Postcolonialist perspective application

Brief examples of postcolonial interpretation of literary texts: Homi Bhabha gives us a

wonderful example of the global orientation of postcolonial criticism when he offers a new
way to analyse world literature, not in terms of national traditions, how it generally has been
studied, but in terms of postcolonial themes that could cross national boundaries. Bhabha
suggests that world literature may be studied in terms of the different ways culture has
experienced historical trauma, perhaps such traumas as slavery, revolution, civil war,
oppressive regimes, the loss of cultural identity, and the like. Or world literature might be
seen as the study of the ways in which cultures define themselves by othering groups whom
they demonise or otherwise devalue for that purpose. Or we might analyse world literature by
examining the representation of people and events that occur across cultural boundaries,
rather than within them, such as representations of migrants, political refugees, and colonised
peoples. The centre of such a study, Bhabha says, would neither be the sovereignty of
national cultures, nor the universalism of human culture, but a focus on...unspoken,
unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present. That is we might study what world
literature tells us about the personal experience of people whom history has ignored the
disenfranchised, the marginalised, the unhomed such are found in the work of South African
writer Nadine Gordimer and African American writer Toni Morrison.
In other words, the colonialist ideology contained in literature is deposited there by
writers and absorbed by readers without their necessarily realising it.
The task of postcolonial literary criticism is to locate the modes of representations in
which the native is represented in inferior ways. It assumes that colonial writing is racialized
and such literature feeds directly into the colonial intentions. The task of postcolonial literary
studies, thus, is to unpack those literary figures, themes and representations that have enforced
imperialist ideology, colonial dominance and continuing Western dominance. A classic
method in postcolonial literary studies is to uncover the subtexts of Eng.Lit.texts, to probe
beneath the obvious and apparently universal/humanistic/aesthetic themes in order to reveal
their racial, gendered imperial assumptions. This is what Edward Said does in his Jane
Austens Mansfield Park. He reads the work from the victims side. He writes: the
Caribbean plantation in Antigua is linked inextricably to the family fortunes and life in
England and thereby showing how the colony is inseparable from the European country.
Postcolonial literary studies pay attention to the context in which English literary texts
were produced and to the workings of colonial ideologies in those texts. Thus reinterpretation is an important strategy in postcolonial criticism. Chinua Achebe reinterpreted
Conrads Heart of Darkness (1902) by arguing that he had no interest in Africans, and
reduced them, in this novel, to animal and dehumanized images. The relevance of this study
is: it questioned the earlier praise of the novel as pro African.