Poetry and Colonialism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 15, 2025

The term colonialism has been variously defined, but most definitions agree that the word refers to processes for the extension and safeguarding of control by one nation or empire over the land, economic resources, and culture of another (and often very different) group of people. The associated imposition of sovereignty includes forcible dominance of labor, markets, educational systems, and sometimes elaborate reward structures for complicitous members of the occupied society.

To qualify as bona fide colonialism, the period of political rule by the colonizing power cannot be of short duration. It takes time for the sorts of changes that a colonizing power effects to be institutionalized in the overpowered region. Some of these changes involve transformations in the attitudes of people in the occupied territories toward the culture of the colonizer—e.g., the colonized society’s capitulation concerning language use and its adoption of the colonizers’ language for the schooling of children and the daily business of acquiring goods, services, and social status; deference, however begrudging, toward the government and officers assigned to rule over the colony; and accommodation to economic realities resulting from technologies imported by the colonizing power into the colonized landscape (roads and railroads, motor vehicles and air transport, communication systems, weaponry, electronic technology, and so forth).

With educational programs that emphasize the superiority of the colonizing power’s culture over that of the colonized, changes in domestic arrangements, health care, indigenous problem-solving institutions, fashion, and aesthetic norms often take place as well. So widespread and deep can the influence of the colonizing power become that traditional ways of living are called into question, compromised, or simply abandoned. The result of colonialism on the personal level can be devastating to individuals who value their ancestral religions and cosmologies, traditional systems of exchange, time-honored customs and mores, and general cultural heritage.

Historians have studied with zeal the growth and collapse of many major colonial regimes: the empire of Alexander of Macedonia; the Roman Imperium; the Persian Empire; the kingdoms of Mali and Benin; the Holy Roman Empire; the Ottoman Empire; the Moguls’ conquest and dominion over the Indian subcontinent; the Islamic Ummah’s conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Near East, North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and Spain; the conquest and dominion of Japan over China and Manchuria at the turn of the century; the Iberian dominion over South and Central America; and the British Empire.

By the beginning of the 20th century, European colonial domination of the world’s landmasses and seaways had reached historical record. But the vast extent of European dominions around the globe was not a sudden achievement. European regimes had begun the process of competing for the world’s economic resources as early as the Middle Ages—with the Crusades’ militant excursions into geographic areas to the east and south of the Mediterranean Sea.

During the so-called European Renaissance (1492–1700), England, Spain, and Portugal entered into competition for domination of the Western Hemisphere and the African coastlines, establishing and defending their new trade routes. By the 16th century, Holland had begun its colonization of Indonesia. During the 17th century, Britain and France were energetically vying for North America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.

The British actively pursued military and hegemonic dominion over India from the 17th century onward—a vastly profitable enterprise for the English that did not end until the middle of the 20th century. By the 18th century, the British had successfully colonized New England, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia and set down permanent roots in Australia and New Zealand. By the 19th century, Britain was interested in China and other areas of the Far East and had deployed diplomatic delegations, spies, financial operatives, and naval forces to that region of the world.

Also in the 19th century, European countries began a vigorous race to explore, conquer, and appropriate parts of Africa. By the turn of the 20th century, European kingdoms and principalities had gained control of nearly the whole African continent—contended areas of which were claimed and fought over by Belgium, Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy.

The history of the world’s colonial adventures bears in crucial ways on the development of 20th-century poetry. First, the upheavals caused by the colonial wars themselves made lasting impressions on poets in every part of the world. There is hardly a poet in this volume who was not affected either directly or indirectly by cataclysmic local events having their sources in the jostling for supremacy of colonial powers.

The two world wars as well as the interwar and postwar eras of dislocations, burgeoning totalitarian regimes, and nationalist insurrections form the background for virtually all of the personal histories recorded in the entries on individual poets. Because colonialism forced the movement of individuals from imperial centers to imperial margins and vice versa and required the mastery of multiple languages and cultural practices, writers everywhere experienced opportunities to transcend local poetic traditions and experiment with and absorb influences from many other lands and cultures.

The richness of poetry produced by writers from Asia, Europe, Central America, the world’s great islands, and South America is especially due to the cross-pollination of poetic practices resulting from the transoceanic travels of so many, who were thereby inspired to forge new expressive languages and poetic idiom with which to communicate their feelings and thoughts about contemporary life.

Nevertheless, 20th-century poets do not record a merely secular history of colonialism and its aftermath. Their works describe or contend with the impact of colonialism and its global repercussions on the human spirit. In this respect, whole movements of poetry have arisen since 1900 whose purposes have been to restore to humanity something of its latent dignity and spiritual health. Among those movements one may count the various modernisms, the Negritude movement, French rap, Arab rap and hip-hop culture, not to mention nearly all of the poetry emerging from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.

A reliable scholarly resource for ongoing contemporary scholarship on this subject is the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Postcolonialism

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