Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s—together with such other counterdiscourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies,… Read More ›
Edward Said‘s publication of Orientalism (1978) made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation and criticism. Said‘s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in… Read More ›
Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) is probably both the most widely known and the most representative African novelist. He may very well have written the first African novel of real literary merit—such at least is the opinion of Charles Larson—and he deals… Read More ›
A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope and complexity of the term “postcolonial.” Temporally, the term designates any national literature written after the nation gained independence from a colonizing power. According to this definition, all literature written… Read More ›
University of Calicut V Semester B.A. English Core Paper Methodology of Literature (EN5B03) Methodology of Literature PDF (To Download the Material Click on the Above Link) Topics Covered Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, Myth Criticism, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Reader Response… Read More ›
Throughout western intellectual history, civilisation has consistently been constructed by or against the wild, savage and animalistic, and has consequently been haunted or ‘dogged’ by it. The wild man of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lurked at the dangerously liminal… Read More ›
The majority of magical realist writing can be described as postcolonial. That is to say much of it is set in a postcolonial context and written from a postcolonial perspective that challenges the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude. As… Read More ›
First popularized in the English-speaking world by the British sociologist Roland Robertson in the 1990s, and later developed by Zygmunt Bauman, the term ‘glocal’ and the process noun ‘glocalization’ are formed by blending the words ‘global’ and ‘local’. Both terms… Read More ›
A term for the anti-colonial liberationist critique formulated by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Fanon’s work in Algeria led him to become actively involved in the Algerian liberation movement and to publish a number of foundational works on racism… Read More ›
Decolonization is the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms. This includes dismantling the hidden aspects of those institutional and cultural forces that had maintained the colonialist power and that remain even after political independence is… Read More ›
The term Black Atlantic was employed first by the Black British critic Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 1993). In that study, he addressed the cultural and historical linkages, which unified the peoples of African descent on both sides of the ocean that… Read More ›
From ‘binary’, meaning a combination of two things, a pair, ‘two’, duality (OED), this is a widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular sets of meanings in post-colonial theory. The concern with… Read More ›
A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of the imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that… Read More ›
A term first developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite. It also refers to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or action (Young 1995: 161). Adapted into… Read More ›
Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas, meaning ‘the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness’. Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter ego. The term alterité is more common in French, and has the antonym identité… Read More ›
The simplest definition of allegory is a ‘symbolic narrative’ in which the major features of the movement of the narrative are all held to refer symbolically to some action or situation. Allegory has long been a prominent feature of literary… Read More ›
Recent work in post-colonial studies by United States’ scholars has stressed the relationship between post-colonial theory and the analysis of African American culture (DuCille 1996). In practice, the exponents of African American culture have often engaged with classic post-colonial theorists… Read More ›
American literary critic, postcolonial theorist and political commentator who was born in the Middle East. In 1963 Edward Said (1935- 2003) was made Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Columbia University, New York, where he has remained to… Read More ›
In his epistemological work on colonial and postcolonial discourse, cultural translation, hybridity and ambiguity, Homi Bhabha gives a central place to culture. Bhabha refers regularly to literature and (albeit to a lesser extent) to cinema. Speaking from a profoundly humanities… Read More ›
A focus on Gayatri Spivak’s education and intellectual trajectory reveals a lifelong commitment to literary-critical studies alongside genuine political engagement. Spivak was born in Calcutta, India in 1942; she later attended Presidency College at the University of Calcutta. After graduating… Read More ›
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