Key Terms & Concepts
This term describes European political and economic control over lands in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, often justified as “civilizing.”
Colonialism
What type of Colonization is Postcolonial Literature mainly about and why?
European Colonization - Colonialism generally perceived as: white people colonizing lands of people of colour, not vice versa
What is Frantz Fanon’s concept of internalized oppression?
Internalized oppression is when colonized people see themselves through the colonizer’s eyes, feeling inferior and distancing themselves from their own culture
This limitation describes how postcolonial scholars critique Western systems using Western theories.
Western reliance
What is Edward Said’s term for Western stereotypes that present “the East” as exotic, irrational, and inferior.
Orientalism
What does the idea of Hybridity/Third Space aim to do in Postcolonial literature?
Wanted to show that the dichotomy between center and periphery does not hold true anymore. There is no distinction between “industrialized” and “developing” nations
What does Gayatri Spivak mean by the Subaltern?
The Subaltern refers to marginalized groups excluded from social, political, or cultural discourse.
This issue arises when most evidence about colonialism comes from colonisers’ writings.
Coloniser bias
What is Homi Bhabha’s concept for mixed “in‑between” identities created when coloniser and colonised cultures blend.
Hybridity
Distinguish between Third World Feminism and Western Feminism (Give both the critiques and significance of Western Feminism in relation to Third World Feminism)
Bourgeois feminists are considered slaves to colonialism but on the other hand, despite being aligned with empire, they also faced gender oppression.
Third World Feminism: Preexisting feminism before colonialist times. Even though this wasn’t called feminism at the time, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist (predates Western Feminist Theory)
What are Homi Bhabha’s concepts and what do each one mean?
Mimicry : When the colonized people imitate the colonizer’s culture in a similar way
Hybridity : The creation of mixed cultural identities influenced by colonizers on the colonized
Third Space : The in-between cultural zone where hybrid identities form, allowing colonized people to reinterpret, resist, and reshape colonial meanings.
This is the main critique of postcolonial theory and is said to demerit the aesthetic value of a work.
Primary political view of literature