subject: What is post colonialism? How do we find this ideology working as a backdrop in the first part of Things Fall Apart? [print this page] What is post colonialism? How do we find this ideology working as a backdrop in the first part of Things Fall Apart?
Post colonialism: The social, political, cultural, and economic practices that arose in the response and resistance to colonialism and imperialism. This term also refers to the historical period following the colonial era, corresponding roughly to the second half of the twentieth century
Postcolonial theory, often said to begin with the work of Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, looks at literature and society from two broad angles: how the writer, artist, cultural worker, and his or her context reflects a colonial past, and how they survive and carve out a new way of creating and understanding the world. One of the earliest critical works to present this point of view is Robert J. C. Young's White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990).
When Said published his path-breaking book Orientalism in 1978, it established a trend that was, for some years, loosely described as "colonial discourse studies" rather than "postcolonial theory." Although Said ostensibly wrote about the Middle East being constructed as the "Orient" by French intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the Spanish and British empires that formed the main fields of colonial discourse studies. Although Said's main thesis was that the West constructed something called the "Orient" as an object of investigation through varieties of cognitive, disciplinary, and administrative practice, colonial discourse studies was broader in its focus and conclusions.
"Post colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism ,gender politics and language in the language of post colonial studies ,some words are new , while other are familiar but charged with a new significance " Bill Ashcroft The Empires Write Back published by Routledge
There is much too post-colonial literature than reading colonialist narratives only. Generations of writers and intellectuals who are born under and after colonialism write inspiringly about the struggle for independence. They write about the conflicting interests of the natives under and after colonialism. Other writers direct their attention to the conflict between the natives and the newly appointed regimes that supplanted the colonialists. Many others write about fossilized social habits and customs in need of rehabilitation or replacement. Some writers exhibit a high level of animosity to the colonialist and their agents; others are less aggressive in their representation of the colonial past, and the postcolonial present.
Chinua Achebe things Fall Apart 1958 this book has moved from its setting in a small Ibo village into universal prominence as Africa's most widely read.
Achebe having the insatiable quest for his identity just to demise the falls notion of European about pre-colonial state of Africa put his effort.
As in one of his lecture "Home and Exile" Achebe quotes!
"The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story." (Chinua Achebe, "An African Voice")
Its portrayal of the impact of British Colonization on the life of an African Community makes it a classic on the clash of culture
Clifford Geertz writes: 'We are in sum incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture...Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products - products manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies, capacities and dispositions with which we were born, but manufactured nevertheless' (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, pp. 49 - 50).
Things Fall Apart; through a strong character named Okonkwo Achebe tries to discuss the whole social set up and cultural values of the Nigerian society. The whole novel is consists of three parts, Okonkwo's Rise to Fame, Okonkwo's Exile to Mbanta, Okonkwo's Return to Umuofia are the part first, second and respectively.
While going through the first part of novel we can conclude that the first part is the backdrop for the very idea of post colonialism because in this first part Achebe discusses the essence of the traditional, moral, and ethical values, which disintegrates and falls apart due to western imperialism.
Although Achebe is not mentioning and discussing the theme of post colonialism in the first part but he frequently discusses the social set up of the society which is indeed a backdrop for the very idea of post colonialism.
While summing up the first part we come to know that Things Fall Apart take place in late 1800s and early 1900s just before and during the early days of the British Empire's expansion in Nigeria. The first part of the novel depicts details about life in an African culture much different from European culture. In this part Achebe reveals the following aspects of Igbo culture.
Legends and tradition (the fight with a spirit of the wild by the founder of their village)
Symbols of honor (titles)
Indicators of wealth (yams and cowries)
Marriage customs (more than one wife)
The reckoning of the time (markets, a week of four days)
Social rituals (cola nut, alligator pepper chalk, small talk and proverbs)
Music entertainment
Concept of faith
Concept of demigods
Concept of individual God (Chi)
Digression in the society
Greatness and Ambition
Fate and Free will
Masculinity
Tribal beliefs
Superstitions
Justice
In his goal to demonstrate the complexity and sophistication of Igbo Society Achebe gradually introduce the details when they are relevant to the story.
British made their colonies in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; it can also refer to the region of the rule, or the period of dominion. It included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the paramount of the British Crown.
Decolonization was gradual and peaceful for some Brit expatriates but violent for others, where native rebellions were energized by nationalism. After World War II, European countries generally lacked the wealth and political support necessary to suppress faraway revolts; they also faced opposition from the new superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both of which had taken positions against colonialism. Britain left India in 1947,
World War II and the decolonization process in subcontinent were troubled times for both colony and colonizer. Moreover, they were irreparably damaging to the psyche of the Western colonial powers, making the utilization of post-colonial imagery somewhat disturbing to Western readers.
A look at the cultural and intellectual responses to colonialism in Asia, especially in subcontinent shows this contrast to be conspicuous. Colonialism successfully determined the terms of discourse in subcontinent.
From an Asian-centered world view without nostalgia for an idealized past, and his attitude is sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and international in awareness, reference, and relevance"(Bruce King, "Wole Soyinka and the Nobel Prize for Literature").
Post-colonialism is used, like the English language itself, self-consciously. Post-colonialism and English have become not just historical links to the canon, but tools used by the authors to communicate their unique, non-Western visions of life. Discussion of post-colonialism in their writings illustrates the confrontations of two worlds, Western and colonized, but this is conflict is not bemoaned or decried. In fact, post-colonial rhetoric, metaphors, and imagery have been appropriated in both, and have the very use of English.
The Indian Subcontinent: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, postcolonial writers are:
Mulk Raj Anand (India)
Kamala Das (India)
Anita Desai (India and USA)
Chitra Fernando (Sri Lanka)
Kamala Markandaya (India)
Meera Mahadevan Mukul Kesavan (India & Pakistan)
Rohinton Mistry (India & Canada)
Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka & Canada)
Arundhati Roy Salman Rushdie (India, Pakistan, and UK)
Sara Suleri (Pakistan and USA)
Theses authors do not stake claim to canonization by appealing to current historical and political sensibilities, but by presenting a unique synthesis of their literary predecessors and native cultures.
While carefully studying the post colonial writer we come to know that the British very cleverly maintained the princely states as separate entities with indirect control under the rule of paramount. After crushing the first war of independence in 1857 they set up direct administration making India part of the British Empire in 1858. Thereafter started the step by step building of the state apparatus, the Indian civil service leading this process.
The two institutional interventions that had long term effects were introduction of the British education system and the legal system. The missionaries played a major role in setting up schools and colleges which were channels for introducing modern European knowledge system to the subcontinent. Graduates from these schools and colleges were recruited as personnel in the offices of the government and companies. This was the beginning of the mass production of clerks at various levels. Since the economy had been plundered resulting in famines and destitution these were regarded as opportunities for making good in life.
The state formation in British India Military conquest, economic expropriation, educational and legal institution-building delegitimatized the local systems of knowledge. It shaped new terms of discourse about society and nature, what is good and what is bad. It moved the centre of discourse to Europe. Therefore, when reformers arrived on the scene, to begin with they saw these developments as positive for Indian people. They thought Indian people owed political unity to the British. They did not realize then that basis of state formation and its forms can vary and the fact of dispersed political power may actually be a positive heritage for building a decentralized, co-operative participatory and federal polity. Indian nationalists, discourse continues to debate these two perspectives on the legacy of state formation in India. The terms of discourse on nationalism shaped by colonial policies in the nineteenth century later on had the dominant section of the Indian National Congress subscribing to the centralistic view. Nehru's Discovery of India traced the roots of unity to Indus valley civilization and Ashoka and unfurled a Unitarian, centralistic perspective on state formation.
In this term paper an attempt is made to explore the reasons behind this divergence in the struggle over terms of discourse in subcontinent. Why is it that the struggle was so easily won by the colonial forces in subcontinent who succeeded in institutionalizing their values about civilization and human conditions which got consolidated after independence through the policies of the post colonial state. British rule in subcontinent claimed the role of a "civilizing mission". It established institutions of the state which included civil service, judicial magistrates, police and clerks for managing the organization of society. It introduced European educational system to promote European ideas of arts and sciences. Imposition of English language through the educational institutions and operations of governmental machinery and especially in the realm of culture and media finally shaped the terms of discourse in favor of the interest of the colonial power. Indigenous institutions of politics, economy and culture were by no means ideal. They were also arenas of struggle as evident in course of many uprisings and cultural and religious reform movements. But colonial regime subdued these struggles and declared its view of the world as modern, scientific and rational, therefore bearer of advanced civilization. That it had a certain class, race and ethnic basis and was subject to struggle in Europe itself was not conveyed to the colonial society. The struggle against the colonial imposition continued to erupt from time to time in subcontinent but it lost the battle each time.
Thus it is important to be conscious of the way the meanings of various notions came to be constructed. Colonialism snatched away the colonized people's right to imagination, rights to understand history in their own way, right to interpret nature from their vantage point. Upper class, upper caste, patriarchal, racial standpoints too denied similar rights. The struggle for liberation, therefore, entails removing the centre from Eurocentric colonial vantage points to the Third World's own, and in the Third World itself from the dominant elite's to the vantage points of the oppressed people themselves. Thus the terms of discourse could change in favor of the oppressed only through the process of struggle.
Work Cited
Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Mishra, Vihay, and Hodge, Bob. "What is Post(-)Colonialism?" Textual Practice 5, 3 (1991):399-414.
