The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

✍ Scribed by BILL ASHCROFT

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 545
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the most comprehensive selection of key texts in post-colonial theory and criticism yet compiled. This collection covers a huge range of topics, featuring nearly ninety of the discipline's most widely read works. The Reader's 90 extracts are designed to introduce the major issues and debates in the field of post-colonial literary studies. This field itself, however, has become so varied that no collection of readings could encompass every voice which is now giving itself the name ''post-colonial.'' The editors, in order to avoid a volume which is simply a critical canon, have selected works representing arguments with which they do not necessarily agree, but rather which above all stimulate discussion, thought and further exploration. Post-colonial ''theory'' has occurred in all societies into which the imperial force of Europe has intruded, though not always in the official form of theoretical text. Like the description of any other field the term has come to mean many things, but this volume hinges on one incontestable phenomenon: the ''historical fact''of colonialism, and the palpable consequences to which this phenomenon gave rise. The topic involves talk about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and reaction to the European influence, and about the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come into being. In compiling this reader, the editors have sought to stimulate people to ask: ''How might a genuinely post-colonial literary enterprise proceed?'' The fourteen sections include: Issues and Debates; Universality and Difference; Textual Representation and Resistance; Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism; Nationalism; Hybridity; Ethnicity and Indigenity; Feminism and Post-Colonialism; Language; The Body and Performance; History; Place; Education; and Production and Consumption. Contributors include many of the leading post-colonial theorists and critics--such as Franz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Homi Bhabba, Derek Walcott, Edward Said, and Trinh T. Minh-ha--in addition to a number of the discourse's newer voices. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader will prove an authoritative compilation, representing an invaluable contribution to the study of post-colonial theory and criticism.

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Contents......Page 5
List of Illustrations......Page 14
Preface......Page 16
Acknowledgements......Page 18
General Introduction......Page 20
Introduction......Page 26
The Occasion for Speaking......Page 31
The Economy of Manichean Allegory......Page 37
Can the Subaltern Speak?......Page 43
Signs Taken for Wonders......Page 48
Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse......Page 55
The Scramble for Post-colonialism......Page 64
Introduction......Page 74
Colonialist Criticism......Page 76
Heroic Ethnocentrism: The Idea of Universality in Literature......Page 81
Entering Our Own Ignorance: Subject-Object Relations in Commonwealth Literature......Page 85
Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism......Page 90
Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'......Page 96
Introduction......Page 104
Orientalism......Page 106
A Small Place......Page 111
Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse......Page 114
Figures of Colonial Resistance......Page 118
Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World......Page 123
The Rhetoric of English India......Page 130
Introduction......Page 136
The Postcolonial and the Postmodern......Page 138
Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today......Page 144
Circling the Downspout of Empire......Page 149
The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy......Page 155
The Politics of the Possible......Page 162
Introduction......Page 170
National Culture......Page 172
Fanon, Cabral and Ngugi on National Liberation......Page 177
Nationalism as a Problem......Page 183
The Discovery of Nationality in Australian and Canadian Literatures......Page 186
The National Longing for Form......Page 189
Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation......Page 195
What Ish My Nation?......Page 197
Introduction......Page 202
Fossil and Psyche......Page 204
Named for Victoria, Queen of England......Page 209
Of the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians......Page 213
Marvellous Realism: The Way out of Negritude......Page 218
Creolization in Jamaica......Page 221
Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences......Page 225
Introduction......Page 232
No Master Territories......Page 234
Who is Ethnic?......Page 238
New Ethnicities......Page 242
White Forms, Aboriginal Content......Page 247
The Representation of the Indigene......Page 251
The Myth of Authenticity......Page 256
Who Can Write as Other?......Page 261
Introduction......Page 268
First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African Literature......Page 270
Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Post-colonial Women's Texts......Page 274
Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses......Page 278
Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism......Page 283
Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism......Page 288
Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition......Page 292
Introduction......Page 302
The Language of African Literature......Page 304
The Alchemy of English......Page 310
Language and Spirit......Page 315
Constitutive Graphonomy......Page 317
New Language, New World......Page 322
Nation Language......Page 328
Relexification......Page 333
Introduction......Page 340
The Fact of Blackness......Page 342
Jazz and the West Indian Novel......Page 346
In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature......Page 351
The Body as Cultural Signifier......Page 355
Dance, Movement and Resistance Politics......Page 360
Feminism and the Colonial Body......Page 365
Outlaws of the Text......Page 368
Introduction......Page 374
Allegories of Atlas......Page 377
Columbus and the Cannibals......Page 384
The Muse of History......Page 389
Spatial History......Page 394
The Limbo Gateway......Page 397
Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History......Page 402
Introduction......Page 410
Unhiding the Hidden......Page 413
Writing in Colonial Space......Page 416
Naming Place......Page 421
Decolonizing the Map......Page 426
Aboriginal Place......Page 431
Ecological Imperialism......Page 437
Introduction......Page 444
Minute on Indian Education......Page 447
The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India......Page 450
On the Abolition of the English Department......Page 457
The Neocolonial Assumption in University Teaching of English......Page 462
Ideology in the Classroom: A Case Study in the Teaching of English Literature in Canadian Universities......Page 466
Education and Neocolonialism......Page 471
The Race for Theory......Page 476
Introduction......Page 482
The Historiography of African Literature Written in English......Page 484
Singapore: Poet, Critic, Audience......Page 490
Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism......Page 494
The Book Today in Africa......Page 499
Literary Colonialism: Books in the Third World......Page 504
Bibliography......Page 510
Index......Page 533