ETHNIC AND POST-COLONIAL
STUDIES
ETHNIC AND POST-COLONIAL STUDIES
Authors in previous study blocks have
critiqued stable, fixed notions of identity,
identity as a state, preferring to inscribe
subjectivity within a fluid, variable,
culturally determined and ongoing process.
 In this section the emphasis shifts,
however, from gender or sexuality to
ethnicity, race and the post-colonial
subject.
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Stuart Hall has noted a revisioning or
splitting of the term ethnicity, between the
dominant notion which connects it to nation
and ‘race’ and … a recognition that we all
speak from a particular place, out of a
particular history, out of a particular
experience, a particular culture … We are
all, in this sense, ethnically located.
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Hall’s linkage of particularity to
commonality (“we all speak from a
particular place”, etc.) enfolds ethnicities
such as Englishness which have
traditionally survived “by marginalizing,
dispossessing, displacing and forgetting
other ethnicities.
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The totalizing project of Englishness in
colonies under British imperial rule, and its
questioning by intellectuals and critics of
the second half of the 20th century, lie at the
heart of what has come to be known as postcolonial criticism.
Within a poststructuralist environment and
drawing on its methodology, post-colonial
critics analyze the repercussions of
European cultural and territorial
expansion from its beginnings to the
present day.
 They examine the mutually reinforcing
enterprise of colonialism and the cultures
of the colonizers, as well as the interaction
between colonizers and colonized.

Post-colonial aims at recovering the marginalized
excluded or otherwise silenced voices of colonial
or subaltern voices.
 Finally, post-colonial studies explore and theorize
identity as determined by colonial and postcolonial experience, national affiliation and a
globalised world.
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The field emerged in the second half of the
20th century after WW II, when the colonial
enterprise started breaking down and
European colonial powers such as France
and England granted independence to
many of its colonies.
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Internal colonial situations such as those suffered by
African Americans in the United States and the black
majority in South Africa faced significant and
mounting challenges to racist practices and abuse.
Colonial hegemony had been enforced by the
imposition of the colonizers’ language and cultures,
and attention in the post-colonial studies turned to
the role of literature which,
as Michael Ryan notes, came to be seen as a
privileged site for understanding the social
structures, cultural codes, and psychological tropes of
cross-cultural and inter-ethnic understanding and
misunderstanding.

Race and ethnicity interest us for the ways
in which they are represented, mediated or
otherwise signify through literary texts.
Ryan reminds us that culturally
constructed racial or ethnic identities bear
a specific relationship to literature. Much of
the most influential post-colonial criticism
has been generated by authors who were
born in formerly colonized nations
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The Nigerian author and critic Chinua Achebe’s
essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness is a foundational text of postcolonial criticism.
It exposes the racism that lies at the heart of
Heart of Darkness, a racism in which Western
culture is given the privileged status of
Conrad’s text in Western canon.
Palestinian-born American critic Edward Said’s
Orientalism is one of the foremost landmarks
credited with having laid the groundwork for
the field.
SAID
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Interacting with the emerging
poststructuralist theory, he was one of
Michel Foucault’s most distinguished
disciples, drawing on his studies of
discourse and power, or discourse as power,
to elucidate the function of cultural
representations on the construction and
maintenance of First / Third World
relations.
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Said takes on the challenge of the post-colonial,
to elucidate how knowledge that is nondominative and non-coercive can be produced in a
setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics,
the considerations, the positions and the
strategies of power (Orientalism Reconsidered).
He put into circulation the term the other to
describe the enduring stereotypes and thinking
about the Orient generated by European
imperialism.
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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi
Bhabha, (Spivak is Bengali, Bhabha is
Indian), have driven post-colonial criticism
further down the route of imaginative
interaction between theory and politics,
analytical discourse and the antiimperialist cause.
Said and Spivak explore the structures of
imperial domination and their material
impact on the lives of the colonized subject
construed as the Other or the Subaltern.
 Bhabha engages with deconstructive
practice in order to critique certain violent
hierarchies: the West and the Orient, the
center and the periphery, the empire and the
colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed,
and the self and the other.
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Dismantling these binaries that
conceptualize national cultures as stable,
fixed and monologic, Bhabha argues that
nationalities, ethnicities, and identities are
dialogic, indeterminate, and characterized
by hybridity
POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES AND RACE AND
ETHNICITY STUDIES
Postcolonial studies examines the global
impact of European colonialism, from its
beginnings in the 15th up to the present.
 Its aims are: to describe the mechanisms of
colonial power, to recover excluded or
marginalized subaltern voices, and to
theorize the complexities of colonial and
postcolonial identity, national belonging,
and globalization.
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One major issue concerns the nature of
representation.
 Following Edward Said’s Orientalism,
postcolonial critics have examined the ways
in which Western representations of third
world countries serve the political interests
of their makers.
 Postcolonial critics problematize
“objective” perception, pointing out the
unbalanced power relations that typically
shape the production of knowledge.
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The West has constructed the third world as
an Other.
 Such ideological projections typically
become the negative terms of binary
oppositions in which the positive terms are
normative representations of the West.
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These damaging stereotypes circulate
through anthropological, historical, and
literary texts, as well as mass media such as
newspapers, television, and cinemas.
A related line of inquiry in postcolonial
theory studies how institutions of Western
education function in the spread of
imperialism.
Historical documents such as Thomas
Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian
Education show that education, including
the study of English literature and the
English language, plays a strategic part in
ruling over colonized peoples.
 As it inculcates Western Eurocentric values,
literary education supports a kind of
cultural colonization, creating a class of
colonial subjects often burdened by a
double consciousness and by divided
loyalties.
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It helps Western colonizers rule by consent
rather than by violence.