Postcolonial literatures in

English

Global field of writing where literature is being produced

and circulated in English, or some varieties of English, but

where a distinctly non-English cultural influence is at work

in the text

Postcolonial literatures in English

The field comprises the literatures of large

parts of Africa, some part of Asia, the Indian

subcontinent, the New World of the

Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Canada

and many other countries formerly part of

the British Empire

Postcolonial literatures

• Literatures which critically scrutinize the

colonial relationships and resist colonialist

perpectives

• Previous definitions:

- in the 60’s “Commonwealth literatures”

- in the late 70’s and 80’s: “New Literatures in

English”

Postcolonial literatures

They contribute to:

- reverse common views;

- reposition our focus and perspective.

They revise established notions and redraw divisions

between outsiders and insiders

Postcolonial Studies

- Concerned with texts arising from the social

consequences and historical effects of

colonialism (in particular the powerful and

disrupting encounter between English and other

cultures).

- Shift in critical perspective, resulting in

decentred and dispaced views of familiar texts

and books (canonical literary works)

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin

The Empire Writes Back, Theory and

Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989)

«What postcolonial literatures have in common

beyond their special and distinctive regional

characteristics is that they emerged in their

present form out of the experience of colonization

and asserted themselves by foregrounding the

tension with the imperial power, and by

emphasizing their differences from the

assumptions of the imperial centre.

It is this which makes them distinctively post-

colonial».

Postcolonialism as a debatable definition

• In the compound:

- Prefix «post»: aftermath in the sense of

‘overcoming’, but there can still exist forms of

neocolonialism

- «colonial»: it perpetrates a legacy with

colonialism because it foregrounds the centrality

of such an experience

Neocolonialism

- It means new forms of colonialism

- Inequalities of colonial rules have not been

completely erased

- A country can be «postcolonial» (formally

independent), but neocolonial (economically or

culturally dependent)

- New superpowers with neocolonialist roles in

establishing global capitalistic economies (USA,

China, Japan)

Is the field of postcolonial studies too large

to be studied in a single framework?

• Vast spectrum of texts, great variety of authors,

geographically as far apart as they are culturally

diverse. Keep always in mind the specific

backgrounds and cultural agendas!

• In recent decades proliferation of specialized

disciplines like Canadian Studies, Aboriginal

Studies etc. which focus on a specific

geographical and/or cultural areas

Risks of generalization

• Should we risk such broad generalizations about

the literatures from so many different places?

• What is that these countries have in common

beside their once imperial connections?

• What is that their literatures share, beside the

fact that they are mainly produced in varieties of

English? Should postcolonial literatures at some

point in their history cease to «write back» to the

centre, because the centre is no longer

relevant?

Double parallel approach in dealing

with postcolonial texts

• Analize texts keeping in mind the specificity of every

single experience and features it shares with other

similar but distinctive ones.

• Never uproot the text from its specific location. There is

always a close, dynamic relationship between the writer

and her/his context.

Common properties of postcolonial

writings

• Implication in a history of colonization: critical awareness of the past

and how it is recordes. Counterhistories.

• Awarenss of the local specificities: land, home, belonging,

displacement, relationship between centre and periphery.

• Endevour to assert a postcolonial identity and to forge a counter-

culture

• Representation of ethnic minorities

• Reflection on the question of language

• Articulation of national sentiments but also overcoming of

boundaries, transnationalism and transculturalism

Hybridization of cultures

• It refers to the creation of new transcultural

forms within the «contact zone» produced by

colonization.

• It challenges notions of authentic and

essentialist selfhood, of nationhood, by

demonstrationg the porousness of supposed

boundaries

Chimamanda Adichie

- Official website:

https://www.chimamanda.com/about-

chimamanda/

- «The Danger of a Single Story»

(2009): see

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamand

a_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_s

tory/transcript?language=it

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was

born in Nigeria in 1977. She is the

author of three novels, Purple

Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow

Sun (2006), and Americanah

(2013), of a short story collection,

The Thing around Your Neck

(2009).She has received numerous

awards and distinctions, including

the Orange Broadband Prize for

Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur

Foundation Fellowship (2008).

Settler colonies/colonies of occupation

• Settler-invader colonies: the invading Europeans

annihilated, displaced, marginalized the

indigenes to become a majority, non-indigenous

population (Australia, Canada, new Zealand)

• Invaded colonies or colonies of occupation:

indigenous peoples remained in the majority, but

were administered by a white minority of foreign

power (i.e. India, Nigeria)

The question of language

• In the settler colonies English is the mother

tongue

• In the colonies of occupation English is a second

language, it stands side by side with local

languages.

• Hence it has to be deliberately chosen and

adopted by writers

Which English?

• Standard English: English of the South-Est England as

a universal norm. Marginalization of all variants as

impurities.

• englishes: «democratic» lower-case «e», hybridized

species as a result of processes of cross-pollination

Chinua Achebe• Chinua Achebe was born in

Nigeria in 1930.

• He was raised in the large village

of Ogidi, one of the first centres

of Anglican missionary work in

Eastern Nigeria.

• He wrote more than 20 books -

novels, short stories, essays and

collections of poetry - including

Things Fall Apart (1958), which

has sold more than 10 million

copies worldwide and has been

translated into more than 50

languages. He received

numerous honours and literary

prizes from around the world. He

died in 2013.

C. Achebe

Nigerian novelist acclaimed for his unsentimental

depictions of the social and psychological disorientation

accompanying the imposition of Western customs and

values upon traditional African society. His particular

concern was with emergent Africa at its moments of

crisis; his novels range in subject matter from the first

contact of an African village with the white man to the

educated African’s attempt to create a firm moral order

out of the changing values in a large city.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

• Ngugi wa Thiong’o (born

January 5, 1938, Kenya), is East

Africa’s leading novelist, whose

popular Weep Not, Child (1964)

was the first major novel in

English by an East African. As he

became sensitized to the effects

of colonialism in Africa, he

adopted his traditional name and

wrote in the Bantu language of

Kenya’s Kikuyu people.

Ngugi• Ngugi presented his ideas on literature, culture, and politics in numerous

essays and lectures.

• The performance of a play of which he was the co-author led to his

detention for a year without trial by the Kenyan government. The play

attacks capitalism, religious hypocrisy, and corruption among the new

economic elite of Kenya.

• In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

(1986), Ngugi argued for African-language literature as the only authentic

voice for Africans and stated his own intention of writing only in Kikuyu or

Kiswahili from that point on. Such works earned him a reputation as one of

Africa’s most articulate social critics. After a long exile from Kenya, Ngugi

returned in 2004 with his wife to promote a book. Several weeks later they

were brutally assaulted in their home; the attack was believed by some to

be politically motivated. After their recovery, the couple continued to

publicize the book abroad. He is currently Distinguished Professor of

English and Comparative Literature at the University of California.

British Imperialism

• Associated with the Europeanization of the globe. Three major waves:

- Age of discovery (XV and XVI centuries)

- Age of mercantilism (starting with Cromwell’s NavigationAct 1651, XVII and XVIII century)

- Age of Imperialism (XIX and early XX centuries)

The earlier British Empire crucial for industrial transformation of 1750-1850 which gave rise to the secondBritish Empire

- Within age of Imperialism:

1815-1880: “informal imperialism”

1880- 1910: “classical imperialism” (1885 Berlin

Congo Conference, “scramble for Africa”)

The demise of the British Empire

• Two major waves of DECOLONIZATION:

- end 19th century- first decade 20th century: creation of dominions in the settler colonies

- after the II World War: indigenous anti-colonialnationalism and military struggles in colonies of occupation

Process of dismantling of colonialist power in all itsforms, including the hidden aspects of thoseinstitutional and cultural forces that hadmaintained the colonialist power.

Complex an continuing process, not achievedautomatically at the moment of independence.

Colonialism/Imperialism

• Imperialism means the practice, the theory, and

the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center

ruling a distant territory. Global system.

Ideological concept: legitimacy of economic,

political and military control

• Colonialism, which is almost always a

consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of

settlements on distant territory. Conquest and

control of other people’s lands and goods

Decolonizing the mind

• Scrutinize colonial relationships

• resist colonialist perspectives

• dismantle colonial discourses

Intellectuals and the anti-colonial struggle:

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963),

Black Skin, White Masks (1967)

Négritude movement

In Paris , after the II World

War, Senghor, Diop, Césaire,

developed theory of négritude:

distinctiveness of African

personality and culture.

Edward Said, (born November 1,

1935, Jerusalem—died September 25,

2003, New York, U.S.)

American academic, political activist, and

literary critic who examined literature in light

of social and cultural politics and was an

outspoken proponent of the political rights of

the Palestinian people and the creation of an

independent Palestinian state.

Edward Said

• Orientalism (1978)

• The World, The Text and the Critic (1983)

• The Question of Palestine (1992)

• Culture and Imperialism(1993)

• Out of Place (1999)

• Humanism and Democratic Criticism(2004)

E. Said: the public intellectual

• “Public intellectual”

• Awareness of the problematic

relationship between knowledge and

power (see Gramsci, Foucault)

• Crucial role of the intellectual

Orientalism (1978)

• Knowledge and power (Foucault): ‘Knowledge’ about the ‘Orient’ as it was

produced and circulated in Europe was an ideological accompaniment of

colonial ‘power’.

• The book is not about non-Western cultures, but about the Western

representation of these cultures (Orientalism as a discipline supported by

others such as archeology, philosophy, history, literature etc.).

• It investigates how the formal study of the ‘Orient’ contributed to the

functioning of colonial power

“Orientalism”

• The study of the Orient was not objective but “a

political vision of reality whose structures

promoted the difference between the familiar

(Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the

Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Orientalism)

• Dicothomy essential in the construction of

European self-conception (civilization, progress,

rationality, control, masculinity etc.)

Culture and Imperialism (1993)

• “Overlapping territories, intertwined histories”

• It explores literary works (mostly novels) produced by Western writers about other worlds, works characterized by a prejudicial approach to the ‘others’ and by an Orientalist view.

• The novel as a literary genre plays a crucial role in creating imperialist attitudes and preconceptions.

• Said insists on the importance of narratives in shaping identities, both individual and collective ones.

• The literary texts taken into exam are seen as inextricably connected to the imperial system within which they were conceived.

Said, contrapuntual reading(From Culture and Imperialism)

Contrapuntal analysis is used in interpreting colonial texts, consideringthe perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. If one doesnot read with the right background, one may miss the implications of the presence of Antigua in Mansfield Park, Australia in Great Expectations, or India in Vanity Fair. Interpreting contrapuntally isinterpreting different perspectives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with other related contexts. It is reading with "awarenessboth of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those otherhistories against which (and together with which) the dominatingdiscourse acts". Contrapuntal reading means reading a text "with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England".

Aimé Césaire

• Colonialism does not simply exploit, but

dehumanizes and objectifies the colonised

subject

• Colonization → «thingification»

Aimé Césaire

Africa as the binary opposite of Europe:

- Europe is «decadent», «morally, spiritually

indefensible»

- Non-European civilizations were «communal»,

«anti-capitalist», «democratic», «co-operative» before

they were invaded by European colonialism,

capitalism and imperialism

Franz Fanon

• He emphasizes the dehumanizing aspect

of colonialsim and pushes its analysis into

the realm of the psyche and the

subjectivity of colonised people as well as

of the colonisers.

• Colonised people are those «in whose

soul an inferiority complex has been

created by the death and burial of its local

cultural originality»

Ideology• It is one of the most elusive and complex terms

in social thought

• It does not refer to political ideas alone

• It includes our mental frameworks, our beliefs,

concepts, and ways of expressing our

relationship to the world.

• Usually ideologies reflect and reproduce the

interests of the dominant social classes.

• Ideology is central in processes of domination

• How does ideology come to be believed in?

Louis Althusser

• How are ideologies internalised? How human

beings make dominant ideas their own?

• Subjects and their deepest selves are

«interpellated», «positioned» and shaped by

what lies outside them.

• Subjectivity is formed in and through ideology

• «Ideological State Apparatuses» and

«Repressive State Apparatuses»

Michael Foucault

• The human subject is not a free,

autonomous entity, but is determined by

the conditions of his/her existence.

• See de Saussure: language as a system

of signs whose meaning is relational.

Language is ideological rather than

objective. Language constructs the

subject.

Foucault: ‘discourse’

• All ideas are ordered through some “material medium”. This ordering imposes a pattern upon them which F. calls ‘discourse’.

• This notion was born from his work on madness(he wanted to recover the voice of insane people)

• Madness as a category of human identity is produced and reproduced by various rules, systems which separate it from ‘normalcy’.

• Discursive practices make it difficult for individuals to think outside them, hence they are exercises in power and control.

Colonial discourses

• Discourse (M. Foucault): system of statements within which the world can be known. System by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon dominated groups.

• Hence, colonial discourse is the complex of signs and practices that organize social existence within colonial relationships. System of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial peoples. It is within it that the colonized come to see themselves.

How the Empire exerted its power

• Colonial domination involved much repression

and coercion.

• However, repression and coercion worked in

tandem with consent (see Gramsci: hegemony is

power achieved through a combination of coercion

and consent. See also Althusser: Repressive State

Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses)

The “Other”

• “The concept of the Other signifies that which is

unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant

subjectivity, the opposite or negative against

which an authority is defined. The West thus

conceived of its superiority relative to the

perceived lack of power, self-consciousness, or

ability to think and rule of colonized peoples”

(Boehmer, 1995, Colonial and Postcolonial

Literatures)

The Western Canon in British colonial policy

• Education as a powerful tool of control and domination

• Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Ngugi argues that colonization was not simply a process of physical force. Rather, "the bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.“(Decolonizing the Mind, 1986)

• Lord Macaulay,”Minute on Indian Education”, 1835: “We are free, we are civilized to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization”.

• F. Fanon: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it” (Black Skin, White Masks, 1967)

• “Colonial educational policies were directed towards the suppression of a sense of identity” (Griffiths, 1978)

The novel

• “English literature of the XIX century cannot beunderstood without remembering thatimperialism, understood as England’s socialmission, was a crucial part of the culturalrepresentation of England to the English”(Spivak, 1985).

The postcolonial rewriting of the classics

• Strategy of cultural decolonization

• Means of subverting but also critically appropriating the canon (part of his/her culural heritage, the culture of the Mother Country cannot be forgotten, ignored or easily removed: cross-cultural fertilizations)

• Critical, productive dialogue with the canon

• Not oppositional attitude but discursive dialectics.

• Remember the role of the classics in imposing and maintaining the status quo (the teaching of the classics as the masterpieces was one of the many ways in which the Empire asserted its cultural and moral superiority)

• Rewriting as a means to unveil and resist the assumptions of colonial discurses.

• The writing back model is adopted with the view of questioning a cultural tyranny while recognizing the precious and inevitable legacy of the Mother country

Bertha in Jane Eyre

• Described as suhuman, robbed of her human selfhood, no voice rather than the demonic laughter

• Her creole savagery leaves the mark when she sets fire to Thornfield Hall

• Banished into silence because of her inacceptable madness

• Manichean representation by Rochester, opposition between Bertha and Jane.

J. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

(1966)• Parallel between the life of J. Rhys and that of Bertha Mason

• The writer’s aim is to give the creole woman back a voice and a full human identity

• She puts her center stage.

• Antoinette is the white creole daughter of a former slave trader. As a creole she is rejected both by the white community and by the black one.

• Dissociation of identity, she falls into madness.

• WSS proceeds through 3 parts. In the first part Antoinette narrates of her childhood in Jamaica soon after the Emancipation Act (1833). Relations between the white and the black communities become very tense. In the second part we find an unnamed male narrator who has married Antoinette and keeps on calling her Bertha (he recalls Rochester). The third part is set in England, A. tells about her life of segregation in a big mansion. She dreams to set the house on fire. When she wakes up she resolves what she has to do.

• Rochester is represented both as the oppressor and as a victim, the writer does not dehumanise him (tricked into an arranged marriage by his father to secure him a fortune)

C. Dickens, Great Expectations

(1961)• Novel at the center of the canon, representative of the

myths, values, and triumphant ideology of Victorian

society.

• It is imbued with and shaped by the spirit of the Empire.

• It severely scrutinizes Victorian society: dark novel.

• At the end of the 50’s, when D. wrote the novel, he was

suffering for his failed marriage and a debilitating illness

(strenuous programme of public readings)

• After the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species

(1859) general skepticism, religious codes and morality

were weakened, sense of relativism and precariousness.

•

Great Expectations

The novel traces Pip’s development from the good-hearted child, who helps the convict

despite his fear, to the snobbish young gentleman who tries to conquer Estella.

Bildungsroman: from “gentleman in manners” to “gentleman at true heart” , he comes to

recognize the insignificance of material wealth.

Magwitch, the transported convict who has devoted all his life to make a gentleman of

Pip, secretly returns to England from Australia to meet the young man risking his life

Though Pip describes him as “the turning point of my life”, his character is not

satisfactorily explored.

Magwithch is depicted according to the stereotypical image of the romantic convict driven

to crime by hunger.

Though he fulfills the function of catalyst for the development of the protagonist, the

narrative devotes him very limited space through the voice of Pip.

His character is associated with images of bestiality (see first scenes in the graveyard).

Dog metaphor, marshes, Australian desert, cannibalism.

He is represented as the Other, contaminated by his experience at the Antipodes. Stigma

of his alterity condemns him to remain in Australia, he cannot expect to enter British

society. Unwanted although redeemed. Once illegally back to England, he shatters the

stability of the centre.

P. Carey, Jack Maggs (1998)

Interviews with the writer

“Dickens’ Magwitch is foul and dark, frightening, murderous. Dickens

encourages us to think of him as the ‘other’. I wanted to reinvent him, to

possess him, to act as his advocate. I did not want to diminish his

‘darkness’ or his danger, but I wanted to give him all the love and

tender sympathy that Dickens’ first person narrative provides his

English hero Pip” (interview with the writer).

Dickens’n novel “is (to an Australian) also a way in which the English

have colonized our ways of seeing ourselves”.

It seems to me to be such an Aussie story”. Dickens’ point of view is “a

point of view of its time and of its period, and I think it’s perfectly fine

that it should have that point of view”.

Jack Maggs

• April 1837: the convict Jack Maggs, after a long exile in Australia, returns to London

to meet Phipps.

• His narrative is set centre stage. He retrieves his right to narrate his own story

through the letters sent to Phipps.

• He develops throughout the novel (he is described at the beginning “like an oyster

working on a pearl”), he is not a passive, static character entrapped in a prejudicial

and sterotyped representation (see Magwith). He is given the complexity of a human

being.

• Tobias Oates, the writer who hypnotizes Maggs, recalls the figure of C. Dickens

(several biographical affinities). He is an addition to the source text and plays a

crucial part in the novel. He exploits and colonizes Maggs’ mind in order to write his

masterpiece to became a writer of great success. He defines himself as the

“cartographer of a criminal mind”. Through his writing he manipulates and distorts

Magg’s story. Maggs answers back to this official version of his story through his own

narrative, disclosing a “hidden history”: “Well, Henry Phipps – he writes in his letters –

you will read a different story in the glss, by which I mean – my own”.

Joseph Conrad

Born in Polish Ukraine in 1857. His father was a landowner who loved

literature and his country was at the time under Russian rule. He

participated in the movement for Polish independence and he was

exiled with his family. He grew up with the hatred for tiranny and the

wish for freedom.

At 17 he went to sea and travelled a lot.

In 1886 he became a British subject . He served for about 20 years in

the British Merchant Service.

In the meantime he had learned English and became fascinated by the

language (he also knew French).

He left the sea in 1894 because of illness and mental distress and

devoted himself to writing. He chose to write his creative works in

English.

Died in 1924

Heart of Darkness

• The novel is based on Conrad’s personal

experience of a voyage as a riverboat pilot

in Congo in 1889-90. It is at the same time

a spiritual voyage into knowledge of his

inner self.

• The narrator is Marlow.

C. Achebe

• Born in Eastern Nigeria in 1930, son of one of

the early Ibo converts to Christianity. He was a

teacher in the Church Missionary School which

Achebe attended.

• At university, where he studied English literature,

the syllabus was that typical of all British

universities. He was introduced to the canon of

English literature and read Conrad and decided to

write about Africa from the inside.

C. Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)

Interviews with the writer• The novel is not a classical re-writing of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but a

peculiar form of “writing back”.

• Achebe defines Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist” and he claims that the

humanity of his people “was totally undermined by the mindlessness of its

context and the pretty explicit animal imagery surrounding it” (1980).

• The Africans are reduced to “limbs and rolling eyes”, deprived of humanity,

of the faculty of expressing themselves.

• Africa is represented as “the other world, the antithesis of Europe and

therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and

refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (1980)

• Achebe spurs his readers to look at texts such as Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness “with a new awareness, and that they may carry that awareness

to other things that they see or read, because all we are saying is do not

treat any members of the human race as if they were less than human”

(1991).

• “The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity

and self-respect”. It is the duty of the writer “to help them regain it by

showing them in human terms what happened to them and what they lost”

(1973).

Things Fall Apart• The novel is set in Ibo-land towards the end of the 19th century, when European

where just beginning to penetrate inland in West Africa.

• It describes the change that comes over an old and firmly established society under

the impact of new, different ideas from outside brought about by the culture and

social organization of the colonizers.

• In the first part it shows the community of Umuofia, 9 related villages, just before the

arrival of the white man. It offers the readers a detailed picture of the way of life of

these peoples. We learn about elaborate social rituals and cerimonies and of how

everyday lives are interpenetrated with the otherworld of magic and mystery.

Okonkwo, the protagonist, is a man of this old order. Brave, fearless fighter, hard

worker, he is highly respected in his clan.

• In the second part of the novel Okonkwo is in exile and his village has changed

dramatically as a consequence of the arrival of the white colonizers.

• The third part brings the final, tragic phase of Okonkwo’s story. He returns to Umuofia

and finds that things have indeed changed. Great crisis and conflicts within the

community.

• In the end, when the Commissioner’s men arrive to arrest him, they find that he has

hanged himself, preferring a shameful death to the white man’s justice.

• The commissioner does not understand the people and its customs but plans t

include the “incident” in a paragraph of the book he is writing.

• Achebe challenges the “white man’s official History” with his novel which gives back

Okonkwo his deserved status and which explores his tragic predicament. Not just a

paragraph, but a whole book will tell his story.

Where are your monuments, your battles,

martyrs?

where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that grey vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

The Sea is History (1986)

Derek Walcott

Why the attention

on the Black

Atlantic?

Ideal field of exploration and

enquiry of the «New World

Order» (C. Phillips, 2002)

History of migrations, diasporas, exiles

generated new «translated» and hybridized cultures

which call into question old systems of thought and

values

Societies and cultures are always fluid and

mobile

The new cartography of the Black Atlantic maps not only the

triangular trade but also the constant uprooting and re-routing of the

«translated» cultures of the modern world.

Legacy in the present

Black Atlantic:

- old forms of slavery

- new disquieting forms of subjegation and

marginalization

It may appear that seas put nations out of all

communion with each other. But this is not so; for by

means of commerce, seas form the happiest natural

provision for their intercourse […] And hence

communications with such lands, especially where there

are settlements upon them connected with the mother

countries giving occasion for such communications,

bring it about that evil and violence committed in one

place of our globe are felt in all. Such possible abuse

cannot, however, annul the right of a man as a citizen

of the world to attempt to enter into communion

with all others, and for this purpuse to visit all the

regions of the earth.

I. Kant, «Nature and Conditions of Cosmopolita Right»

(1796)

The Black Atlantic “connects” Africa, the

Americas and Europe

Discursive space of intersecting

perspectives and exchanges

•Site of encounters, fluid space

"contact zones"

social spaces where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’

(M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992)

As a site of cultural dialogue the Black

Atlantic invites to “transcend the structures

of the nation state and the constraints of

ethnicity and national particularity” (Paul

Gilroy, the Black Atlantic, 1993)

Living «in-between»

entails a critique of

• ethnic, racial monolithic assumptions and

prejudices

• cultural nationalism

• all forms of absolutism

The Black Atlantic (1993)

PAUL GILROY

The Black Atlantic (1993)

PAUL GILROY

«Striving to be both European and

black requires some specific forms of

double consciousness. By saying this I

do not mean to suggest that taking on

either or both of these unfinished

identities necessarily exhausts the

subjective resources of any particular

individual…

The Black Atlantic (1993)

PAUL GILROY

…However, where racist, nationalist, or

ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate

political relationship so that these identities

appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying

the space between them or trying to

demonstrate their continuity has been

viewed as a provocative and even

oppositional act of political

insubordination».

The Black Atlantic

fosters a critical dialogue which awakens

the conscience of an uninterrupted history

of oppression which is the soil on which the

great fortune and the advancement of

Western societies are built.

the slave trade

the slave trade

Diagram of an African slave ship, printed in Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, Vol. 2, London, 1808.

Joseph Johnson as portrayed in

Vagabondiana (1817)

The Empire Windrush

Epilogue (1983)

Grace Nichols

I have crossed an ocean

I have lost my tongue

from the root of the old

one

a new one has sprung

What is a ‘diaspora’?

Diasporas are communities of people living together in one country who ‘acknowledge that ‘the old country’ – a notion often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore – always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions’’ […]

Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 1997

What is a ‘diaspora’?

[…] ‘a member’s adherence to a disporic

community is demonstrated by an

acceptance of an inescapable link with their

past migration history and a sense of co-

ethnicity with others of a similar

background’

Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction,

1997

diaspora identity‘it lives with and through, not despite difference’(Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and diaspora’1990)

•Heterogeneity

•Ongoing self-transformation

•Hybridity

challenges the certainty of roots for the contingency of routes (Paul Gilroy, 1993)

Black British identities

Diasporic peoples struggle for different ways to be

«British»

It means «to be British and something else complexly

related to Africa and the America, to shared histories of

enslavement, racist subordination, cultural survival,

hybridization, resistance and political rebellion»

(James Clifford, Routes, 1997)

Immigration from colonial

possessions after the II World

War

• Windrush generation (Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadianmigrants): start of large-scale postwar migration

• During World War II West Indian soldiers were recruited in the British Army

• They considered their migration to Britain a «return to the Mother Country»

• After the war Britain was in need of workers: the NationalityAct facilitated immigration. Britain actively recruited labour in the West Indies for the National Health Service, LondonTransport, and factories in the North.

• Very soon there were xenophobic responses and rescrictiveimmigration laws, so that immigration became nearlyimpossible for black Commonwealth citizens

II generation of migrants

• They were born in Britain or arrived as young persons

• Their attachment to Britain is symbolized by their Britishpassport

• Their birthplace is Britain, or their youth is spent there, Britishculture is of primary importance in their formative years

• The homelands left behind by their parents are less«available» to them, they have no direct memories (just in some cases of their journeys to those countries)

• Their parents’ homeland may be present through the parents’memories and accounts

• The connections with the parents’ origins are tenuous

• But their attachment and belonging to Britain is problematic

Black British

• The term came up in the later 1960s, in conjunction with the black power movements, and gained wider currrency in the ‘70s: it became an ombrella term for the entire spectrum of non-white British citizens and their communities, all living under difficult conditions in a white-dominated society, as «second class citizens» (Buchi Emecheta 1976)

• At its inception it was used to refer to distinct groups of West Indian migrants. Later it wasused to include migrant groups from other parts of the world and to speak about peoplewith African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds (expecially South Asian, i.e. Indians and Pakistanis), sometimes including also East Asians e.g. Chinese.

• The term is not simply a marker of ethnic identity and/or cultural belonging. It refers to people of many different ethnicities and diverse cultures labelled «Black» for their social and political condition of marginalization and oppression.

• It is a marker of their contingent placing outside the social mainstream. Common experience of racism and marginalization (S. Hall, 1988)

• The term became very current in the 1980s and ‘90s, but it was questioned and criticizedfor its broad, inclusive usage.

• Some critics have stressed the need to acknowledge cultural specificities and avoid toogeneral terms which tend to homogenize the field.

• Beginning with the third millennium and the emphasis on cultural diversity, the usefulnessof «black British» as a political term is waning

Black British literature• Black British literature is produced by immigrants or

their descendants who have become part of the

country’s social fabric (first and following generations).

• Fundamental challenge to any general traditional

understanding of what is «British»

• It raises crucial questions about cultural identities and

the concept of «national» and «nationhood» (various,

shifting elements contribute to its making).

• Blackness redefines the concept of Britishness and of

British literature

Black British literature

• Body of texts marked by a degree of heterogeneity thatalmost resist definition

• Texts by writers with African, South-Asian, Indo-Caribbean and African Caribbean backgrounds. Writers who belong to different generations and social classes, located in differentgeographical regions of Britain

• Different genres, texts written in different varieties of English

• Space not homogeneous, heterogeneity is one of its definingfeatures

A «Black British» literature?

• D. Dabydeen, 1987: «Black British literature refers to that created and published in Britain, largely for a British audience, by black writers either born in Britain or whohave spent a major portion of their lives in Britain».

• «But what of the term ‘black’? Does black denote colour of skin or quality of mind? If the former, what does skin colour have to do with the act of literary creation? Ifthe latter, what is ‘black’ about black? What are the aesthetic structures thatdifferentiate that expression from ‘white’ expression?»

• Though problematic the term is provocative and challenging. It implies the necessity of redifying and redressing the concepts of both Britishness and blackness, of reshaping space and identities.

E. Said, “The Mind of Winter.

Reflections on life in Exile” (1984)

“The canon of modern Western culture is in

large part the work of exiles, émigrés and

refugees”

Role of literature for diasporic

peoples

• It participates in a healing process.

• It partakes of the construction of memory

and re-construction of identities

Salman Rushdie

S. Rushdie

• Born in Bombay in 1947 into a Muslim

family of Kashmiri descent (year of the

Partition).

• He moved to England as a young boy to

attend school and Cambridge university.

He eventually settled in London and

moved to the United States in 2000.

Rushdie

• One of the most popular and controversial writers of the twentiethcentury, Salman Rushdie is a British Indian essayist and novelist. He has authored several novels and short stories in his life, which hascontinued to attract the interest of both critics and public. His abilityto combine magical realism with historical fiction is an exceptionalquality which makes him a truly unique writer. Most of the workswritten by him feature around the Indian subcontinent and mostlycontain themes like migrations to and fro the East and West and the incidences occurring in between them.

• It was Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which enragedthe Muslim community across the globe to the extent of Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa (death sentence) against him. However, despite it, Rushdie continued writing and released several books and novels.

Imaginary Homelands (1991)

• Collection of essays published in 1991.

• In the first one, “Imaginary Homelands”, he reflects upon the process of writing his novel Midnight’s Children (1981) which is set in India and Pakistan.

• Attempt to restore the world of his childhood home in Bombay. Impossible task to “return home” via the process of writing: he reconstructs an imaginary India, an India of the mind.

• Sense of dispacement and alienation, the past can be recovered only in fragments.

• Migrants arrive in new places with baggage (beliefs, values, traditions, customs, behaviours) which often exclude them from being recognized as part of the nation’s people.

• How can migrant deal with questions of home and belonging?

• Concept of translation (“we are borne across”) and of the hybridization of identities.

• Pain of loss,of not being firmly rooted. Deep suffering in being uprooted but also enlargment of critical perspective and privileged point of view. Partial, but at the same time plural view.

Rushdie, a migrant storyteller

• «Certainly, writing on the East and living in the West engenders friction. But the

problem of uprooting is even more important. My family originates in Kashmir, now

my family lives in Pakistan and myself in London. The series of uprootings has made

me feel split between several worlds». (Interview, 1984)

• Rushdie has never been accepted in any of his «homes». In England he was

considered very foreign and exotic; back in India he was ridiculed for his perfect

British accent and considered brainwashed and corrupted by the materialiatic West;

in Pakistan he is still considered an infidel and a blasphemer.

• «To migrate is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul, but the migrant

is not simply transformed by this act, he also transforms the new world»

• Migration is is a painful but emancipating process: «To be born again, first you have

to die» (opening words of The Satanic Verses)

• All his work is a celebration of hybridity

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

• «The purpose of fiction was in a way paradoxical, that the fiction is

telling the truth at a time at which the people who claimed to be

telling the truth are making things up. So in a way you have

politicians or the media, the people who form opinion, in fact making

the fictions. And it becomes the duty of the writer of fiction to start

telling the truth» (Rushdie, 1999)

• The project of the writer is that of «giving voice», «to speak up for

the great mass who never had the chance to sit down at a table, let

alone to win, and this is clearly a literature of the highest importance

and value» (Rushdie)

• History/stories

• History is not univocal , unilateral, impartial.

H. Kureishi

• Born in Britain in 1954 with a Pakistani father and English mother.

• In his essay “The Rainbow Sign” (1986) he records his experience as a boy growing up in London, a visit to Pakistan as a young man and makes some comparisons between the two locations.

• As a child he had no idea of what the subcontinent was like. At school he was mistakenly identified as an Indian by his teacher. Labelled as an outsider by his schoolmates despite the fact that he was British, he wasn’t permitted to belong.

• When he goes to Karachi as an adut he finds it difficult to consider this place as “home”.

• Identity crisis: “we are Pakistanis, but you, you will always be a Paki”, a relative tells him.

• New models of identity, “in-between” positions.

Hanif Kureishi

The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)

Caryl Phillips

i

Caryl Phillips The European Tribe

(1987)

A New World Order

(2001)

Caryl Phillips

Crossing the River

(1994)

A Distant Shore

(2003)

Andrea Levy

She was born 1958 in London to Jamaican

parents.

She grew up in London in a council estate.

Her father came to England on the SS Empire

Windrush and he was joined by her mother 6

months later. In Jamaica her parents were

both educated members of the middle class

and were considered “coloured” because they

were light-skinned blacks. They expected to

be privileged in England because of their

colour and social class but they suffered

discrimination.

Andrea Levy(from essays and interviews)

• “I am English born and bred, as the saying gos (as far as I can remember, itis born and bred and not born-and-bred-with-very-long-line-of-white-ancestors-directly-descended-from-Anglo-Saxons). England is the onlysociety I tryly know and sometime understand. I don’t look as the English did in the England of the 30’s or before, but being English is my birthright. England is my home. An excentric place where sometimes I love beingEnglish”.

• “I was educated to be English. Alongside me – learning, watching, eatingand playing – were white children. But those white children would neverhave to grow up to question whether they were English or not”.

• “So what am I? Where do we fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond?”

• “If Englishness doesn’t define me, then I’ll define Englishness”

• “Englishness must never be allowed to attach itself to ethnicities”

• “Being Back and British is a dynamic thing. It’s always changing.What weare trying to do is rid ourselves of a racist society. I want equality”

Levy

• Committed writing, literature has a social function.

• Deconstruction of the official version of Englishness.

• Her dual cultural heritage positions herself in a hybrid location.

• Insecurity about her “home” and sense of belonging

Andrea Levy The Fruit of the Lemon

(2007) The Long Song

(2010)

Fruit of the Lemon

• Published in 1999, the novel is partly autobiographical.

• Bildungsroman set in the 80’s.

• Faith is a Londoner of Jamaican origins (daughter of Black parents)

• Her dark skin and background are markers of her alterity.

• She grows up in London among white English students and friends, knowing nothing about her family (erasures and gaps in her family history), and constantly struggles to achieve a unified identity.

• She feels out of place. Identity crisis, she is forced to acknowledge her difference.

• II part of the novel: trip to Jamaica where she rediscovers and retrieves her roots (importance of the stories told by the various narrators, remembering the past as an essential step in the process of re-membering identities). She learns about a complex mixed-race ancestry which calls into question the myth of a pure identity.

• Faith’s re-birth: sense of pride in being black and awareness of her multiple, hybrid identity as a source of richness and empowerment. She reclaims her postion as the “bastard daughter of the Empire”

• She goes back to England with a new awareness.

W. Shakespeare

• Born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon.

• He attended grammar school, no further formal education.He married an older woman and had 3 children. Around 1590 he left his family behind and went to London to work as an actor and playwright.

• His career bridged the reigns of Elisabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625) and he was the favorite of both monarchs (James gave the members of his company the title of King’s Men).

• Wealthy and renowned, S. retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of 52.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

• The Tempest (1611) is considered by some critics as an allegory of colonialism, written against the background of England’s experiment in colonization.

• Prospero and Caliban have become synonimous with the figures of coonizer and colonized.

• S., like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by both the commercial and the imaginative possibilities offered by the New World, and this interest informed the writing of his last play.

• He knew the “Bermuda Pamphlets”, narratives describing the wreck of a ship going to the recently established colony of Virginia in 1609.

• He was also familiar with other travel narratives about the New World.

• America excited interest at the beginning of the 17th century for the commercial and imperial adventure but also because it was considered a tabula rasa, a “natural” environment in which sophisticated European values would be transferred and reassessed.

• The English colonial project seems to be in S’s mind throughout the Tempest. Almost every character ponders how he would rule the island if he were its king.

The Tempest

Probably written 1610-1611, first performed

at Court by the King’s Men in 1611. The

Tempest is most likely the last play written

entirely by S.

The Tempest: plot (I Act)

• A storm strikes a ship carrying Alonso, Ferdinand, Antonio, Gonzalo Stephano, Trincolo and Sebastian. They are on their way to Italy from Africa. The royal party is prepared to sink and they all fear for their lives.

• The second scene begins more quietly. Miranda and Prospero stand on the shore of their island, looking out to sea at the recent shipwreck.

• Miranda asks her father to do whatever he can to save those poor souls. Prospero reassures her and reveals to her that he orchestrated the shipwreck and tells her the story of their past. Prospero was the duke of Milan until his brother Antonio, conspiring with the King of Naples, Alonso, usurped his position. Kidnapped and left to die at sea, Prospero and his daughter survive. Gonzalo leaves them supplies and Prospero’s books which are the source of his magic and power. They have lived on the island for 12 years.

• Prospero calls his magical agent, Ariel, who brought the tempest upon the ship and set fire to the mast. He made sure that everyone got safely to the island.

• Ariel is Prospero’s servant, an airy spirit.Prospero has promised him freedom if he performs tasks such as these without complaining.

• Prospero reminds him that he rescued him from an horrible fate (he was imprisoned by the witch Sycorax in a tree and then freed by Prospero).

• Prospero and Miranda go and visit Caliban, Prospero’s servant, and the son of the dead Sycorax. Caliban curses Prospero, and they claim that he is ungrateful for what they have given and taught him.

Prospero

• One of S’s more enigmatic characters. He was wronged by his usurping brother, but he exerts his

absolute power over other characters submitting them.

• The pursuit of knowledge gets him into trouble in the first place. By neglecting everyday matters

when he was duke, he gave his brother a chance to rise up against him.

• His possession of magical knowledge makes him extremely powerful.

• His punishments of Caliban are petty and vindictive (he calls upon his spirits to pinch C. when he

curses).

• He is very authoritative with Ariel. When Ariel asks him to relieve him of his duties, he bursts into

fury and threatens to return him to his former imprisonment and torment.

• Through his schemes, manipulations, spells, he creates the play itself with its plot. Watching

Prospero at work is like watching a dramatist create a play, building a story from material at hand

and developing the plot to reach the final ending.

• In his final speech he likens himself to a playwright by asking the audience for applause.

• The final scene is a celebration of creativity, humanity and art.

• P. emerges as a more likable and sympathetic figure in the final two acts thanks to his love for

Miranda, his forgiveness of his enemies (he also releases his slaves) and the happy ending he

orchestrates.

• He makes his audience share his understanding of the world.

• It is tempting to think of the Tempest as S’s farwell to the stage because of the theme of the great

magitian giving up his art.

Caliban

• Prospero’s dark, earthly slave, frequently referred to as a monster by the other characters, C. isthe son of a witch and the only real native of the island.

• Complex figure. He insists that Prospero stole the island from him. He has a sort of dignity whenhe refuses to bow before Prospero’s intimidations.

• He regrets to have shown Prospero all the secrets of the island when he first arrived and the he was enslaved and betrayed by the new master.

• Pospero lists Caliban’s shortcoings and describes his good treatment of him, but Caliban answerswith curses..Prospero accuses him of being ungrateful for all he has taught and given him. He calls him a “lying slave” and reminds him of the efforts he made to educate him. But Caliban’snature makes him unfit to live among civilized peoples.

• On the one hand Prospero and Miranda think that their education of him has lifted him from hisformerly brutish status. On the other hand they seem to see him as inherently brutish.

• Is he inherently brutish or is he made brutish by oppression? The answer remains open

• Prospero’s ability to master Caliban is through words, and the more Caliban gets control over language the closer he comes to achieve freedom.

• His beautiful speeches about his island home provide some of the most impressive imagery in the play. The readers are led to consider his enslavement as terribly unjust. However he is alsopresented in the most degrading kind of drunken, servile behaviour.

• He becomes the symbol of native peoples and cultures enslaved, exploited and suppressed by Europena colonial societies, here represented by the power of Prospero.