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Postcolonial Fiction - ENG312C2
Study Resources
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The Book Stack
[ All of the following titles are listed by alphabetically in each teaching category. ]
| Keynote Articles by Authors and Critics (Full Text) |
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| Chinua Achebe (1) |
Achebe argues that English is the Nigerian national language since it is the one that unites all parts of the nation, and illustrates his own belief that African writers can be creative both as novelists and poets in that language - with an example from his own novel Arrow of God. |
| Chinua Achebe (2) |
The price of Conrad’s eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the “dark” continent and her people [...] a price is far too high for Achebe. (Interview by Caryl Phillips, in The Guardian, Feb. 2003.) |
| Chinua Achebe (3) |
Conrad [is] safely dead. [...] Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as “among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” |
| Ngugi wa Thiong’o |
Ngugi (formerly James) wa Thiong’o disagrees with Chinua Achebe that Nigerian experience can be expressed in English, and he gives an account of his own childhood and education setting out graphically the reasons why ... |
| Léopold Seghar |
Seghar - later president of Senegal - was one of the African writers in Paris in the 1940s who identified “nègritude” (blackness) as the source of a distinctive non-Western value-system. This is black pride with philosophical muscle but is it romance? ( Wole Soyinka has an answer ...) |
| Albert Memmi |
Col. Muammar Gadhaffi of Libya invited North African Jews to return to the lands of their birth with promises that they would be treated as “one of us”, but Memmi was not convinced that Arabs are any less anti-semitic than other nations ... |
| Frantz Fanon |
Writing at the time of the Algeria War, Fanon argues in a crucial chapter of Wretched of the Earth that the effects of colonisation can only be overcome by revolutionary violence. Just as this document has served to mandate terrorism it is also the document with which all passivists must conduct their argument. See also ... |
| Homi Bhabha |
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| J.-P. Sartre |
Sartre’s enthusiastic preface to The Wretched of the Earth marks not only the turning-point of French opinion against their country’s colonial obsession with “Greater France” (i.e., Algeria), but also recalls the mood of the student revolution of 1968 which he joined as a sort of elder brother ... |
| G. C. Spivak |
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demolishes the cultural relativism of the post-modernists (Deleuze & Guattari) and takes on Michael Foucault, author of the theory of ”discourses of power” - both of which belittle the colonial subject and ignore his/her real subjugation and silence ... |
Salmon Rushdie
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Rushdie - the fictional master of what Homi Bhabha calls “hybridity” and the comical elegist of an India destroyed by partition - reflects on nationhood in an entirely unillusioned fashion which leads him to attach a practical value to his British passport ... |
| Jenny Sharpe |
Sharpe relates the famous Cawnpore Massacre in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in which female British prisoners were executed by the retreating rebel forces - an event that was soon converted by the colonial imagination into an symbol of native barbarism and a justification for empire ... |
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| Benedict Anderson |
The man who coined the wide-used definition of nations as “imagined communities” - a definition which locates their origins in literature, culture and tradition. |
| Chinua Achebe |
A short life of the writer with some critical comments from the Emory Univ. website |
| Aimé Cesaire |
Carribean author of a post-colonial version of Shakepeare’s play The Tempest (Une Tempête) and associate of Léopold Seghor in Paris ... |
| Monica Ali |
Monica Ali talks about the experiences of her early family life in and out of Bangladeshi when it was still Eastern Pakistan. ... |
| Ben Okri |
A full account of the writer and his works by Robert Bennett - an able and discerning scholar-critic. (Don’t miss “A Musical Response” from Ulster, attached.) ... |
| Toni Morrison |
A selection of articles and reviews of the black novelist novelist who gave a human face to Afro-American slaves ... |
| Salmon Rushdie |
The Pegasos website biography of Rushdie offers a sound overall view of the writers’s career and attainments ... |
| Léopold Seghor |
Seghor is known for his romantic celebration of “nègritude [blackness]” as emotional, rhytmical and ecological .... |
| Ngugi wa Thiong’o |
A short notice on the author of Petals of Blood and one of the most searching critics of African-literature in English ... |
| Rudyard Kipling |
The author of Kim (1901), first novel on our reading list, was both the author of the best-known poetic tributes to British imperialism and a series of complex novels advancing his hopes of a hybrid civilisation and now read as a complex figure of imperialist hegemony in the Indian subcontinent whose literary qualities and genius for coinage redeems him from postcolonial damnation. |
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Topics |
| Postcolonial (def.) |
Definitions of “postcolonialism” gleaned from Internet and other sources, indicating how elastic and imprecise the terminology is. ... |
| Postcolonial (def.) |
Definitions of “postcolonialism” gleaned from Internet and other sources, indicating how elastic and imprecise the terminology is. ... |
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| A-Z |
Extracts and Selections |
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| Fiction |
Some key passages of novels on the module |
| Rudyard Kipling (1) |
A full text version of Kim (1901) is in process of being placed on this website at 13.02.06. The text is searchable on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and you can identify recurrent themes and motifs by this means. (An edition of Soldiers Three will be added shortly.) |
| Rudyard Kipling (2) |
“Take Up the White Man’s Burden” is a poem written in the form of an Anglican hymn pronouncing the mission of the British to bring civilization to the ‘fluttered folk and wild’ who live ‘without the law’. ֧Recessional” is a paean to the sacrifice made by imperialists in the execution of that doubtful benefit to the countries that they conquered through commercial and military intervention and called a world empire. |
| Joyce Cary |
Mister Johnson gives a profound insight into the the British colonialist mind-set - liberal and well-meaning but nonetheless a case of colonial stereotyping which has insensed African writers almost as much as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ... |
| Chinua Achebe |
Things Fall Apart describes the impact of colonial intrusion on native Igbo society in Nigeria; his novel describes the world before and after the missionary and military interventions which bring an end to one reality and the dawning of another ... |
| Toni Morrison |
Beloved is an astonishingly vital and moving account of the trauma of slavery involving the relentless cruelty of white slave-owners and the terrible self-mutilation that it imposes on its victims as a last-stand self-protective measure ... |
| Arundhati Roy |
The God of Small Things (1997) tells the truly brutal story of caste-barriers ending in murder in post-colonial Kerala (India), when a Christian bourgeois family find themselves drawn into the animosities of a traditional society ... |
| Monica Ali |
Brick Lane (2003) narrates the life of a Bangladeshi woman, Ali, married to an older man at her father’s command and now living in London. Her growth in independence and sense of self gives an extraordinary insight into the experience of British Asians ... |
| J. M. Coetzee |
Disgrace (1999) deals with a university teacher who is disciplined for an affair with a student and learns through the rape of his own daughter that the reality of victimisation in the new Africa is more complex than his Eng.-lit. outlook permits him to understand. |
| Discourse |
Extracts from discursive works on postcolonial topics .... |
| Albert Memmi |
Memmi - a North Africa Jew - offered an authoritative account of the structure of colonialism in its political, social, and cultural essentials and established the principle that the structure, not individuals, is the real determiner of relations ... |
Homi Bhabha |
In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha supplies the term “hybridity” as a way of describing the condition of post-colonial nations considered as a starting point rather than a tragedy ending. “Ambivalence”, “liminality” and “Third Space” are among the other terms he uses ... |
| Homi Bhabha |
In ‘The Other Question’ (1996), Homi Bhabha discusses the limits of stereotyping as a way of understanding the ‘production of the colonial self’ or ‘subjectification’ within colonial (and post-colonial) discourse. |
| Frantz Fanon |
Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is the great call to anti-colonial revolution, based on his understanding of the psycho-pathology of colonialism which he masterfully described from the standpoint of a psycho-analyst in Black Skin, White Masks. |
| Ernest Gellner |
Ernest Gellner shares with Benedict Anderson the idea that nationalism is an ‘invention’ but believes that it is rarely beneficial one and that it inevitably leads to war. Encounters with Nationalism (1994) contains a striking critique of Edward Said ... |
| Eric Hobsbaum |
Eric Hobsbaum gives a Marxist account of the rise of nationalism in 19th-century Europe and elsewhere, tracing the claims used to assert the right to separate from larger dynastic states - claims chiefly concerned with language and ethnicity ... |
| Edward Said |
In Orientalism (1977), Edward Said used that term to describe the way in which European cultures constructed versions of the world and experience of the Middle East and beyond and thereby created a means of dominating ... . |
| Edward Said |
In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said extended his analysis of the creation of colonial “others” to the whole scope of English and European literature, giving analyses of works by Austin, Kipling and Conrad but also Verdi’s opera Aida as examples of the mechanicisms involved ... |
| Edward Said |
Criticises Leopold Sédar Segor’s thesis of négritude for its acceptance of the Western polarity of black and white, simply reversing the polarity without abolishing it ... |
| Benedict Anderson |
Imagined Communities (1983) - the most lucid account of the thorny question of nationhood - revolves around the idea that nations come into existence in the imagination before they exist on maps. His examples are mostly Asian ... |
| R. F. Holland |
A British historian writing about ‘European decolonisation’, finds its cause in the breakdown of the the ‘clogging’ of empire by what he calls ‘miasmic dust’. This account does not represent colonialism as inherently corrupt but inevitably prone to failure ... |
| John Springhall |
Outlining the chronology of British decolonisation since 1945, Springhall covers such topics as the ‘structural weakness’ of post-war Britain and the economic hegemony that was often substituted for direct colonial rule ... |
| Parker & Starkey |
These essays look the means that at Achebe, Ngugi, Desi and Walcott use to articulate their own experience when faced with the monopoly of culture by the colonist. (Sample contents include brief notes on several essays about Achebe) ... |
| Anton Gramsci |
Anton Gramsci originated the political term hegemony, much used in cultural and postcolonial criticism today. Chris Barker (Cultural Studies, 2000) gives an account of it that makes its value in both contexts perfectly clear to the ordinary reader ... |
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| Critics and Others on the (neo-)Colonial Order |
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| Older Writers (Authors and Statesmen) |
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| Roger Casement |
Roger Casement was in the Congo at the beginning of the 20th century and witnessed the atrocities committed by the colonial administration of King Leopold of Belgium and reported it to the British Government. W. G. Sebald tells what happened ... |
| Carlyle & Churchill |
Thomas Carlyle and Winston Churchill were among well-known Englishmen who believed in the entitlement of the “superior race” to colonise parts of the world inhabited by those whom they considered inferior ... |
| Joseph Conrad |
in his famous long short-story Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad typified the Africans as the European’s “other”, savage and ugly - or did he? Chinua Achebe quotes a passage which bears that interpretation ... |
| Rudyard Kipling |
“Take Up the White Man’s Burden” and “Recession” are two of Kipling’s best known hymns of empire, expressing the sense of cultural superiority felt by colonial intellectuals in words that epitomise those attitudes forever ... |
| JH Patterson |
Col. J. H. Patterson was a British soldier and lion-hunter in East Africa whose adventures made for a best-selling book (later filmed and Bwana Devil) and incidentally incorporate a paternalistic vision of the “savage tribes” of Africa ... |
| Shakespeare |
The Tempest (1610) includes an early portrait of relations between the colonist (Prospero) and the colonised (Caliban) which mobilises concepts such as language and sex together with such terms as “filth” for the racial other ... |
| Current writers (Journalists and Scholars) |
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| Bill Ashcroft |
Extracts from Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge 2001). The contents have been reorganised by author-citation rather than by topic (as in the original). |
| John Darwin |
Did the English really believe in it? John Darwin reviews recent works on the British Empire and the attitude of contemporary Britons to it ... |
| Richard Dowden |
For seven years in the 1950s Britain pursued a murderous little war in against the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. Abandoning moral values, its troops killed and tortured civilians with impunity ... |
| Naomi Klein |
Wanna know what Shell Oil (UK) has been up to in Nigeria and why the folks in Ogoni don’t like them very much? ... |
| James Mittelman |
Mittelman explains how regional (peripheral) countries are effected when they are drawn into the trans-world capital system ... |
| Declan Walshe |
An Irish journalist gives an account of the vani system of rural Pakistan where young women are given away as a form of compensation for injuries received. The ‘brides’ are simply ‘worn like a pair of shoes’ by their husbands - a form of honour killing without actually demise ... |
| A-Z |
The Haiti File |
| Robin Blackburn |
“Of Human Bondage”, in The Nation (4 Oct. 2004), pp.26-32. |
| Gary Young |
Gary Young points out that Haiti has been maintained has a ‘debtor nation’ by western powers since so-called independence ... |
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| POSTCOLONIAL WEBSITES: GATEWAY |
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internet encyclopaedias & search engines
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| Wikipedia |
A readable collaboration of scholars - this site will give you reliable information about historical events, lives of famous people, philosophical systems, artistic movements (&c., &c.) |
| “Countries Survey” |
This site has been created by the Federal Research Division (Washington, DC) and gives a thorough account of virtually all world-wide countries. Find out about Nigeria, India, Algeria ... &c. |
| Google |
| Stuck? Go on, Google it! ... But only use serious and reliable pages and be careful to quote your internet source exactly. Don't quote anything unless you can cite the author or the agency that wrote it. (If the cited URL doesn't work I can’t accept it as a valid reference. ) |
| PS: Thank goodness this isn't a Shakespeare module - no Spark Notes to contend with! |
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ENG312C2 - University of Ulster |