Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Dolce, libro consigliato Beginning Postcolonialism, McLeod

Introduction

The term ‘postcolonialism’ does have a history. It has entered common parlance (linguaggio) and is frequently used by critics, scholars, teachers, and writers. The range of issues (problemi/questione) covered by the term is indeed large and sometimes contradictory. There is no one singular postcolonialism. But one of the fundamental arguments of this book is that postcolonialism can be productively articulated in different ways as an enabling and critical concept. It is always vital that we take into account the cultural and historical specificity of writers and thinkers when we consider their work, and understand the dynamic relationship between a writer and the culture(s) about which he or she writes.

The hyphenated term ‘post-colonial’ seems better suited to denote a particular historical period or epoch, like those suggested by phrases such as ‘after colonialism’, ‘after independence’ or ‘after the end of the Empire’. In its hyphenated form, ‘post-colonial’ functions rather like a noun: it names something which exists in the world. We will be thinking about postcolonialism as referring to disparate forms of representations, reading practices, attitudes, and values. These principally aesthetic phenomena can circulate across the historical border between colonial rule and national independence. The term postcolonialism denotes something which one does. ‘Postcolonialism’ without the hyphen is best thought of as akin (simile) to an adjective, a word which describes the particular qualities of a thing or an action. We use the phrases ‘once-colonised countries’ or ‘countries with a history of colonialism’ when dealing in strictly historical terms with those locations which were previously part of the European empires.

From 'Commonwealth' to 'Postcolonial'

Introduction

We need to place the word 'postcolonialism' in two primary contexts:

• The first regards the historical experiences of decolonisation that have occurred chiefly in the 20th century.
• The second concerns relevant intellectual developments in the latter part of the 20th century, especially the shift from the study of 'Commonwealth literature' to 'postcolonialism'.

Colonialism and Decolonisation

At the turn of the 20th century, the British Empire covered a vast area of the Earth that included parts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the Caribbean, and Ireland. At the beginning of the 21st century, although there remains a small handful (manciata) of British Overseas Territories, the vast bulk of the Empire has not survived. All over the world, the 20th century witnessed the decolonisation of millions of people who were once subject to the authority of the British crown. The British Empire signified a historical period and set of relationships which appear no longer current. The material and imaginative legacies of both colonialism and decolonisation remain fundamentally important constitutive elements in the contemporary geo-political realities and conflicts around the world and impact upon how different people live today. And they also remain in the arts, cultures, languages, and intellectual disciplines (anthropology, literature, etc.).

Colonialism has taken many different forms and has engendered diverse effects around the world. Judd argues that colonialism was first a fundamental part of the commercial venture of Western nations such as Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal that developed from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Some date its origins to the European 'voyages of discovery' in the 15th and 16th centuries (when Columbus discovered America in 1492). The seizing of 'foreign' lands for government and settlement was in part motivated by the desire to create and control opportunities to generate wealth and control international markets, frequently by securing the natural resources and labor power of different lands and peoples (popoli) at the lowest possible cost to Europeans.

• Colonialism was big business and the profits to be made were unimaginable (one example is the construction of the sugar industry in the Caribbean). British businesses could produce a range of products at minimal cost which, when shipped to Europe, could be sold for extremely high profits (thanks to African slaves and, later, Indian indentured laborers). Colonialism was first a lucrative commercial operation, bringing wealth and riches to Western nations through the economic exploitation of others. Colonialism and capitalism share a mutually supportive relationship with each other. Colonialism is only one form of practice, one modality of control which results from the ideology of imperialism, and it specifically concerns the settlement of people in a new location. It is one historically specific mechanism of imperialism which prioritizes the act of settlement. It is a process virtually over today as a practice.
• Imperialism is an ideological project which upholds the legitimacy of the economic and military control of one nation by another. It continues apace (rapidamente) as Western nations are still engaged in imperial acts, securing wealth and power through the continuing economic exploitation of other nations. The British Empire is one form of an imperial economic and political structure among several which emerged in Europe.

There are three distinct periods of decolonisation when the colonised nations won the right to govern their own affairs.

1. First period: the first one was the loss of the American colonies and declaration of American independence in the late 18th century.
2. Second period: the second one spans the end of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century, and concerns the creation of the 'dominions'. This was the term used to describe the nation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These nations ('settler nations') consisted of large European populations that had settled overseas, often violently displacing or destroying the indigenous peoples of these lands ('First Nations' peoples in Canada, Aboriginal communities in Australia, New Zealand's Maori, and the many different tribes in southern Africa). The 'settler' peoples of these nations campaigned for forms of self-government which they achieved as dominions of the British Empire. Yet, as a 'dominion' each still recognised and pledged allegiance (fedeltà giurata) to the ultimate authority of Britain as the 'mother country'.
• Canada was the first to achieve a form of political autonomy in 1867.
• Australia followed suit in 1901.
• New Zealand in 1907.
• South Africa in 1910.
• Ireland won self-rule in 1922, although the country was partitioned and six counties in the northeast remained under British control as Northern Ireland. In 1931 the Statute of Westminster removed the obligation for the dominions to defer (rinviare) ultimate authority to the British crown and gave them full governmental control.
3. Third period: the third one occurred in the decades immediately following the end of the 2nd World War. Most colonised lands in South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean tended to feature larger dispossessed indigenous populations settled and governed by small British colonial elites. The achievement of independence, particularly in South Asia and Africa, occurred often as a consequence of indigenous anti-colonial nationalism and military struggle. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw busy decolonisation throughout the declining Empire. With the passing of Hong Kong from Britain to China on 1 July 1997, the numbers of those living under British rule fell below one million for the first time in centuries.

There are many reasons for decolonisation as there were once-colonised nations:

• One fundamental reason concerned the growth of many nationalist movements which mounted various challenges across the Empire to British colonial authority, and which very often took inspiration from each other in opposing colonial authority.
• One cause was the decline of Britain as a world power after 1945 and the ascendancy of the USA and the Soviet Union.
• Another reason concerns changes to technologies of production and international finance which enabled imperialist and capitalist ambitions to be pursued (portate avanti) without the need for colonial settlement.

The Emergence of 'Commonwealth Literature'

'Commonwealth literature' was a term literary critics began to use from the 1950s to describe literatures in English emerging from a selection of countries with a history of colonialism. It incorporated the study of writers from the predominantly European settler communities, as well as writers belonging to those countries which were in the process of gaining independence from British rule (such as those ones from the African Caribbean and South Asian nations). Literary critics began to distinguish a fast-growing body of literature written in English which included work by figures as Narayan (India), Naipaul (Trinidad), Frame (New Zealand) and Achebe (Nigeria). The creation of the category of 'Commonwealth literature' was an attempt to identify and evaluate this vigorous literary activity, and to consider via a comparative approach the common concerns and attributes that these manifold (molteplici) literary voices might have.

One consequence of the decline of the British Empire in the 20th century was the establishment of the British Commonwealth of Nations. In the early decades, Britain hosted frequent 'colonial conferences' which gathered (radunava) together the Governors of the colonies and heads of the dominions. In 1907 these meetings were re-named 'imperial conferences'. After the 2nd World War, these meetings became 'Commonwealth conferences'. The British monarch was recognised as the head of the Commonwealth in symbolic terms only (the British crown held no political authority over other Commonwealth nations). 'Commonwealth' became redefined after the war in more equitable terms, as meaning an association of sovereign nations without deference (rispetto) to a single authority. Today, the Commonwealth of Nations as a body exists in name only. It aims to promote democracy, world peace, non-racialism, and consensus-building within and across its 54-member states (enshrined /racchiuse/ in its 1971 'Singapore Declaration Commonwealth principles'). But it remains troubled by colonialism's legacies (eredità) and violent contemporary conflicts. The term 'Commonwealth' proffers (offre) a sanitised vision of international fraternity which masks the exploitative and painful realities of British colonisation and its legacies. That common inheritance arguably served to reinforce the primacy of Britain among the Commonwealth nations.

'Commonwealth literature' may well have been created in an attempt to bring together writings from around the world on an equal footing, yet the assumption remained that these texts were ultimately to be judged by a Western, English-speaking readership. One of the fundamental assumptions held by the first Western critics of Commonwealth literature and the nation. The editor McLeod proposed that the genesis of a local literature in the Commonwealth countries has almost always been contemporaneous with the development of a truly nationalist sentiment. Many agreed that the 'novel' ideas and new 'interpretations of life' in Commonwealth literature owed much to the ways that writers were forging their own sense of national and cultural identity.

The editorial to the first edition of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature recognised the important national and cultural differences between writers from divergent locations. Commonwealth literature was really evaluated in terms derived from the conventional study of English that stressed the values of timelessness and universality. For liberal humanists, the most 'literary' texts always transcend the provincial contexts of their initial production and deal with moral preoccupations deemed (ritenuto) relevant to people of all times and places.

Many postcolonial critics insist that historical, geographical, and cultural specifics are vital to both the writing and reading of a text, and cannot be so easily bracketed as secondary coloring or background. For many critics of Commonwealth literature, these texts conformed to a critical status quo. Their potential differences were contained by the identification within them of universal themes that bound texts safely inside the aesthetic criteria of the West.

Theories of Colonial Discourses: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said

Theories of colonial discourses explore how Europeans keep colonised peoples of other lands subservient to colonial rule. Colonialism operates by persuading people to internalise its logic and speak its language; to perpetuate the values and assumptions (presa di potere) of the colonisers as regards the ways they perceive and represent the world. Language constitutes our world-view by cutting up and ordering reality into meaningful units. A Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o stresses, language also goes a long way towards creating a person's understanding of their world, and it houses the values through which we live our lives. Under colonialism, a colonised people are made subservient to ways of regarding the world which reflect and support colonialist values. The cultural values of the colonised peoples are deemed as lacking in value, or even as being 'uncivilised', from which they must be rescued. Empire endured (resistito) by getting both colonising and colonised people to see their world and themselves in a particular way, internalising the language of Empire as representing the natural, true order of life.

In the 1950s there emerged much important work that attempted to record the psychological damage suffered by colonised peoples who internalised these colonial discourses. Prominent was the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who wrote about the damage French (he was born in Martinique) colonialism had wreaked upon millions of people who suffered its power. He joined with the Algerian rebels fighting against the French occupation of the country. Influenced by contemporary philosophers and poets such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire, Fanon's publications include two polemical books: 'Black Skin, White Masks' and 'The Wretched of the Earth'. 'Black Skin, White Masks' examined in the main the psychological effects of colonialism. Fanon looked at the cost to the individual who lives in a world where due to the color of his or her skin, he or she is rendered peculiar, an object of derision, an aberration.

Fanon's identity is defined in negative terms by those in a position of power. He is forced to see himself as an object, a peculiarity at the mercy of a group that identifies him as inferior and less than fully human, subservient to their definitions and representations. The violence of this 'revision' of his identity is conveyed powerfully in the image of amputation. Fanon feels abbreviated, violated, imprisoned by a way of seeing him that denies him the right to define his own identity as a subject. Identity is something that the French make for him.

'Black Skin, White Masks' explains the consequences of identity formation for the colonised subject who is forced into the internalisation of the self as an 'other'. The 'Negro' is deemed to epitomise everything that the colonising French are not. The colonised are never accepted on equal terms. For Fanon, the end of colonialism meant a psychological change too. Colonialism is destroyed only once its ways of thinking about matters such as identity are successfully challenged.

In 1978 Edward W. Said's Orientalism was published. 'Orientalism' is a book, in which Said looked at the divisive (combattuta) relationship between the coloniser and the colonised and explored how colonialism institutionally created a wide-ranging body of knowledge which supported the divisive practices of colonial government and settlement. Said examined how the knowledge that Western imperial powers formed about their colonies helped continually to justify their subjugation. Western travellers recorded their observations based upon commonly held assumptions about 'The Orient' as a mythic place of exoticism, moral laxity (negligenza/permissività), sexual degeneration, and so forth. These observations functioned to justify the very propriety of colonial domination. Colonial power was buttressed (rinforzato) by the production of knowledge about colonised cultures which endlessly produced a degenerate image of the Orient for those in the West, or Occident. In this way, its colonisation could be justified in benign or moral terms, as a way of spreading the benefits of Western civilisation and saving native peoples from their own perceived barbarism.

Fanon shows how this works at a psychological level for the oppressed, while Said demonstrates the legitimation of Empire for the oppressor.

The Turn to 'Theory' in the 1980s

A new generation of critics turned to more 'theoretical' materials in their thinking. Postcolonialism as a discipline emerging in the 1980s. Three forms of textual analysis in particular became popular in the wake (scia) of 'Orientalism':

1. One involved re-reading canonical English literature in order to examine if past representations perpetuated or questioned the latent assumptions of colonial discourses. This form of textual analysis proceeded along two avenues:
   • In one direction, critics looked at writers who dealt (in accordo) manifestly with colonial themes and argued about whether their work was supportive or critical of colonial discourses (an example is Joseph Conrad's novel, 'Heart of Darkness').
   • In another direction, texts that seemingly had little to do with colonialism, such as Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park' (1814) or Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' (1847).
2. Second, a group of critics who worked with the poststructuralist thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan began to dwell (risiede in) in particular...