which mark the language of the novelist in action.

The moral stance of the liberal narrator is intrinsically antipathetic to the social and psychological processes of some traditional and revolutionary societies in the world today. In taking them up, the postcolonial novelist is, in fact, engaging in an act of complicity and subversion involving an endorsement and exploitation of the novel genre for new purposes and for the purposes of a new humanity which it did not countenance before. The moment at which Man Friday becomes a novelist is, in fact, the moment at which the colonies start to writes back.

The point is well made by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his reflections on Daniel Defoe’s great novel:

[1] For remarks on Gramsci and extracts from his work, see extract from Chris Barker, Cultural Studies (2000), infra.
[2] “Daniel De Foe - William Blake” [a lecture at La Università Popolare, Trieste] 1912; quoted in Dominic Maganiello, Joyce’s Politics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980, p.109.
[3] Robinson Crusoe (1719), Chap. 14:“A Dream Realised” (Electronic version from Guttenberg Project/Virginia Electronic Text Centre @ http://etext.lib.virginia.edu .. &c.
[4] Idem.
[3] Idem.
[6] The Tempest, Act 2, Sc. II, l. For longer extracts, see infra.
[7] George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison & Busby 1984), p.110; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), p.279.
[8] Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago UP 1961).
[9] ‘Moving towards the Centre: Towards a Pluralism of Cultures’, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26, 1 (1991), p.200.