Postcolonial Studies

Introducing Literary Criticism A Graphic - Owen Holland 2015

Postcolonial Studies

Postcolonial criticism offers a political approach to literary criticism. It arose in a historical context of decolonization and national liberation struggles in the so-called “third world” in the latter half of the 20th century after the end of WWII. Some of the writers most closely identified with postcolonial criticism participated in these struggles.

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Frantz Fanon (1925—61) was born in Martinique, which was a French colony at the time (and which remains an overseas department of France). Fanon participated in the Algerian War of Independence (1954—62) against the French state and offered a Marxist account of the conditions of anti-colonial revolution in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Fanon, who was also a psychiatrist, wrote a polemical critique of the psychology of colonial domination in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). It was as much a study of the formation of black identity under imperialist oppression as it was a critique of the imperialist world order. Fanon characterized the formation of black identity under colonial conditions as a process of “self-division”:

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Every colonized people - in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality - finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.