Postcolonialism

Abstract

Postcolonialism deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies and those societies’ responses. While the analysis of the controlling power of representation began with Fanon in the 1950s and reached a climax with Edward Said’s Orientalism, leading to the development of colonial discourse theory of Bhabha and Spivak, postcolonial analysis arose in the late 1980s as a direct response to writers’ engagement with imperial power. Postcolonial theory arose in conjunction with the dominance of literary theory in the late twentieth century but distinguished its practice from the Eurocentric and universalist nature of contemporary theory. Its rapid rise to prominence in the 1990s came about because it offered a language with which to approach the phenomenon of cultural globalization. Postcolonialism is now used in wide and diverse ways to include the place of translation, of the sacred and of biopolitics, ecological theory and animal rights and, most importantly, to widen its interest in the relation between local communities and global influences to include the global flows of populations, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and the transnational.