Friday, 3 February 2012

Postcolonialism

Post-colonialism as a literary theory, emerged in the late 19th century and thrived throughout the 20th century. Post-colonialism is a literary approach that gives a kind of psychological relief to the people (the colonized) for whom it was born.

The focus of the Post-colonial critic is to expose the mechanism and the evil effect(s) of that monster called colonialism on the colonized. Colonialism which is the capitalistic and exploitative method by a ‘superior’ nation (colonizer) to lord itself over a less privileged nation (colonized) leads to the impoverishment of the latter. The concept of colonialism has political, economic and cultural implications.

Post-colonialism sees literature as an avenue to probe into the history of society by recreating its past experience with the mind of forestalling the repetition of history. The ultimate for the Post-colonial critic is to develop a kind of nostalgia about his historical moment that produces a new dawn in his society.

Post-colonialism is a dominant feature in African and Caribbean literature as writers in these settings see colonialism as an instrument of reducing them to nonentities.  An interesting feature of Post-colonial criticism is its attempt, not only to expose the oddities of colonialism but to reveal and discuss what the independent nations make of themselves even after the demise of colonialism. Works of the celebrated Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe like A Man of the People (1966), the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah like the Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and the Jamaican novelist Jamaica Kincaid like A Small Place (1988) and the Nigerian playwright and theatre practitioner – Olu Obafemi like Suicide Syndrome (1986) are all interesting to the Post-colonial critic.

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