Knowra Postcolonialism Postcolonialism Postcolonialism is an intellectual tradition examining colonialism and its enduring effects on culture, identity, power, and knowledge, including resistance to imperial ways of understanding the world.
Colonialism : A system of domination in which one power controls another territory and its people, often through settlement, extraction, and political rule. Postcolonialism begins by examining colonial rule and the structures it leaves behind.
Edward Said : A literary scholar whose book Orientalism analyzed Western knowledge and representation of the Middle East. His account of Orientalism became a foundational critique of imperial cultural authority.
Mimicry : In postcolonial theory, the colonized subject’s partial imitation of colonial norms, which can both reinforce and unsettle authority. Bhabha uses mimicry to show why colonial imitation can become politically ambivalent.
Marxism : A tradition of social and economic analysis centered on class relations, material production, and historical change. Its focus on class and capital can conflict with postcolonial emphasis on race, empire, and culture.
Things Fall Apart : Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel about Igbo society and the disruptions of British colonial rule in Nigeria. Its narrative contests colonial depictions of African societies as without history or complexity.
Imperialism : A policy or practice of extending a state’s power over other peoples or territories, through political, economic, or cultural means. Its broader account of power helps distinguish colonial rule from other forms of domination.
Frantz Fanon : A Martinican psychiatrist and anticolonial thinker who analyzed colonial violence, racism, and the psychology of liberation. His work connects colonial domination to embodied and psychological experience.
Othering : The process of defining people as fundamentally different and inferior, thereby legitimizing exclusion or control. Colonial classifications make domination appear natural by casting colonized people as outsiders.
Nationalism : A political principle that treats a nation as the proper basis of collective identity and self-government. Anticolonial nationalism seeks liberation, while postcolonial analysis also questions its exclusions.
Wide Sargasso Sea : Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel that reimagines the life of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre in the Caribbean. It exposes how colonial identity and voice shape a canonical English literary story.
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