Postcolonialism started in the 1950s, the decade when France ended its long involvement in Indochina, when Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre parted ways about Algeria, when Fidel Castro delivered “History Shall Absolve Me”, his most famous speech, and when Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World that represents countries that are not culturally, politically, and philosophically defined by Western metaphysics. In the 1960s, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, George Lamming, and other critics, authors, and philosophers published text that became the foundation of postcolonial writings.
Like deconstruction and other post structural approaches to textual analysis and literary criticism, postcolonialism is a heterogeneous field of study where even its spelling provides an alternative. Some argue that it should be spelled with no hyphen - postcolonialism; while others argue that it should be spelled with hyphen - post-colonialism. Some suggests that it has two branches - those who view postcolonialism as a set of cultural strategies centered in history and those who view postcolonialism as a set of diverse methodologies that possess no unitary quality. Even the former group can be subdivided into two branches - those who believe that postcolonialism refers to the period after the colonized countries have become independent and those who believe that postcolonialism refers to the characteristics of a country from the time of its colonization to the present.
However, postcolonialism concerns itself with the diverse and the numerous issues that becomes evident when a literary critic examines various subjects such as place, history, ethnicity, language, feminism, education, resistance, difference, production, universality, nationalism, representation, and postmodernism. In its interaction with the colonizing culture, the colonized culture is forced to be obliterated or to go underground.
It is only after the colonization that the colonized people have time to think and to write about their oppression and loss of cultural identity. Born out of the colonized people's frustrations, fears, hopes, and dreams about the future; and direct and personal cultural clashes with the colonizing culture, postcolonialism comes into existence.
Although a number of postcolonial critics such as Frantz Fanon, Homi K Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have contributed to postcolonialism's ever growing body of practical methodology, the key figure in its establishment is Edward W Said's Orientalism in 1978. In this text, Said reprimanded the literary world for not investigating and for not taking seriously the study of colonization, also known as imperialism.
According to Said, Nineteenth Century Europeans justified their territorial conquests by propagating Orientalism - a creation of non-European stereotypes that “Orientals” were crazy, indolent, unreliable, thoughtless, and sexually immoral. However, Said argued that all human knowledge can be viewed only through one's cultural, political, and ideological framework. For him, a theory, either literary or political, can never be totally objective.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN CRITICISM
The growing interest of postcolonialism in the late 1970s to the present provided a renewed interest among African-American writers and their works. For the first seven decades of the Twentieth Century, African-American criticism was alive and enthusiastic; its chief concern being the developing understanding of the nature of African-American culture. African-American critics exposed the treatment of African-Americans, a repressed, suppressed, and colonized subculture, at the hands of their “white conquerors”. Presenting a variety of themes in their prose and poetry, such as the search for personal identity, the mild and the militant pictures of hatred and protests, the bitterness of the struggle of black men and women in America to achieve social, political, and economic success, African-American critics gave America numerous personal portraits of what it meant to be a black writer struggling with personal, cultural, and national identity.
Perhaps the most important African-American critic is Henry Louis Gates Jr. Unlike many African-American critics, Gates directed his attention to the other African-American critics refusing the premise that theory is something that the white people do and declaring that they must redefine theory itself from within their own black culture. Gates also attempted to provide a theoretical framework for developing an African-American literary canon.
Today, African-American critics and African-American feminist critics believe that they must develop a literary criticism devoted to African-American literature considering the language of blackness, because they believe that their literature is a significant discourse that has been ignored. According to them, this body of literature must be reformed, and its beginnings have brought another body of literature that has also been neglected or relegated to second-class citizenship: the writings of females with its accompanying approach to textual analysis and literary criticism - gender studies.
GENDER STUDIES
Alice Walker, Toni Morison, and Gloria Naylor are African-American women writers who have successfully bridged the gap between subaltern authors and the dominant culture. As models for other African-American women writers, they have found their voice in a society dominated by males and Western metaphysics, and their works have become influential texts in gender studies.
Concerned primarily with feminist criticism, gender studies broaden traditional feminist criticism to include an investigation not only of femaleness but also maleness. Like the traditional feminist theory, gender studies continues to investigate how women and men view such terms as ethics, society, personal identity, and definition of truth.
Striving to develop a philosophical basis of feminist criticism, gender studies re-examines the literary canon and questions the traditional definition of family, sexuality, and female reproduction. In addition, it continues to articulate and to investigate the nature of feminine writing, and joins feminist scholarship with postcolonial discourses noting that postcolonialism and feminism share many characteristics - the chief having oppressed peoples.
As with feminist criticism, the goal of gender studies is to analyze and to challenge the established literary canon. Women themselves must challenge the hegemony and free themselves from prejudices and false assumption that have prevented them from defining themselves. By involving themselves in textual analysis and literary criticism and its accompanying approaches, gender scholars believe that women and men alike can redefine who they are, what they want to be, and where they want to go.
