Postcolonial Criticism Study Guide

PostcolonialismThe school of postcolonial criticism aligns itself with other “post-ists” chools of criticism such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and all these schools of criticism share their objection to one single objective view of reality. They believe that every individual constructs his own reality according to his own experiences and his culture and the society he lives in, so each person’s reality is an individual one.Reality is a social constructEach society has a certain dominant ideology (hegemony)The problem arises when a person’s ideas or background fails to conform with the dominant ideology. The person feels silenced and seeks to challenge the dominant culture and what it dictates.The actions and the literature that comes out of people who refuse to be silenced are an act of resistance, an attempt to be empowered. This aims to cause a cultural change on the long run, a change that would accept this individual’s reality and his own public and private histories.What is postcolonialism?Postcolonialism consists of a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned with literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other countries.<span