Jackie Miller
Professor Helphistine
Spring 2012
Bibliography
I. Origins of Multicultural Theory
 Response to Change
 The Impact of Multicultural Theory.
V. Current Articles
II. Key Terms
VI. Websites explaining
Multicultural Criticism and its Key
Practitioners
III. Key Practitioners
1.
Frantz Fanon
2.
Edward Said
3.
Homi K. Bhabha
4.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
VII. Works Cited
IV. Criticism of Multicultural Theory
 Literary theory has long been dominated by white Europeans, most
notably the French and English. According to Booker, virtually every text
in the Western literary canon was authored by a white male from Western
Europe or the United States (151).
 The emergence of award winning writers such as Toni Morrison, N. Scott
Momaday, Gabriel García Márquez and Naguib Mahfouz, has caused a
paradigm shift in literary theory and its application.
 Booker notes that multicultural theory has much in common with
feminist theory in the way it poses fundamental challenges to traditional
literary canons & traditional modes of literary interpretation (151).

Multicultural Literary Criticism emerges as a response to the changes brought about by
writers who are “involved in serious efforts to develop viable cultural identities to replace
those thrust on them by the culture of their former colonial masters” (Booker 150).

Booker notes that the plurality of multicultural theory is further enhanced by the fact
that postcolonial literature and theory both arise in a cultural context informed by the
attempt to build a new hybrid culture that transcends the past but still draws on the
vestigial echoes of pre-colonial culture, the remnants of colonial culture and the
continuing legacy of traditions of anticolonial resistance (153).

What makes multicultural criticism and theory so interesting is how it has “gone beyond
challenges to the traditional canon, drawing on the rich body of work by AfricanAmerican and postcolonial writers to explore the possibilities for alternative cultural
traditions” (Booker 153).

Neil Lazarus, author of the essay, “Introducing Postcolonial Studies” examines the impact of
postcolonial studies and points out how texts from postcolonial authors are now award winning
novelists:

The last quarter of the twentieth century has borne witness to a profound decentering of the dominant traditions of the literary world.
This transformation has been registered at all levels – reading, writing, publishing, and criticism – including at the highest levels of
institutional consecration. Thus while no African writer had won the Nobel Prize for Literature before the mid-1980s, four have done
so since then…In Britain, the Booker Prize has since the early 1980s been dominated by writers either living in, raised in, or with close
connections to the former colonial world… Much the same is true of the Prix Goncourt in France. Everywhere in Anglophone and
Francophone literatures, much of the most vibrant, audacious, and inspiriting contemporary writing is being produced by such
writers, whose work derives from and reflects upon the experiences of colonialism and post-coloniality, even if the intellectual and
ideological formation of these writers cannot be separated from the metropolitan studium,the various “great traditions.” (13-14).

Alterity - " the quality or state of being radically alien to the conscious self or a particular cultural orientation” (Merriam-Webster).

Diaspora (dI-ASP-er-ah)- This term describes a “range of cultural affiliations connecting other groups who have been dispersed or who have
migrated across national boundaries (Gilroy 1993; Hall 1996b). Thus Asian, Irish, African, Caribbean and other ethnic groups - including
theoretically in a post-imperial age a dominant ethnic group such as the English - are connected in a diasporic network via family ties,
morality, manners, sporting and artistic traditions to a homeland, or to an idea of a homeland.”(Brooker 74).

Eurocentrism - " A term describing the way a particular cultural model, 'centered‘ upon European intellectual traditions and socio-political
systems, has been generalized so as to apply to the world at large(Brooker 95).

Hegemony- “In contemporary critical discourse it has come to mean power exercised by creating the belief in the majority of people in a
society that power is the prerogative of a group or class as a ‘natural’ or otherwise justified right. From the point of view of literary and
cultural criticism this contemporary usage of ‘hegemony’ serves to place the production of culture at the heart of the issue of power and
social change. It suggests that social texts, literature, film, television, the Internet, etc., may be crucial in allowing a ruling class to exercise
power” (Childs, Peter and Roger Fowler 102-103).

Hybridity -This term “ has been most extensively articulated and theorized by Homi Bhabha. Bhabha introduces the term first within the
colonial arena and he, amongst others, has since transported it to other fields of analysis in post-colonial contexts, where hybridity has now
become a central term in discussions of multiculturalism and diaspora. It is …closely related to terms such as ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’
and is imbedded within a wider framework of concern with what Bhabha calls the “Third Space.’” (Childs, Peter and Roger Fowler 112).

Subaltern- although this term was initially used by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci to refer to “the non-elite classes, including but not
restricted to the proletariat it has been “passed into the lexicon of post-colonial studies…referring in general to dominated or subordinate
groups within colonial power relations and is sometimes applied to the colonized elite as well as non-elite sectors of colonial studies” (Childs,
Peter and Roger Fowler 230).
In Multicultural Literary Theory
“
Fig. 1. Frantz Fanon.
Copyright Getty Images.”
 Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)-he is noted as a “founding thinker of multicultural theory. He warned
against the possibility of continuing neocolonial oppression in postcolonial nations dominated by a ruling class
modeled on the European bourgeoisie and by a national consciousness modeled on European nationalism”
(Booker 153-154).

He was the first major theorist to recognize that the nationalist spirit of independence in the colonial world did
not necessarily stand in direct opposition to foreign imperial domination but might in fact extend that domination
in more subtle ways.

Edward Said wrote in his book Culture, Fanon “more dramatically and decisively than anyone…expresses the
immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation.”

Although Fanon “wrote very little about literature…his analysis of the negative consequences of the fictional
stereotypes produced in Western discourses have numerous implications for literary criticism and theory. His
meditations…have provided an important theoretical framework for postcolonial writers such as Ngugu and the
Senegalese Sembéne Ousmane . It also remains among the founding texts of postcolonial theory (Booker 154).

Four works are associated with Frantz Fanon- Black Skin, White Mask (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), Studies in a Dying Colonialism, or A Dying Colonialism (1965), and Toward the African Revolution (1967).

Edward Said credits Fanon “as an essential figure in the attempts of multicultural peoples to develop viable cultural and
personal identities for themselves” (Booker 155).

In his work of the multicultural “stereotype” criticism titled, Orientalism (1978) , Said “argues that the nineteenth century
Europeans often justified their imperial expansion into the rest of the world through a belief in “Orientalist” stereotypes that
envisioned non-Europeans as lazy, irresponsible, irrational, and sexually promiscuous” ( Booker 151).

Sabine Milz notes in her article about the importance of Said’s discourse:
Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism is a highly politicized contrapuntal reading of imperial discourse about the nonWestern Other. Both "an inventory of how the Western intellectual has come to be in the service of the hegemonic
culture and an example of how critical humanists might become oppositional intellectuals " (Bové,Intellectuals 28),
the book offers a revisionist a account of Western imperialism and colonization from a non-Western, nonimperial perspective. As Said writes, "In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory
the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the
life of all Orientals " (Orientalism 25).

Booker notes that “Said’s findings…are highly relevant to literary theory and criticism. His work may be especially important for
literary scholars, who historically have often regarded their work as particularly free of political and ideological distortion” (151).

Benita Parry points out Foucault’s influence on Said, whose study of colonial discourse was enabled by Foucault’s
understanding of how the will to exercise dominant control in society and history, has also discovered a way to clothe,
disguise, rarefy, and wrap itself systematically in the language of truth, discipline, rationality, utilitarian value, and knowledge
(69).

Said’s work includes Orientalism (1978), The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1994),
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), The Edward Said Reader (2000)
Bhabha’s work is “characterized by sophisticated applications of Lancanian and
Derridiean theory to the postcolonial situation, also draws on Fanon, whom he tends to
read as a precursor of poststructuralism” (Booker 154).
 The essay by Bart Moore-Gilbert remarks that Bhabha has since become one of the most
cited theoreticians of diasporic culture and of contemporary "multiculturalism's " in the
West, as well as a respected commentator on postcolonial visual culture.
 Simon Gikandi notes that for Bhabha postcolonial criticism “bears witness to the unequal
and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social
authority within the modern world order” (98).


The essay by Moore-Gilbert reveals a primary concern in Bhabha’s focus:
Bhabha is especially preoccupied by questions of cultural exchange and identification that
are determined not by problems of geographical distance and overt forms of political
inequality, as in colonialism, but by the contiguity of cultures (characteristically from the
former colonial "peripheries ") sharing the same (usually metropolitan) space within the
former imperium and by relations of ostensible, if often illusory, equality. Such issues involve
Bhabha in a complex set of negotiations between postcolonialism and postmodernism.
Bhabha’s work includes, Nation and Narration (1990)The Location of Culture (1994)as well as numerous
articles and reviews. According to the Harvard University website, he is currently the Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard (Harvard University).
Her work in post colonialism theory brings together “feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and
Marxist forms of political economy “ in such a way as to “demonstrate their respective limits and
incompatibilities, as well as their mutual points of interrogation”(Moore-Gilbert). Spivak recognizes the
impact all women have in postcolonial discourse.
In her most important essay, “ Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), she “extends the scope of Antonio
Gramsci’s term and applies it to the “Third World” to signify “subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant
labor, the trials and communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside” (Moore-Gilbert).
Spivak’s work includes In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Outside in the Teaching
Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing
Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias(2005). In 2008 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
would publish Who Sings the Nation-State? a book co-written with Judith Butler. Her more recent works
include Nationalism and the Imagination (2010) and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
(2012).

Aijaz Ahmad, ‘argues that the primary failure of postcolonial theory is to be found in its eagerness
to foreground a set of questions – on historical agency, the production of colonial subjects, and
even the history of modernity – or to consider “the question of cultural domination exercised by
countries of advanced capital over imperialized countries” (Gikandi 97).

In Booker, critic Fredric Jameson believes multicultural literature should be read from a different
perspective:

Fredric Jameson, for example, suggests that all ‘third world texts’-and particularly the major characters in
those texts must necessarily be read as ‘national allegories’. For Jameson, the allegorical nature of third-world
(postcolonial) societies, in which the lack of the clear separation between public and private realms typical of
Western effaces the boundary between individual characters and the societies in which they live, leading to a
situation in which ‘the story of a private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society.”(155).
In Multicultural Criticism











Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, 1995. eBook
Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 16 Apr. 2012. Project Muse.
Bergner, Gwen. "Who Is That Masked Woman? or, The Role of Gender in Fanon's Black Skin, White
Masks." PMLA 110.1 (January 1995): 75-88. Project Muse.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Statement for the Critical Inquiry Symposium.” Critical Inquiry. 30.2 (Winter
2004):342-349. JSTOR
DeCook, Travis. “Northrop Frye and the Book as Metaphor and Material Artefact.” University of Toronto
Quarterly. 81.1. (Winter 2012):37-49. Project Muse.
Enjelvin, Geraldine and Nada Korac-Kakabadse. “France and the Memories of “Others”: The Case of the
Harkis.” History and Memory. 24.1 (Spring/Summer 2012):152-177. Project Muse
Gates, Henry Louis. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17 (1992): 457-470. Project Muse
Moore, T. Owens. “A Fanonian Perspective on Double Consciousness.” Journal of Black Studies. 35.6 (Jul.,
20005):751-762. JSTOR.
Mufti, Aamir. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry. 36.3 (Spring
2010):458- 493. JSTOR.
Niesen de Abruña. “Homi Bhabha as Public Intellectual at the Turn of the Millennium: Introduction to Keynote
Lecture at the Annual NEMLA Conference, Boston, March 8, 2003.” Modern Language Studies.
33.1/2. (Spring-Autumn, 2003): 90-93. JSTOR
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “In Memoriam: Edward W. Said.” Comparative Studies of South Asia,
Africa and
the Middle East. 23.1 & 2. (2003): 6-7. Project Muse. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
Young, Paul. “Victorian Literature & Postcolonial Studies.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920.
55.1 (2012):112-116. Project Muse.
Explaining Multicultural Criticism and Its
Key Practitioners

Open Yale Courses. Professor Paul Fry
http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-22
Introduction to Postcolonial theory:
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
Information on Frantz Fanon:
http://newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0036
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html
A Glossary of Key Terms in the work of Gayatri Spivak:
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Glossary.html
Orientalism from Emory University:
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html
Gayatri Spivak from Emory University:
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Spivak.html














“Alterity.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary Online. Merriam-Webster, 2012. 14 Apr. 2012.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Faculty.” Department of African and African American Studies. Harvard University. N.p. (2012) Web.
17 Apr. 2012.
“Diaspora.” Brooker, Peter. Glossary Of Cultural Theory. Arnold, 2003. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 15 Apr. 2012.
“Eurocentrism.” Brooker, Peter. Glossary Of Cultural Theory. Arnold, 2003. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 15 Apr.
2012.
“Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak-Biography.” European Graduate School EGS. N.p. (2012). Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
Gikandi, Simon. “Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed.
Neil Lazarus. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cambridge Collections Online. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
“Hegemony.” Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. Routledge Dictionary Of Literary Terms. Routledge, 2006. eBook Collection
(EBSCOhost). Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
“Hybridity.” Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. Routledge Dictionary Of Literary Terms. Routledge, 2006. eBook Collection
(EBSCOhost). Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
Lazarus, Neil. “Introducing Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil
Lazarus. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cambridge Collections Online. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
Milz, Sabine. “ Said, Edward W. “ The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. 2ed. (2005): n.p. Web. 16
Apr. 2012.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. “ Bhaha, Homi K.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. 2ed. (2005): n.p. Web. 16
Apr. 2012.
Parry, Benita. “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed.
Neil Lazarus. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cambridge Collections Online. Web. 16 Apr.
2012.
Poulos, Jennifer. “Frantz Fanon.” Theorists. Postcolonial Studies at Emory. (Spring 1996): n.p. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.
“Subaltern.” Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. Routledge Dictionary Of Literary Terms. Routledge, 2006. eBook Collection
(EBSCOhost). Web. 16 Apr. 2012.