Saturday, 3 June 2023

जहां तक संभव हो।

 जहां तक संभव हो।


शायद यह एक

संरचनात्मक दुर्बलता ही है कि हम

भाषा के स्तर पर

इतने अभागे हो रहे हैं

लगातार ।


परंपरा का संवर्धन

अनिवार्य आवश्यकता के रूप में

कुछ सिद्धांत गढ़ती है

जो

प्रशंसात्मक रूप में

अंतिम जन तक

स्वीकार किया जाता है

लेकिन

बिना मौलिकता के

बिना प्रतिकारात्मक साहस के

क्या सिर्फ अनुवाद से

कोई हल निकलेगा ?


संभवतः नहीं 

अतः 

एक कोशिश के तौर पर ही सही

स्वयं में समाहित करने हेतु

भाषा के 

समावेशी संघर्ष को

आशा भरी संभावनाएं तलाशनी होंगी

जहां तक संभव हो सके।

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor 

जिससे सिद्ध होता है

 जिससे सिद्ध होता है


एक

रोचक विषय की तरह 

नवाचारी प्रवृत्ति को

लगातार खोते चले जाना 

कितना दुर्भाग्यपूर्ण है!!


परंपरा से उखड़े लोगों को

निरंतर

आगाह किया गया कि

नवीनता

परंपरा की ही कपोलें हैं लेकिन

उनकी उपेक्षा ने

उन्हें उनकी जड़ों से

काट दिया

शायद ये लोग 

जड़ताओं और जड़ों में

अंतर नहीं समझ पाए।


एक नज़ीर के तौर पर

ऐसी बातों का

स्मरण रखना चाहिए

जिससे सिद्ध होता है कि

बाद की कहानी

अपनी पृष्ठभूमि का ही

विकास है ।

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor 

Wasted Beauty

 Wasted Beauty

Dr Manisha Patil 

The Bluest Eye is an enquiry into the reasons why beauty is wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed to murder possibilities...

– New York Times

The discussion of white hegemony has shown us that notions like beauty, morality, success and happiness are not natural products but social constructs. In America these notions are invariably linked with whiteness and when black people accept these notions undoubtedly and also try to imitate white people, what they achieve is not salvation but their own destruction.

Polly 

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by heap. (95)

As a young girl, Polly always fantasized herself waiting for her Prince Charming. ‘He was a simple presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest...She had only to lay her head on his chest and he would lead her away to the sea, to the city, to the woods...forever.’ (88) So when Cholly first tickled her foot, she felt as if her dream has come to life. Cholly did love her then and he did take her away to city (Lorain, Ohio). But they did not live happily ever after. In a Northern city, full of white people and away from her own family, Polly started feeling lonely. Cut off from her family and deprived of emotional support from other black people, Polly fell an easy prey to materialism and consumerism. Unlike the communal spirit in the South, where people feel genuine concern for each other, up North people are judged by the way they dress and talk. ‘Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying “children”) and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes…The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and make up. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.’ (92) The increasing need for money made Polly seek a job but it did not end her hardships, but rather increased them.

In a racist and sexist world, black women’s suffering is multiplied. Not just white men but also white women and black men have their own share in the troubles of black women. It is as if they compensate their own powerlessness in relation to white men by displaying their power over i.e. causing trouble to black women. Furthermore, we also see white women and black men competing with each other in their power over black women. Polly’s representative example makes it very clear. 

To make the ends meet, Polly started doing day work for a white woman. She was working hard both at home and at her job and, Cholly, her husband and her employer were harassing her. Cholly was troubling her for money and her employer was constantly lecturing her how to clean and do. ‘Look like working for that woman and fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome.’ (92) One day Cholly came to white woman’s house drunk wanting some money. There followed a quarrel between the two, causing Polly to lose her job. Her employer was generous enough to let her stay if she left Cholly but not generous enough to give Polly, her hard earned 11 dollars so that she could cook food. She lectured Polly over having more self-respect and not letting a man take advantage of herself but bluntly refused to pay her 11 dollars and again that too under the pretext of caring for Polly and her future.

This particular episode echoes the clashes between the Black Civil Rights’ Movement and the feminist movement in 1960s. Both the movements wanted to enlist black women in their camp but none the less marginalized them. The Black Civil Rights’ Movement was pronouncedly macho which challenged white masculinity by asserting black masculinity. Black men felt that slavery and racism had emasculated them. So, to repossess their manhood, they expressed hyper-masculinity. They also felt that it is black women’s duty to stand by black men in their struggle. However, their hyper-masculinity was often expressed against black women – abusing and beating black women was the most common behavior pattern. On the other hand, feminist movement prioritized the middle-class white women’s concern at the cost of black women. The white feminists ignored the fact that a black woman’s experience is fundamentally different from that of a white woman. For a middle-class white woman who is financially well off, single parenthood may be the assertion of individuality but for poor black woman single parenthood obviously means further oppression. In such a case, she will always try to keep her man. Polly says, “No good, ma’am. He ain’t no good to me. But just the same, I think I’d best stay on.” (94) Bell hooks comments,

As a group, black women are in an unusual position in this society, for not only are we collectively at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but our overall social status is lower than that of any other group. Occupying such a position, we bear the burnt of sexist, racist and classist oppression. At the same time, we are the group that has not been socialized to assume the role of exploiter/oppressor in that we are allowed no institutionalized ‘other’ that we can exploit or oppress…White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined the struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.5

Caught like this between devil and the deep sea, Polly sought escape in the silver screen. Hollywood movies depict an idealized white world: ‘white men taking such good care of the women and they all dressed up in big clean houses.’ (95) The life which Polly could not have in reality, she fantasized in the movies identifying herself with the heroine. Susan Willis writes that ‘in mass culture many of the social contradictions of capitalism appear to us as if those very contradictions had been resolved.’ Commenting on it Jane Kuenz says, ‘In other words, economic, racial and ethnic differences is erased and replaced by a purportedly equal ability to consume even though what is consumed are more or less competing versions of the same white image.’6 She further says, ‘Like the Dick and Jane story, Pauline’s movies continuously present her with a life again presumably ideal, which she does not now have and which she has little, if any, chance of ever enjoying in any capacity other than that of “the ideal servant” (101) In the absence of alternate images which might validate and endorse a kind of virtue not tied to physical beauty or ones offering competing definitions of beauty itself and in the absence of a network of family and friends, especially women friends, whose own lives would provide a differing model and the context in which to erect her own, Pauline succumbs to the “simple pleasure” of “black and white images projected through a ray of light” and “curtailing freedom in every way.” (95)’7 Her movie education had taught her to grade each and every face she saw ‘in the scale of absolute beauty’ and ‘all there was to love and all there was to hate.’ (95) She herself tried to pass this beauty examination by dressing up like Jean Harlow but terribly failed when her tooth fell down. Then she stopped caring for herself and ‘settled down to just being ugly’ (96) She concluded that, ‘she is destined never to be so beautiful or cared for as those women on the screen. She does not understand that her rotten tooth is the physical embodiment of her inability to be an unmarked citizen who has the economic power to erase the unwanted traces of her body by purchasing a new artificial tooth. Instead, she directs blame inward and loses interest in her physical appearance and her home: “Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style and were absorbed by the dingy storefront.” (101) Not understanding this system aspect of her situation, Pauline imagines that her inability to be beautiful or stylish stems from some inherent fault; in so doing, she fails to account for the economic barriers to her attainment of the privileged home maker position in one of those white houses.’8 

However, the more tragic part was yet to come. When she went to the hospital for delivery, the white doctor dismissed her labor pain saying, “now these here women you don’t have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain. Just like horses.” (97) She was also subjected to the dehumanizing gaze of other young white male doctors who looked at her stomach and between her legs and said nothing to her. Her musing, ‘I hurt just like them white women. Just cause I wasn’t feeling hoping and hollering before didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling pain’ (97) became representative thought of all the silent/silenced black women in America. Unfortunately, this experience did not make her rethink her criteria of beauty, virtue and happiness. She judged even her new born baby Pecola according to white beauty scale and found her ugly and therefore unworthy of love and happiness. Instead, she found pink-white Fisher baby worthy of her love. ‘When Claudia witnesses Pauline’s mothering of the Fisher girl, she recalls, “The familiar violence rose in me. Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove” (86) That her role as Polly distracts from the quality of mothering Pauline gives her own daughter is not surprising given the historical precedent set in the plantation household. The mistress-mammy relationship allowed the white woman to maintain the idealized status of mother, while freeing her from the actualities of mothering. In turn, this transference of mothering established a burden of superhuman mothering on the black woman. Thus, Mrs. Fisher, like plantation mistress, remains associated with the “universal qualities of nurturance and self-sacrifice” despite the fact that she leaves the mothering to Pauline (Bridenthal 232; Fox – Genovese 113). Because the mammy is represented in Hollywood films as “satisfied, even pleased, with this inequitable arrangement”, Jeremy G. Butler argues, the mammy “does not just represent nurturing; she also promotes black women’s exploitation as nurturers of white characters who hire and use her” (292) Thus the viewer is led to believe that this seemingly familial relationship cannot be exploitative’.9

For Polly herself this relationship seemed far from exploitative. Rather she believed that ‘[i]t was her good fortune to find a permanent job in the home of a well-to-do family whose members were affectionate, appreciative, and generous. She looked at their houses, smelled their linen, touched their silk draperies, and loved all of it. The child’s pink nightie, the stacks of white pillow slips edged with embroidery, the sheets with top hems picked out with blue cornflowers. She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs…Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style, and were absorbed by the dingy storefront. More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man…Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise…The creditors and service people who humiliated her when she went to them on her own behalf respected her, were even intimidated by her, when she spoke for the Fishers...Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household. They even gave her what she had never had – a nickname – Polly. It was her pleasure…[h]earing, “We’ll never let her go. We could never find anybody like Polly. She will not leave the kitchen until everything is in order. Really, she is the ideal servant.” (98-9)

Jennifer Gillan remarks, ‘Embodying the role of Polly becomes a substitute for what Pauline wants: a satisfying and substantial self. When she cannot access that self on her own, through her family or the black community, she accepts the self-imposed upon her by the Fishers. Pauline wills herself not to know her own history because it is too painful. She seems to forget her own role in creating the seeming naturalness of Hollywood’s image of “white men taking such good care of the woman and they all dressed up in big clean houses” (95)…Because she believes that she is squalid and dark like her apartment and the Fishers are stately and clean like their house Pauline can only maintain a positive self-perception by affiliating herself with the Fishers. Yet houses such as theirs are clean because she and others like her labor in them; they are big because white employers can still find black labor to exploit.’10 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Sex championship in Sweden

 

In Sweden words first European Sex Championship going to be held soon.

It's surprising but true that The world will have its first sex championship in Europe/ Sweden with proper set of  rules and regulations . As per the social media and some big print media house's it is said that The first ever European Sex Championship will be held on June 8 2023 by the Swedish Sex Federation.
For a country like India this is very surprising. As per the social and cultural traditions people normally doesn't like to talk on such topics, but european culture is very open.

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Friday, 2 June 2023

निषेधों का निषेध ।

 निषेधों का निषेध ।


तमाम घोषणाओं

एकालाप के बावजूद

निषेधों का निषेध

प्रेम को परिभाषित करता रहा

हमेशा से।


तमाम उन्मादों

धर्म और राज्य के

विलापों के बावजूद

यही प्रेम की

क्रियागत 

परिणति रही 

यहां कभी भी

कोई अंतिम उत्तर नहीं मिलता ।


यहां उत्कंठा

शेष रहती है

संभावनाएं

बनी रहती हैं

यहीं से मनुष्यता

उम्मीद की सांस लेती है

यहां कभी भी

कोई बात 

पूरी नहीं होती लेकिन 

यहां का अधूरापन ही 

जीवन का 

सारभूत तत्व है।

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor

Department of Hindi

K.M.Agrawal College

Kalyan west 

Playing with Darkness: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Early Novels from Postcolonial Perspective (Book)


 The basic premise of this research is an attempt to identify key issues of post colonial theory like hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion and hybridity which are reflected in the vivid experiences of Morrison's characters. As an African American woman writer, Morrison consciously thinks and theorizes about enslavement. In her creative reflections about slavery and racism in America, she anticipates many of the post colonial concerns. Indeed, her canon itself reflects the pattern of colonization and decolonization. Her early work (first four novels) struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community while her later work (her trilogy) moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history. Highlighting the 'geometrical oppression' of race, sex and class, Morrison vividly portrays the double heritage of African Americans. Racially they are essentially African but white blood has undoubtedly mixed into it. Similarly, culturally every attempt was made by the white masters to wipe out African language, culture and heritage yet a very powerful black undercurrent has been instrumental in the very conception of America as a nation.

White Hegemony

 White Hegemony 

Dr Manisha Patil 

The Bluest Eye is the tragedy of a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is the victim of racism. However, this racism is not something which we find only in the external world but something which has also invaded one’s consciousness. There is no inherent objective truth about their ugliness (‘you looked closely and could not find the source.’) but only the fiction of white superiority (‘…it came from conviction, their conviction.’) and this fiction is perpetuated through culture (‘They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance.’). In Western civilization, dominant white culture (‘self’) is defined primarily against the black underdog (‘other’). By the logic of binary opposition or the ‘Manichean allegory’ (Abdul Jan Mohammad’s term), white is defined as good, black as bad; white as intelligent, black as dumb; white as civilized, black as barbaric; white as rich, black as poor. Even inborn physical features are assigned intrinsic beauty value: white physical features – white skin, blue eyes, blond hair – are termed as beautiful, while black physical features – black skin, high cheekbones, thick lips – are termed as ugly. In short, blackness does not have any other autonomous status apart from the distorted mirror image of whiteness. 

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist proposed the concept of hegemony which states that ‘a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression.’1 In The Bluest Eye, no white authority figure appears in person to impose his values on the black people. That job is performed by the mass culture of consumerism and capitalism. Mass culture propels all people towards a universalism which is the politics of propagating certain ideas as universal, trans-historical, as always and essentially non-contingent. However, mass culture deliberately ignores the fact that so-called universal features of humanity are the characteristics of those who occupy the positions of political dominance. Universalization helps this dominant class to pose itself as disembodied and representative class of citizens. The myth of universalism creates a tactic hierarchy between the universal/ dominant values and local/subordinate values. The universal is brought to the center while the local is pushed to the periphery. As a result, ‘Euro-American’ characteristics become universal and central and it becomes the duty of all others confined to locality and periphery to achieve those features. Mass culture also shows people the way to perform this duty: by internalizing universal (white) notions and by consuming products that reflect that universalism. Movies, advertisements, bill boards, fashion magazines and all other vehicles of consumerism constantly present us with the so-called universally ideal (or idealized) images of high-quality commodities whose consumption would result in equally ideal (white) selfhood. For example, Dick-and-Jane Primer starts with the description of a beautiful house: ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.’ It shelters an ideal family: ‘Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.’ (1) The Primer text creates a one-to-one connection between the two and both together provide an individual with success and happiness. Similarly, white baby dolls, Shirley Temple cups and Mary Jane candies endlessly reproduce the images of universally ideal feminine beauty first disseminated through Hollywood movies – Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Commodity culture turns even female bodies into the sexual commodities to be consumed equally by all – men, women, black and white. However, in accordance with mass culture’s projection of idealism, sexualized/idealized female bodies are exclusively white, turning black female bodies its opposite – demonic and repulsive. Yet again total absence of black female bodies from mass culture (result of erasure and replacement) lets black women hallucinate themselves as white beauties, making self-denial a pleasurable experience. Thus, mass culture’s deception of reality, lets subordinate classes cultivate the illusion that they are on par with the dominant class and can in fact become the most dominant class, while in reality foreclosing all the doors to equality and power. 

Commenting on this process of abstracting universal and ideal notions, Jennifer Gillan says, ‘When the abstract, disembodied citizen is figured as white and male, all others cannot embody such citizenship because they are hyper-embodied by the racial and/or gendered markings on their bodies.’2 In America, theoretically all are equal (but separate), and all have equal access to power but the underlining concept of ‘abstract, disembodied citizen’ skillfully curtails blacks’ and women’s actual acquisition of power. Furthermore, America’s image-building during the World War II, as ‘the crusader against racialized forms of nationalism abroad’ disguises ‘this systematic reinforcement of a racial and gendered criteria for full citizenship’ at home. America uses the policy of ‘focusing on the wrong front’ (called ‘Maginot Line Syndrome’ by the historian Sidney Lens) – whereby there are deliberate ‘historical displacements in which something of lesser significance comes to occupy a central position and thereby effaces the more disturbing issue’ – to defocus attention from its own unjust, exclusionary, racist and sexist practices. Jennifer Gillan further says, ‘[A]s Hitler’s crimes against humanity came into sharp focus, the United States’ own conflicts over race purity were displaced and receded into the background…The domestic support for racialized nationalism is overshadowed on the international front by the United States’ intervention in the war against racialized nationalism in Europe; the economic threat of black male labor to white male ascendancy is transformed by lynching rhetoric into a sexual threat black males to white womanhood; black exclusion from national family, especially the thwarting of the black male appropriation of the breadwinner role, is superceded by the inclusion of the ideal black female servant into the white family; black economic inequality is refigured as the retardation of black male progress by the presence of a matriarchal kinship network. In each case, the original exclusionary practice is rewritten through a counter narrative of reversal or justification.’3 

This whole process, then, erases the specificity of bodies, places and histories and condemns all to an abstract universal ideal. For example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Department of Labor Report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, ignores the sexual exploitation of black women by their white masters and instead reinforces the cultural myth of black rapist to uphold the false image of the Southern white gentleman as the chivalric protector of ideal womanhood. These images of chivalric gentleman and ideal woman (beautiful and virtuous: angel in the house) exclude black men and black women right from the beginning because basically they are built against the stereotypes of black men and women as ugly, barbaric and promiscuous. Similarly the white ideal of nuclear family with father as the sole breadwinner and master of the household is inapplicable to African American community because historically slavery destroyed the black families where blacks were not married but bred like horses and then sold in the slave markets. Many times the so-called chivalric white gentlemen themselves were the fathers of their mulatto slaves and they themselves sold their own sons and daughters to the highest bidders. In such a situation only matriarchal kinship structure could provide black people with the legitimate comfort, care and sense of belongingness. Even after Emancipation, the enslaving socio-economic-political conditions did not change much and the importance of matriarchal kinship networks that share household spaces, services and goods and that guarantee financial support and child care during emergencies remained intact. In fact, matriarchal kinship structure is the most important survival technique of the African American community. The Moynihan report, however, blames this system as the main cause of African American backwardness. It states that matriarchal kinship structure of black family is ‘so out of line with the rest of American society’ that it ‘seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.’ It proposes instead African Americans’ willing adoption of white nuclear family structure as both a means of their assimilation in the larger American society and of their achieving equality with the white Americans. 

In fact, this pressure to assimilate – to adopt exclusively white perspective and behavior regardless of its applicability – is very strong on the African American community. The African American community responds to this pressure by developing an interest in everything white and developing corresponding disinterest in everything black. For them even the white baby dolls become more precious than a living black girl like Pecola. They fuss over the dismembered dolls (‘Tears threatened to erase the aloofness of their authority. The emotion of years of unfulfilled longing preened in their voices.’ [14]) but look away in disgust when they face Pecola. (‘They tried never to glance at her’ [34]) In their topsy-turvy world view they fail to see the reality: white hegemony as the cause of black misery and instead start seeing what the whites want them to see: black misery as the result of black unworthiness. It causes further misery for the black people because now they themselves become disinterested in their own welfare and on the other hand, engage in the ‘disinterested violence’ towards other black people. Pecola’s scapegoating by the larger African American community is nothing but the extreme example of this disinterested violence: ‘disinterestedness is occasioned specifically by the inability to place people and events into contexts that would flesh out experience and thus make obvious the limitations of present actions or beliefs. It becomes steadily more difficult for characters in The Bluest Eye to do this because they are either separated from the supportive networks that would encourage it and (or as a result) because their placement in American culture does not sanction accurate representations of what that context would be. The result is a community of individuals who are, at times, painfully alienated from each other as each is divided within him/herself. Pecola’s split consciousness at the end of the novel is a literal representation of this doubleness(7); it affects other characters also as distortions or denials of self, but denials and distortions approved and fostered in popular iconographic representation.’4 On the whole, the result of this whole dehumanizing process is very tragic: wasting of black beauty at every step. 

Dr Manisha Patil 

लगी लब से और होश उड़ा दिया

 लगी लब से और होश उड़ा दिया

यूं पिलाया कि काफ़िर बना दिया।


हमको मयखानों का मेहमान बना 

बड़ी मेहरबानी जीना सिखा दिया।


किसी के साथ थी रात देर से आई

यह कहकर उसने दिल जला दिया।


जब वो साथ थे हिसाब क्या देखते

उनका मन था बेहिसाब पिला दिया।


कल ख़्वाब में आई थी मेरे पास वह 

ख़ूब बातें करके पहलू में सुला दिया।


Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor

Department of Hindi

K.M.Agrawal College

Kalyan west 

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TYBA Hindi admission started

 TYBA Hindi admission started in K.M.Agrawal College. If anyone is interested then please visit to the college or contact me personally.

9082556682

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Department of Hindi

Thursday, 1 June 2023

Application of Postcolonial Theory to American Literature

 Application of Postcolonial Theory to American Literature

Dr Manisha Patil 

After World War II, the process of decolonization started all over the world. It became easier for the colonies to overthrow the power of Western metropolitan centers like Great Britain and France whose military and economic power had weakened due to the heavy toll of the war. Along with political freedom these colonies also asserted their autonomous cultural identity. It was a period of unprecedented optimism and resultant flourishing of creative nationalist anti-colonial writings. From the mid-1960s, all the literature that came out from the British colonies during and after the era of imperialism was called ‘Commonwealth Literature’ – ironically re-inscribing the colonial relationship of center and periphery between Britain and its former colonies. ‘Commonwealth Literature’ was an umbrella term because it included the literatures of such diverse nations as white settler colonies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand; administrative colonies like Indian subcontinent and the combination of both like South Africa where apartheid was legalized. Significantly, the literatures of England and USA were excluded from this umbrella because they were (and are) supposed to be above these bundle of new literatures – England because it was the ‘mother’ country and USA because this daughter had declared its independence far, far back in 1776 and in fact after World War II emerged as a superpower pushing back the mother on periphery. In the 1990s the nomenclature changed from ‘Commonwealth Literature’ to ‘Post colonial Literature’ – foregrounding the oppositional stance of the newly independent nations toward the former imperial center instead of the continuing colonial link between the two. Still, American literature has retained its aura of separateness, specialness and sacredness. This situation is arbitrary and awkward because Canada who shares not just the border but much socio-cultural-political-economic interests and policies of the USA is included in postcolonialism. The authors of ‘Empire Writes Back’ try to justify this arbitrariness as follows: 

‘We use the term ‘post-colonial’, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression…So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan center as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere.’8

The above remark for not including USA under postcolonialism is unsatisfactory. It assumes that USA is a homogenous country and all the people in it are privileged and in a position of power. It ignores the fact that even within the borders of USA, not all the people are free and equal. Slavery, an extreme form of colonization and its legacy racism had been and continues to be a burning issue even today. In fact, USA is an odd combination of colonialism and anti-colonialism. Historically, America was the first colony to break away from the ‘mother’ country England and declare its independence. At the same time, as a settler colony it established itself by displacing the original inhabitants. This paradox has entered the very genes of America. On one hand, it declared itself as free country; a land of opportunity and on the other practiced institutionalized slavery. During the World War II, it fought against the Nazis and Fascists as a great defender of humanity but still followed ‘equal but separate’ policy at home questioning the full humanity of the African Americans. Even today we can see this irony. On one hand there are the ‘neo-cons’ who wish to establish the American empire all over the world and on the other, there are those minority groups – feminists, homosexuals, African Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists – who oppose the hegemony of Protestant, white, male American in various ways and inspire the marginalized people all over the world to fight for their rights. Especially the African American literature and literary theory has been inspirational to various literary and political movements. For example, Harlem Renaissance instigated Negritude movement in Africa and black literature in America motivated Dalit literature in India. In fact there is a lot of interaction among anti-colonial movements in the whole world including USA. To cite another famous example Martin Luther King adopted the non-violence technique of Mahatma Gandhi and in turn influenced Nelson Mandela. 

African Americans are the community which has very consciously thought about its own enslavement and has also theorized it. In its reflections about slavery and racism African American literary theory anticipates many of the post-colonial concerns like hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion, hybridity etc. ‘Hybridity’ the most important concept in post-colonial theory and a condition which is supposed to be the hallmark of post coloniality is perhaps applicable first and foremost to the African Americans. They were the people who had double heritage – racially they were essentially African but white blood had undoubtedly mixed into it. Similarly, culturally every attempt was made to wipe out their African language, culture and heritage and to turn them into a ‘tabula rasa’ by the white masters; yet African culture continued to be a very powerful undercurrent beneath the apparently pure European culture. In fact eventually African culture molded the European culture itself in such a way that during 1920s emerged a new trend known as ‘modernism’ which broke away from the European tradition completely. To go one step further, indeed ‘modernism’ and even ‘postmodernism’ are the products of slavery. Toni Morrison says,

‘…modern life begins with slavery…From a woman’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with post-modern problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by the black people a long time ago: certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of and the need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad…as one of the characters says in the book, “in order not to lose your mind.” These strategies for survival made the truly modern person.’9 

Thus, when there are so many affinities between African American literature and postcolonialism, to treat them as totally separate is to succumb to ‘divide and rule’ policy of dominant white ideology whose interest lies in segregating people according to race, sex, class etc. and thereby yield its own power over them. I chose Toni Morrison’s novels as the main area of study because as an African American woman writer her work is informed by the ‘geometrical oppression’ (Barbara Smith’s term)10 – race, sex and class oppression – and it readily gives way to the post-colonial analysis when the vivid experiences of her characters are discussed under the headings like hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion and hybridity. Indeed, her canon itself reflects the pattern of colonization and decolonization. Her early work (first four novels) struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community while her later work (her trilogy) moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history. 

Dr Manisha Patil 

जो भी लगा काम का उससे रिश्ता बना लिया

 














जो भी लगा काम का उससे रिश्ता बना लिया

खुदगर्जी में खुद को कितना सस्ता बना लिया।


मैंने कह दी जो सही बात तो बुरा मान गए हो

यूं ही नहीं तुम ने दूरियां आहिस्ता बना लिया।


यह तो निभाने की बात थी लेकिन जाने कैसे

रिश्तों को ही तुमने आगे का रास्ता बना लिया।


इस चकाचौंध वाली रंगीन जिंदगी के लिए ही 

तुम ने बाजार में दिल को गुलदस्ता बना लिया।


चांदी के चंद सिक्कों पर तुम इतने फ़िदा हुए

कि कमजर्फ लोगों को ही फरिश्ता बना लिया।


Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor

K.M. Agrawal College

 Kalyan west 

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Wednesday, 31 May 2023

Postcolonial Theorists - Dr Manisha Patil

 Postcolonial Theorists

Theorist/Author Books Critical Terms Explanation

Edward Said Orientalism (1978) Orientalism Said argued that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years, since the composition of The Persians by Aeschylus. Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the West has conquered the East politically but also that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s languages, history and culture for themselves. They have written Asia’s past and constructed its modern identities from a perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the “exotic”, “inscrutable” Orient deviates.

Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised “Other”, contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create “difference” between West and East that can be attributed to immutable “essences” in the Oriental make-up.

Frantz Fanon Black Skin, 

White Masks (1967) Internalization 

of colonization

by the 

colonized Colonization permeates the psyche of the colonized black man to such an extent that he develops not only an inferiority complex but also the desire to be the white colonizer. Fanon says, “For the black man, there is only one destiny and it is white.” For Fanon, being colonized by a language had larger implications for one’s political consciousness: “To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17-18). Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French. French or rather whole European collective consciousness has unredeemable racist structure. In Europe, the black man is the symbol of evil, torturer, Satan, shadow, dirt (physical as well as moral dirtiness), sin, concretely or symbolically the bad side of character. The myth of bad nigger is central to white man’s conceptualization of self. The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. So when a black man learns a European language, he is subjected to its inherent racism and is thereby colonized. To overcome this inferior status, he attempts to win the love of a white woman: ‘Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me, she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.’ Fanon ends the book on a note of appeal: “I have one right alone: that of demanding human behavior from the other…I, the man of color want only this: that the tool never possesses the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever…superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”

Frantz Fanon The Wretched of 

the Earth (1986) Role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored the psychological effect of colonization on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization.

Fanon goes into great detail explaining that revolutionary groups should look to the lumpenproletariat for the force needed to expel colonists. The lumpenproletariat in traditional Marxist theories are considered the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness. Fanon uses the term to refer to those inhabitants of colonized countries who are not involved in industrial production, particularly peasants living outside the cities. He argues that only this group, unlike the industrial proletariat, has sufficient independence from the colonists to successfully make a revolution against them. The book also constitutes a warning to the oppressed of the dangers they face in the whirlwind of decolonization and the transition to a neo-colonialist/globalized world.

Aimé Césaire Negritude The literature of Negritude includes the writings of black intellectuals who affirm black personality and redefine the collective experience of blacks. A preoccupation with the black experience and a passionate praise of the black race, provides a common base for the imaginative expression in association with romantic myth of Africa. The external factor defining the black man in modern society is colonialism and the domination by the white man, with all the moral and psychological implications. Negritude rehabilitates Africa and all blacks from European ideology that holds the blacks to be inherently inferior to the whites so as to rationalize Western imperialism. 

Octave Mannoni Prospero and 

Caliban: The 

Psychology of 

Colonization Psychology of the colonizer and the colonized Mannoni states, “Not all people can be colonized; only those who experience this need [for dependency]…Whenever Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering, it can be safely said that their coming was unconsciously expected – even desired – by the future subject people. Everywhere there existed legends foretelling the arrival of strangers from the sea, bearing wondrous gifts with them.” So according to him, the white male colonizer acts in obedience to an authority complex while the colonized black man obeys a dependency complex. Both are satisfied. The book was later criticized by writers such as Frantz Fanon. 

Albert Memmi The Colonizer and 

the Colonized (1957); Decolonization and 

the Decolonized (2006)

Interdependent relationship of the colonizer and the colonized Memmi suggests that in the wake of global decolonization, the suffering of former colonies cannot be attributed to the former colonizers, but to the corrupt leaders and governments that control these states. 

Homi K. Bhabha Nation and Narration (1990) Nation as a product of narration Bhabha challenges the tendency to treat post-colonial countries as a homogeneous block. This leads, he argues, to the assumption that there is and was a shared identity amongst ex-colonial states. Bhabha argues that all senses of nationhood are narrativized. In his this book, Bhabha primarily critiques the attempts of nationalist discourse to produce the idea of nation as a complete self-sufficient entity, as “a continuous narrative of national progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the valk “(Bhabha:1) and instead draws our attention to the “recesses of the national culture from which alternative constituencies of peoples and oppositional analytic capacities may emerge – youth, the everyday, nostalgia, new ‘ethnicities’, new social movements, ‘the politics of difference’.” (Bhabha:3) Against the totalizing tendencies of nationalism, Bhabha asserts the locality of culture. He says, “The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor it must be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus faced and the problem of outside / inside must always itself be a process of hybridity…. [which turns] boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated…..The ‘other’ is never outsides or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’” (Bhabha: 4)

Homi K. Bhabha The Location of 

Culture (1994)












Hybridity






Theory of third space Bhabha advocates a fundamental realignment of the methodology of cultural analysis in the West away from metaphysics and toward the “performative” and “enunciatory present” [(1994) The Location of Culture p.178] Such a shift, he claims, provides a basis for the West to maintain less violent relationships with other cultures. In Bhabha’s view, the source of the Western compulsion to colonize is due in large part to traditional Western representations of foreign cultures.

Bhabha’s argument attacks the Western production and implementation of certain binary oppositions. The oppositions targeted by Bhabha include center/margin, civilized/savage, First/ Third worlds, West/East, North/South, capital/labour and enlightened/ignorant. Bhabha proceeds by destabilizing the binaries insofar as the first term of the binary is allowed to unthinkingly dominate the second.

Once the binaries are destabilized, Bhabha argues that cultures can be understood to interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions can allow. According to Bhabha, hybridity and “linguistic multivocality” have the potential to intervene and dislocate the process of colonization through the reinterpretation of political discourse.

Bhabha’s key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power. Bhabha’s arguments have become key in the discussion of hybridity. While he originally developed his thesis with respect to narratives of cultural imperialism, his work also develops the concept with respect to the cultural politics of migrancy in the contemporary metropolis. This critique of cultural imperialist hybridity meant that the rhetoric of hybridity became more concerned with challenging essentialism and has been applied to sociological theories of identity, multiculturalism, and racism.

Bhabha states that the ‘act of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ of the statement. The production of meaning is negotiated through a third space which represents both langue and the parole.’ It is the intervention of this third space which ‘challenges our sense of the identity of culture as a homogenizing unifying force authenticated by an originary past and kept alive in the national tradition of the people.’ It is that third space that answers the ‘meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity’; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistorisized and read a new. By exploring this third space a new revolutionary change can be brought about. This theory of third space proposes that culture is constantly negotiated. Because it is a site for contest of meanings, there is possibility of resistance. If the culture can be imposed, it can be deposed as well.

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (1983) Nation as “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. For example the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your “imagined community” participates in a larger event such as the Olympics. As Anderson puts it, a nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. [Imagined Communities. p. 6-7] Members of the community probably will never know one another face to face, however can have similar interests or are both just a part of the same nation. The media also create imagined communities, through targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public.

Anderson argues that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, ‘print-capitalism’).

Ashis Nandy The Intimate Enemy: 

Loss and Recovery of 

Self Under Colonialism (1983) Psychological problems posed at a personal level by colonialism, for both colonizer and colonized Nandy argues that the understanding of self is intertwined with those of race, class, and religion under colonialism, and that the Gandhian movement can be understood in part as an attempt to transcend a strong tendency of educated Indians to articulate political striving for independence in European terms. Through his prolific writing and other activities supported by his belief in non-violence, Professor Nandy has offered penetrating analysis from different angles of a wide range of problems such as political disputes and racial conflicts, and has made suggestions about how human beings can exist together, and together globally, irrespective of national boundaries.

Partha Chatterjee The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial 

and Postcolonial 

Histories (1993) Chatterjee asks why nation states in the third world, which became independent with such high ideals, have been unable to realize their promises of emancipation and freedom to their citizens. Part of the problem, Chatterjee argues, is that while we see the nationalism as being the complete opposite of colonialism, it in fact absorbs much of the value system of colonialism, and acts to benefit middle class elite. He needs us to think through history very carefully and very responsibly. Doing this means that we can neither take Western political science theories and apply them in a ‘modular’ fashion to postcolonial nation-states such as Singapore nor sloppily claim that ‘Asian’ social and political orders are different from ‘Western’ ones without any evidence. Above all, we need to remember that the attitudes we take for granted about civil society, about community, market, and state, are themselves the products of history. 

Chatterjee highlights the fact that as a modern regime of power, late colonialism could not appeal – except as a very last resort – to brute force or to ideas of sovereignty. Rather, it attempted to justify itself by attaching itself to Enlightenment ideals. Thus, colonialism was often presented by colonialists as a kind of tutelage, in which colonized peoples would eventually be brought up to the level of Europe. Many colonial officials in fact saw themselves as missionaries, bringing light to the darkest corners of the earth, taking on ‘the White Man’s burden’ of educating and enlightening colonized peoples so that they could begin, very slowly, to climb up the ladder of progress which the colonizers have already climbed. Colonialism thus works as governmentality, attempting through institutions such as schools, asylums, and churches to encourage colonized peoples to move gradually towards ‘self-improvement’. This is also a pragmatic strategy, in that relatively few colonizers (and crucially for colonizing governments, little money) are needed to run a colony.

Colonialism, for Chatterjee, is fundamentally flawed not just because it is a cruel and unjust system but because it is inherently contradictory. As a modern regime of power it claims to incite colonial subjects to self-improvement and development, so that they become more rational and leave ‘primitive superstition’ behind. However, the whole basis of colonialism is based on an irrational racist distinction between colonizer and colonized, between ruler and ruled which he calls ‘the rule of colonial difference’.

As some members of the colonized community become educated and ‘improved’ in the colonizer’s eyes, they threaten the very foundations of colonialism. If colonialism as governmentality works, these people should become as ‘rational’ and as ‘modern’ as Europeans, deserving equality with the colonizers. However, granting them such a status would threaten the very foundations of colonialism itself, the rule of colonial difference. Colonialism thus despises the very products it has created, people of mixed cultural heritage who form the middle-class elites of colonized communities. Colonial rulers are much happier with ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ colonized populations because they do not challenge the inherent contradictions of colonialism. The longer colonialism exists, however, the greater the number of middle-class people of mixed cultural heritage who call into question the rule of colonial difference. 

The colonial middle classes are often educated by the colonial power and as a result they adopt an Enlightenment world view, the ‘bourgeois-rationalist conception of knowledge’ (Nationalist Thought 11) of the colonizer whereby human race universally progresses from superstition and ignorance to reason and knowledge. Yet they face a problem: How can they become modern, but modern in a different way from the colonizer? How can one progress, but not become ‘Westernized’? To solve this dilemma, they make a fundamental distinction between West and Self, and see the West as possessing cultural attributes (largely material) which need to be appropriated, while maintaining the superior spiritual qualities of the indigenous culture. The colonizer’s culture is seen as ‘decadent’ while the culture of the colonized is seen as morally superior. This leads to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, which attempts to invent nationhood and a ‘“modern” national culture’ which is not Western, excluding the colonial state from the heart of national culture (The Nation and Its Fragments 6). Nationalists are unwilling for the colonial state to reform ‘“traditional” society’ (9). Rather, they assert that ‘only the nation itself could have the right to intervene in such an essential aspect of its cultural identity’ (9). 

This distinction between West and Self is mapped onto another division, that between public and private, the world and the home. The public sphere becomes the area of modernity, a material world. The spiritual, private sphere of the home becomes the area of tradition, where indigenous culture may be preserved in an uncontaminated way. (What is presented as tradition here is often a middle-class, cleaned up version of community practices which is quite remote from the life world of the majority of colonized peoples.) It becomes the first and foremost duty of women (and women alone) to maintain this cultural essence, and thus bear the primary burden of not being Westernized. Women can be educated, and indeed should be so, but they must also be respectable: they thus differentiate themselves from uneducated (an unrefined) previous generations, but also from Western women who move freely in the material world (127).

Thus anti-colonial nationalism shares a thematic with colonialism, even when the problematic is exactly opposite. Nationalism accepts the notions of progress towards reason and modernity propounded by colonialism. Freed from the rule of colonial difference, however, nationalism can bring modernity to the citizens of the new nation in a way that colonialism never could. Colonialism presents itself as governmentality, but deeply, at the last resort, it must resort to force, to sovereignty, a pre-modern form of power. In its lack of representativeness, colonialism can never realize the project of modernity; nationalism can. The middle-classes in the emergence of nationalism take it upon themselves to educate the masses and lead them: “[The member of the colonial elite] had grown used to referring to himself, like the educated European, as a member of ‘the middle class.’ Not only was he in the middle in terms of income, but he also assumed, in the sphere of social authority, the role of the mediator. On the one hand, he was claiming that those who had wealth and property were unfit to wield the power they had traditionally enjoyed. On the other hand, he was taking upon himself the responsibility of speaking on behalf of those who were poor and oppressed. To be in the middle now meant to oppose the rulers and lead the subjects.” (The Nation and Its Fragments 92)

The middle classes achieve hegemony in the private sphere, producing a sense of what it means to be ‘Indian’, or ‘Jamaican’, or ‘Nigerian’ to which all future citizens assent. During the colonial period, the middle classes may initially participate in civil society institutions of the colonial public sphere. Later, however, they will carve out an autonomous space outside of the colonial public sphere. After independence, hegemonic control is expressed largely through the institutions of political society, in an expanded state which now acts in the nation’s interests.

Anti-colonial nationalism achieves what Chatterjee terms a passive revolution. The middle-classes take over the apparatus of the colonial state, but no fundamental political revolution occurs. Much of the space which was occupied by civil society institutions in the colonial era comes to be occupied by institutions of political society with a close affiliation with the state. As a result, subaltern classes still remain oppressed even after independence.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern 

Speak? (1988) Subaltern



























Strategic essentialism This essay perhaps best demonstrates Spivak’s concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is “post-colonialism” a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that ‘postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss’ (Ashcroft. et al 28). In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci’s term ‘subaltern’ (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a ‘voice’ or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the ‘epistemic violence’ done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to ‘speak for’ the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos – a totalizing, essentialist ‘mythology’ as Derrida might describe it – that doesn’t account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

By reserving the crisis of subjectivity to Europeans and the authenticity of experience to ‘subalterns,’ poststructuralists end up recapitulating a number of problems: (1) Foreclosing culture and theory for the oppressed who “only” have recourse to concrete experience, which gets valorized as “untouchably” authentic (double-meaning intentional) (2) Giving up on even attempting to understand/speak to the experience of “others” since it is their own and unknowable (3) Creating and relying on a ‘native informer’ class. 

Spivak herself is (arguably) from the ‘native informant’ class (though born shortly before independence) and deals with issues of translation in her work (critiquing translatability of Western ideas of subjectivity). Since she has invited us to consider how position influences politics/theory, how does her position influence her work? 

Spivak says the Subaltern can’t speak because by having a single “voice” you are being essentialist, reductionist, bipolar (“master and slave dialectic”) and not looking at class. (This is a continuation of the dialogue of the Indian Subaltern Studies Project of the 1980’s.) 

Spivak coined the term ‘strategic essentialism’, which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, the attitude that women’s groups have many different agendas makes it difficult for feminists to work for common causes. ‘Strategic essentialism’ is about the need to accept temporarily an ‘essentialist’ position in order to be able to act.

Anne McClintock Imperial Leather In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that to understand colonialism and postcolonialism, one must first recognize that ‘race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other – if in contradictory and conflictual ways.’ She further explains that imperialism ‘is not something that happened elsewhere – a disagreeable fact of history external to Western identity. Rather, imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity. The invention of race in the urban metropoles...became central not only to the self-definition of the middle class but also to the policing of the “dangerous classes”: the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, the militant crowd and so on. At the same time, the cult of domesticity was not simply a trivial and fleeting irrelevance, belonging properly in the private, “natural” realm of the family. Rather, I argue that the cult of domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities – shifting and unstable as these were.’5

Anne McClintock forcefully argues that a large part of colonial expressions of distaste for African treatment of women and consequent reformist zeal arose in the fact that women’s work effectively removed African men from the control of colonial power, ideology, and economic pressures:

Missionaries and colonists voiced their repugnance for polygyny in moral tones, placing it firmly within the discourse of racial degeneration. The practice of polygyny was seen to mark African men, as Haggard had marked King Twala, as wallowing in the depths of sexual abandon: the “African sin.” Yet colonial documents readily reveal that the assault on polygyny was an assault on African habits of labor that withheld from the resentful farmers the work of black men and women. The excess labor that a black man controlled through his wives was seen as a direct and deadly threat to the profits of the settlers. As Governor Pine complained: “How can an Englishman with one pair of hands compete with a native with five to twenty slave wives?...” 

The fundamental unit of Zulu society was the homestead (urmuzi, imizi), in which a single male (umnumanzana) held authority over his wife or wives, their children, livestock, gardens and grazing lands. Each homestead was more or less independent, with women growing food on land held in trust for the chief of the clan. Each wife worked her own fields, living with her children in a separate house that took its name from her. A strict gendered division of labor prevailed, as women did most of the agricultural and domestic work hoeing, planting, gathering and tending the crops, building and tending the houses, making implements and clothes, taking care of the daily cooking and the houses, as well as the bearing and raising of the children.6 

She also identifies European discourse about Africa as a part of larger discourse of European Porno-tropics. The European porno-tropics had a long tradition. As early as the second century A.D., Ptolemy wrote confidently of Africa that “the constellation of Scorpion, which pertains to the pudenda, dominates that continent.” Leo Africanus agreed that there was “no nation under heaven more prone to venerie” than “the Negros.” Francis Bacon’s Hermit was visited by the Spirit of Fornication, who turned out to be a “little foule, ugly Aethiope.” John Ogilby, adapting the writings of Olfert Dapper, rather more tactfully informed his readers that west Africans were distinguished by “large propagators,” while the planter Edward Long saw Africa as “the parent of everything that is monstrous in nature.” By the nineteenth century, popular lore had firmly established Africa as the quintessential zone of sexual aberration and anomaly – “the very picture,” as W. D. Jordan put it, “of perverse negation.” The Universal History was citing a well-established and august tradition when it declared Africans to be “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts.” It was as impossible, it insisted, “to be an African and not lascivious, as it is to be born in Africa and not be an African.”7 


Chandra Talpade Mohanty Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship 

and Colonial Discourses (1986) Third World woman In this essay, Mohanty articulates a critique of the political project of Western feminism in its discursive construction of the category of the “Third World woman” as a hegemonic entity. Mohanty states that Western feminisms have tended to gloss over the differences between Southern women, but that the experience of oppression is incredibly diverse, and contingent on geography, history, and culture. 

Robert J C Young White Mythologies: 

Writing History 

and the West (1990) In this book, Young argued that Marxist philosophies of history had claimed to be world histories but had really only ever been histories of the West, seen from a Eurocentric--even if anti-capitalist--perspective.

Robert J C Young Colonial Desire (1995) Hybridity In this book, Young examined the history of the concept of hybridity, showing its genealogy through nineteenth-century racial theory and twentieth-century linguistics, prior to its transformation into an innovative cultural-political concept by postcolonial theorists in the 1990s.

Robert J C Young Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) It offers the first comprehensive account of the history and theoretical production of all the major anti-colonial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the globe and traces their relation to the development of postcolonial theory. Stressing the significance of the work of the Third International, as well as Mao Zedong’s reorientation of the landless peasant as the revolutionary subject, Young points to the importance of the Havana Tricontinental of 1966 as the first independent coming together of the three continents of the South – Africa, Asia and Latin America – in political solidarity, and argues that this was the moment in which what is now called ‘postcolonial theory’ was first formally constituted as a specific knowledge-base of non-Western political and cultural production.

Robert J C Young Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction 

(2003) Young links this genealogy of postcolonialism to the contemporary activism of the New Social Movements in non-Western countries. This last book, intended as an introduction to postcolonialism for the general reader, is written in a highly accessible style and unorthodox format, mixing history with fiction, cultural analysis with moments of poetic intensity that stage and evoke postcolonial experience rather than merely describe it. Instead of approaching postcolonialism through its often abstract and esoteric theories, the book works entirely out of particular examples.

 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Tuesday, 30 May 2023

Postcolonialism - Dr Manisha Patil

 Postcolonialism

The term ‘postcolonialism’ can be written in two ways: with and without hyphen. With hyphen (post-colonialism) it indicates the temporal marker: something which happened after colonization. Without hyphen (postcolonialism) it stands for the oppositional attitude to the colonization. In that sense postcolonialism starts not after but with the onset of colonization itself and continues till colonization and its effects are operative, long after the actual political subjugation is over. Generally anti-colonial struggle in the colonies concentrates too much on the political front at the expense of socio-psychological aspects of the colonization. It is assumed that once the political sovereignty is achieved, all the adverse effects of colonization would vanish like waving a magic band. The need to break away from the painful past and make a new beginning is so urgent that it is accompanied with equally strong ‘will-to-forget’ the memories of colonial subordination and will to disown the burden of past. However, historically speaking political liberation is not the cut-off point in the continuous flow of time. The post-independence amnesia cannot completely wipe out the residual traces of subordination. The ‘celebrated moment of arrival – charged with the rhetoric of independence and the creative euphoria of self-invention’ is accompanied with the ‘anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the historical burden of expectation.’ Thus, in reality, this historical amnesia ‘is informed by a mistaken belief in the immateriality and dispensability of the past. In Lyotard’s judgment, ‘this rupture is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past that is to say, repeating it and not surpassing it.’ (Lyotard 1992, p 90)’3 

Like colonization even decolonization is a lengthy process consisting of both political activism and intellectual resistance. The first step towards decolonization is obviously developing an ideological resistance to colonization. It is not enough to experience the oppression, it is necessary to theorize it – to identify its source (subjugation of native people through brute force and then its rationalization), effects (degradation of the colonized people’s self, creation of trauma and inferiority complex in their mind, falsification of their history and calcification of their culture) and ways of resistance (rejection or appropriation). Then comes the actual political resistance which is marked by mass struggle both violent and non-violent. The acquisition of political sovereignty may seem to be the end of this process, but in reality, it is the beginning of a more complex process known as decolonizing the mind. It involves overcoming the historical amnesia mentioned earlier, and repossessing one’s self, history and culture. The last but the most difficult stage involves remapping the society, culture and the psychological territory.

To truly overcome colonialism, it is necessary to re/member colonial past. The colonial discourse creates a ‘Manichean allegory’ (Abdul Jan Mohammad’s term) or binary opposition between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonizer as ‘self’, is depicted as the epitome of all noble qualities and the colonized as the ‘other’ is depicted as filthy, brute savage. The colonizer is defined as good, the colonized as bad; the colonizer as intelligent, the colonized as dumb; the colonizer as civilized, the colonized as barbaric; the colonizer as rich, the colonized as poor. In short, the colonized does not have any other autonomous status apart from the distorted mirror image of the colonizer. This ‘Manichean allegory’ has great persuasive power as the colonized in need of positive self-image, takes up the position of colonizer and disowns his/her own colonized self. Known as ‘double consciousness’, this self-division turns a colonized into his/her own enemy. If s/he rejects everything associated with the colonizer, s/he may be trapped into the self-created marginalization. On the other hand, if s/he whole heartedly internalizes the values of colonizer, s/he becomes inauthentic; mere shadow of the colonizer. In either case, the colonized is the loser. The solution to this deadlock is subversion – to subvert the context in which the colonizer defines value and to appropriate those values to serve one’s own purpose rather than the colonizer’s. For example, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, colonizer Prospero teaches the native Caliban his language so that he can command his slave to perform his chores. However, Caliban claims, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!” [Act 1, Scene2] It is necessary for the colonized not to be seduced by the colonial discourse which valorizes colonizer’s values and calls upon the colonized to embrace them as a means of their upliftment. George Lamming says, “The colonizing agent may begin with suggestions for improvement, and improvement is always welcome, for it’s another word for change, with a promise of change for the batter as you see better. It may start as a suggestion. Then the suggestion fails and the colonized are alive with complaint. But the colonizing agent has already chosen the future of this enterprise, the end of which is to get colonized securely into his power. This power will be used toward an end that may have nothing to do with the landscape where they both experience this encounter.”4 When the colonized looks back upon the colonial past, s/he encounters two discourses: ‘the seductive narrative of power and alongside that the counter-narrative of the colonized – politely but firmly declining the come-on of colonialism. It is important to remember both – to remember in other words, that postcoloniality derives its genealogy from both narratives.’5 It is not enough to oppose the colonizer’s domination, it is extremely important to regain ‘creative autonomy’ from the colonizer. Focusing on the future and striving for the creativity rather than authenticity (in other words hybridity) can show the path towards liberty and prosperity.

The Postcolonial theorist have explored these issues of colonization and decolonization from various angles – starting with their meanings, assumptions, critical methods till its limitations. In essence, they have exposed to both the colonizer and ex-colonized the falsity or validity of their assumptions. The pioneers of Post-colonialism like Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Homi Bhabha among others, have concerned themselves with the social and cultural effect of colonization. They have regarded the way in which the West paved its passage to the orient and the rest of the world as based on unconfounded truths. They have asserted in their discourses that no culture is better or worse than other culture and consequently they have nullified the logic of the colonialists. In their readings of colonial and post-colonial literature and other forms of art, post-colonial critics have relied heavily on other available literary theories. They have manipulated Marxism, new historicism, Psychoanalysis, and deconstruction to serve their purposes. Now one by one we will go through their views and ideas. 

Dr Manisha Patil 

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रात सोती है और मैं जागता हूं

 














रात सोती है और मैं जागता हूं

कितने अजीब शौख पालता हूं।


बस इश्क की लाज के खातिर 

तुम्हारे झूठ को सच मानता हूं।


कह दूंगा तो शर्मिंदा होगे तुम 

मैं इसलिए ही बात टालता हूं।


तुमसे हाँथ मिलाया हूं लेकिन

तुम्हारे हर फरेब को जानता हूं।


तुम्हें कहने की जरूरत नहीं है 

मैं इश्क वाला रंग पहचानता हूं।



Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor

Department of Hindi

K.M.Agrawal College

Kalyan west

Maharashtra 

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Monday, 29 May 2023

The Effect of Colonialism - Dr Manisha Patil

 The Effect of Colonialism

Colonization has wide ranging effects in all the spheres of life – physical, economic, social, psychological and cultural. There is no denying the fact that oppression is a basic ingredient of colonialism. Colonization is for the benefit of the colonizer. So, on the colonizer it has positive effect while on the colonized it has negative impact. Possibility of physical movement means mobility and liberation to the colonizer while the same means displacement for the colonizer. Colonization boosts the economy of the imperial center by providing raw material at cheap rate and ensuring captive markets for the final products. In contrast it destroys the economy of the colonized land by denying it the fair trade and competition. Economic prosperity brings about social stability in the mother country while forced displacement, indentured labor and finally slavery destructs the very fabric of family and community in the colony. Moreover, it creates acute trauma and inferiority complex in the colonized which becomes trans-generational. Ultimately, cultural hegemony of the colonizer suppresses the local cultures.

The initial submission of the natives may be forced or mutual. But after some period through their experience and exposure to wider political climate and world ideologies they realize that the settlers are mere parasites sucking off the blood and labor of the natives without awarding them their dues. The natives realize that their hopes and aspirations would always remain subdued under the foreign rule. As a result, the natives resort to violent struggle to shake the colonizer off his shoulder; and eventually they do it.

There are so many views on the effects of colonialism. These views depend on the political and ideological position of those who disseminate them. Some claim that in spite of the ugly face of colonialism, it did a lot of good to the colonized. It brought to the colonized a new vision of life, mainly western and advanced. It fostered a strong sense of national unity. It brought industrialization and modern economy to the colonies; and above all it advanced cultural life where it occurred. Implicit in these claims is the colonizers’ high moral grounds mentioned above. On the other hand, there is the view that colonialism is pure oppression, immoral, evil, and nothing more than a form of a Neo-slavery. As a result, no possible good can come out of such evil, and it should be combated with sheer force. This radical view not only denies any positive effect of colonialism, but also incriminates those so-called apologists for colonialism.

Some of the results and effects of colonialism can be put in the following terms:

• The total or partial erosion of the colonized culture

• The mediation of the identity and subjectivity of the colonized

• The total rejection by some elements among the colonized of everything western as a form of reaction and protest against the colonizer.

• The categorization of the world into ranks, such as first world, second world, the West and the rest with all the subsequent stereotyping and prototyping that follows.

• The emergence of different forms of fundamentalism that aim at purifying their local cultures from the residues of the colonial past

• The emergence of bourgeoisie classes in the colonies, modeling themselves after their masters, who endeavor to maintain their status quo by getting closer to Western culture

• The emergence of societies with a lot of contradictions and split loyalties.

Dr Manisha Patil 

Sunday, 28 May 2023

Toni Morrison- Dr Manisha Patil

 Toni Morrison is the first African American woman writer to win Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In her work Morrison demonstrates an ‘oppositional attitude’ to the hegemony of White America and asserts the identity of Black women as historical subject. She explores the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. At the same time, she also documents the nuances of unique and complex cultural inheritance of African-Americans.

The basic premise of the present research is an attempt to identify basic issues of postcolonial theory which are reflected in the vivid experiences of Morrison’s characters such as hegemony, displacement, stereotyping, resistance, subversion and hybridity. The study tries to look into these issues that enable Toni Morrison to explore the problems pertaining to Blacks in America from various angles of class, gender and race. 

I am very much grateful to all the critics on whose works I am heavily dependent not just for the insight in the subject matter but also for inspiration.

I express my heart felt gratitude to my guide Dr. Rambhau M. Badode, Professor and Head of Department of English, University of Mumbai for his valuable advice and critique of my writing.

I am thankful to all other members of Department of English, University of Mumbai for all their aid.

I am also indebted to all the staff members of Jawaharlal Nehru Library, Kalina Campus, University of Mumbai and Central Library, American Conciliate, Mumbai for their prompt and smiling assistance while locating and referring books, magazines and articles. They have taken extra effort to provide me with right material. Without them I would not have been able to complete my work.

I am greatly obliged to my mother for all her caring, support, guidance and inspiration throughout my life. She has played a very big role in motivating me for this research.

Last but not the least I wish to express gratitude to Toni Morrison herself for providing insight in the nature of oppression, human suffering and resistance to it and thereby making millions of people more humane and benevolent towards their fellow human beings irrespective of class, race and sex.

Dr. Manisha D. Patil




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