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Postcolonial criticism examines how European imperialism and colonialism have shaped literary representation, canon formation, and cultural identity across the Global South and in metropolitan cultures. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) demonstrated how Western texts construct the 'Orient' as an exotic, inferior Other whose representation legitimizes imperial domination. Homi Bhabha developed concepts of hybridity and mimicry to describe the ambivalent cultural identities produced under colonialism, where colonized subjects are required to become almost-but-not-quite European. Gayatri Spivak's foundational question 'Can the subaltern speak?' asks whether colonized subjects—particularly women—can represent themselves within intellectual frameworks built to exclude them.
Begin with Said's first chapter of Orientalism and a short postcolonial text (Achebe's 'An Image of Africa' critique of Conrad, or Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea as a postcolonial rewriting). Practice identifying how a canonical text positions non-Western characters, whose point of view controls the narrative, and what silences or distortions this produces.
Postcolonial criticism begins with a deceptively simple observation: literature is never politically neutral. Every text is produced within a historical situation, and for much of the last five centuries that situation involved European empires controlling vast territories, populations, and the means of cultural representation. Postcolonial criticism asks what traces of that power relationship appear in texts — and how those traces have shaped what gets called "literature" at all.
Edward Said's *Orientalism* (1978) is the founding text. Said argued that Western writing about the "Orient" (roughly, the Middle East and Asia) did not describe a pre-existing reality but *constructed* one. Travelers, novelists, administrators, and scholars produced an image of Eastern peoples as exotic, sensual, timeless, and incapable of self-governance — and this image, repeated across genres and centuries, helped legitimate the claim that colonized peoples needed Western rule. Reading *Jane Eyre*, *Heart of Darkness*, or *The Tempest* with Said's lens means asking: how does this text position non-Western characters, and what does that positioning serve?
Homi Bhabha's contributions are more difficult but essential. His concept of *mimicry* identifies a crack in colonial authority: the colonizer demands that colonized subjects become "civilized" — educated in the colonizer's language, religion, and manners — but can never allow full assimilation, because that would erase the difference that justifies empire. The colonized subject becomes "almost but not quite" European, and this slippage is Bhabha's hybridity. It is threatening to colonial authority precisely because it reveals that identity categories like "European" are unstable and constructed.
Gayatri Spivak's question — "Can the subaltern speak?" — pushes further. Even if we want to recover voices that empire suppressed, Spivak asks whether we can do so within scholarly frameworks built to exclude those voices. When a Western academic claims to "give voice" to the colonial subject, they may simply substitute their own representation for the subaltern's. This is a problem not just for colonialist writers but for well-meaning postcolonial critics too.
The practical upshot for reading literature: postcolonial criticism does not require rejecting Western canonical texts. It requires reading them in their full historical context — noticing whose perspective controls the narrative, which characters are given interiority and which are treated as backdrop, and what the text's silences might reveal about whose experience was considered too ordinary or too alien to represent.
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