Postcolonial literature
Literature that engages with colonial rule, its cultural and political legacies, and the experiences of people and societies shaped by colonialism.
Colonialism: A system in which a state extends control over another territory and its people, often through settlement and resource extraction. Its institutions and histories are the conditions these works examine.
Hybridity: The formation of mixed cultural identities and practices through contact, migration, and unequal power. It describes identities that cannot be reduced to colonizer or colonized.
Edward Said: A Palestinian-American literary critic whose work analyzed Orientalism and the cultural power of empire. His account of Orientalism explains how texts helped construct the colonial East.
Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel about Igbo society and the arrival of British colonial rule in Nigeria. It narrates colonial disruption from within an Igbo community rather than through a colonial viewpoint.
Postcolonial theory: A body of scholarship studying colonialism, its cultural representations, and its continuing effects. Literature is one object of study within this broader critical framework.
Imperialism: A policy or practice of extending a state's power over other territories and peoples. It links colonial rule to broader political and economic projects.
Mimicry: In postcolonial theory, the partial imitation of a dominant culture that can expose its authority as unstable. Characters' imitation of colonial norms can both reproduce and unsettle power.
Frantz Fanon: A Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker who analyzed colonial violence, racism, and liberation. His writing connects colonial structures to identity, language, and psychological experience.
A Passage to India: E. M. Forster's 1924 novel portraying British colonial society and Indian life under the Raj. Its contested encounter exposes racial hierarchy and the limits of colonial liberalism.
Commonwealth literature: Literature associated with countries historically connected to the British Empire, especially after independence. The older label can imply a shared imperial framework that postcolonial criticism questions.