Assignment
Name:
Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai
Paper
no: 11
Topic: Notable postcolonial theorist and critics
Year:
2015-2017
M.A.Sem=3
Submitted
to: Smt. S.b.gardi department of English m. k. Bhavnagar University
ü Topic: Notable postcolonial
theorist and critics
To understand post colonial study first we have to make
understanding on what is colonial.
Ø WHAT IS COLONIAL ?
Colonialism
is the basis of the concept of mercantilism, which is an imperial idea that suggests
that colonies exist for the benefit of the mother country and should be
governed accordingly. When a country develops colonies, or acquires them,
it becomes an empire. "The sun never sets on the British
Empire" because at any given time, the sun was up somewhere in the world
where a British colony existed.
There are
other types of colonialism, such as economic colonialism. When your
economy is the dominant source of trade and jobs for another country or region,
it could be said to be a type of economic colony of the larger one.
****http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/whatr-colonialism-66951
Ø
WHAT IS POST
COLONIAL?
Post
colonial is a term related to the post colonial literature which is the product
of the third world countries which share certain formal and discursive
features. They demonstrate ‘resistance’ and subversion’ of the imperial
‘centre’. The post colonial discourse refers to the writing and reading habits
rooted in colonial psyche as a consequence of European expansion and
exploitation of other worlds. Bill Ashcroft identifies three common features of
post colonialism
“ The
silencing and marginalizing of the post colonial voice by the imperial centre;
the abrogation of this imperial centre within the text; and the active
appropriation of the language and culture of that centre.
It means
post colonial studies critically analyses the relationship between colonizer
and colonized, from the earliest days of exploration and colonization. It
focuses on the role of texts, literary and otherwise, in the colonial
enterprise. It examines how these texts construct the colonizer’ superiority
and the colonized inferiority. With regard to literature, it argues that ‘English
literature’ and ‘American literature’ have in the post-war period been replaced
by ‘literatures in English’ a term that captures the multicultural and
multiethnic nature of current writing in English.
According to
Homi Bhabha post colonial perspective emerge from the colonial testimony of
third world countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the
geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south. They formulate their
critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority and
political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent
moment within the rationalizations of modernity.
The major
writers of post colonial discourse are from 1960’s and 1970’s; they are 2wilson
Harris (Guyana) yambo ouologuem (Mali) Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) Soyinka, Derek
Walcott (saint Lucia) who reflect their immediate cultural environment in their
works, they also defined their culture and themselves in their own terms. They
focused on cultural self-definition and political self-determination is their
writing. It is noted that for these writers English is often their second
language.
ü
NAME OF THE
THEORIST AND CRITICS:
- Benedict
Anderson
- Kwaku
Asante-Darko
- Mikhail
Bakhtin
- Ayo
Bamgbose
- William
Boelhower
- Homi
K. Bhabha
- David
Brooks
- Amilcar
Cabral
- Partha
Chatterjee
- Michel
DeCerteau
- Arif
Dirlik
- Terry
Eagleton
- Frantz
Fanon
- Hubert Harrison
- C. L.
R. James
- Neil
Lazarus
- Thomas
Babington Macaulay
- Anne
McClintock
- George
Orwell
- Salman
Rushdie
- Edward
Said
- E.
San Juan, Jr.
- Leopold
Sedar Senghor
- Ella
Shoat
- Georg
Simmel
- Gayatri
Spivak
- Sara
Suleri
- Ngugi
wa Thiong'o
- Edward Gibbon Wakefield
In English
literature we find many postcolonial theorist and critics. From many I have taken
one i will give some information about their life and works.
1) Salman Rushdie :-
ü
Early
life and family background
Rushdie was born in Bombay, then British
India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent. He
is the son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University
of Cambridge-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin
Bhatt, a teacher. Rushdie has three sisters. He wrote in his 2012 memoir
that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
He was educated at Cathedral and John Cannon School in
Mumbai, Rugby
School in Warwickshire, and King's
College, University
of Cambridge, where he read history.[4]His father Anis
Rushdie was rusticated from the Indian Civil Service (ICS) after the British
government found out that he had fudged his date of birth.
ü Religious and political
beliefs
Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family although he now identifies as an atheist. In an interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a "Hardliner atheist".
In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, Rushdie said that he was in a sense a
lapsed Muslim, though "shaped by Muslim culture more than any other",
and a student of Islam. In another interview the same year, he
said, "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe
in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu."
In 1990, in the "hope that it
would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he
issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the
attacks on Islam made by characters in his novel and was committed to working
for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie
later said that he was only "pretending".
His books often focus on the role of
religion in society and conflicts between faiths and between the religious and
those of no faith.
Rushdie advocates the application of higher criticism, pioneered during the late 19th
century. Rushdie called for a reform in Islam in a guest opinion piece printed in The Washington Post and The Times in mid-August 2005:
What is needed is a move beyond
tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of
Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist
ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists,
throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air. It is high time for
starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as
an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. Broad-mindedness is
related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
Rushdie is a critic of cultural relativism. He favours calling things by their true names and constantly
argues about what is wrong and what is right. In an interview with Point of Inquiry in 2006 he described his view as follows:
We need all of us, whatever our background,
to constantly examine the stories inside which and with which we live. We all
live in stories, so called grand narratives. Nation is a story. Family is a
story. Religion is a story. Community is a story. We all live within and with
these narratives. And it seems to me that a definition of any living vibrant
society is that you constantly question those stories. That you constantly
argue about the stories. In fact the arguing never stops. The argument itself
is freedom. It's not that you come to a conclusion about it. And through that
argument you change your mind sometimes. … And that's how societies grow. When
you can't retell for yourself the stories of your life then you live in a
prison. … Somebody else controls the story. … Now it seems to me that we have
to say that a problem in contemporary Islam is the inability to re-examine the
ground narrative of the religion. … The fact that in Islam it is very difficult
to do this makes it difficult to think new thoughts.
Rushdie is an advocate of religious
satire. He condemned the Charlie Hebdo shooting and defended comedic criticism of religions in a comment
originally posted on English PENwhere he called religions a medieval
form of unreason. Rushdie called the attack a consequence of "religious
totalitarianism" which according to him had caused "a deadly mutation
in the heart of Islam".
Religion, a medieval form of unreason,
when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This
religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam
and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo,
as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for
liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’
has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other
ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
He strongly supports feminism.
Political background
In the 1980s in the United Kingdom, he
was a supporter of the Labour Party and championed measures to end racial
discrimination and alienation of immigrant youth and racial minorities.
Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading the leftist Tariq Ali to label Rushdie and other
"warrior writers" as "the belligerati'". He was supportive
of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan, which began in 2001,
but was a vocal critic of the 2003 war in Iraq. He has stated that while there was a
"case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was
unjustifiable.
In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in March 2006—which many considered an echo of the death
threats and fatwā that followed publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989—Rushdie signed the manifesto Together Facing the New Totalitarianism, a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism. The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French
weekly Charlie Hebdo in March 2006.
In 2006, Rushdie stated that he
supported comments by the then-Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw, who criticised the wearing of the niqab (a veil that covers all of the face
except the eyes). Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never wear the
veil. He said, "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and
continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm
completely on Straw's side."
Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, a former admirer of Rushdie's work,
attacked him, saying he "cheered on the Pentagon's criminal ventures in Iraq and
Afghanistan". Eagleton subsequently apologised for
having misrepresented Rushdie's views. At an appearance at 92nd Street Y, Rushdie expressed his view on
copyright when answering a question whether he had considered copyright law a
barrier (or impediment) to free speech.
No. But that's because I write for a
living, [laughs] and I have no other source of income, and I naïvely believe
that stuff that I create belongs to me, and that if you want it you might have
to give me some cash. My view is I do this for a living. The thing wouldn't
exist if I didn't make it and so it belongs to me and don't steal it. You know.
It's my stuff.
When Amnesty International suspended human rights activist Gita Sahgal for saying to the press that she thought AI should
distance itself from Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Rushdie said:
Amnesty … has done its reputation
incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group
Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very
much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to
distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending
the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns. Gita Sahgal is a woman of immense integrity and distinction.... It is
people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement;
Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they
deserve our contempt.
Rushdie supported the election of
Democrat Barack
Obama for the U.S. presidency and has often
criticized the Republican party. In Indian politics, Rushdie has criticised the Bharatiya
Janata Party and its Prime Minister Narendra
Modi.
Rushdie was involved in the Occupy Movement, both as a presence at Occupy Boston and as a founding member of Occupy Writers.
Rushdie is a supporter of gun control, blaming a shooting at a Colorado cinema in July 2012 on the American right to keep and bear arms.
Rushdie supported the vote to remain in
the EU during the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016
v
His works
Ø Novels
·
Grimus (1975)
Ø Collections
Ø Children's
books
Ø Essays
and non-fiction
·
"In Good Faith", Granta,
1990
·
"The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film
Classics", BFI, 1992.
·
Step Across
This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002)
Ø Awards
·
Author of the Year (Germany)
·
Booker of Bookers for the best novel among the Booker
Prize winners for Fiction awarded at its 25th anniversary (in 1993)
·
The Best of the Booker awarded to commemorate the Booker Prize's 40th anniversary (in 2008), winner
by public vote
·
India Abroad Lifetime Achievement Award
(USA) ETC...
Thank You
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