Orientalism

Orientalism is a foundational text of postcolonial theory, a lens for examining and creating art, culture, and politics in former colonized nations in the aftermath of Western colonialism. As such, postcolonial works exist in many parts of the world and take on the specific cultural contexts of those nations; there are postcolonial movements in Latin America, Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), and Europe (in nations like Ireland and former USSR states), as well as in diaspora populations from formerly colonized nations.

Postcolonial theory emerged in the late 20th century, though many works published prior to this point are now analyzed from a postcolonial lens. One of the first postcolonial theory essays was Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1950. Césaire, a native of Martinique (a West Indies island that is still a French territory today), cofounded the Negritude movement devoted to restoring Black African cultural identity. Another Martinique writer, Frantz Fanon, was a psychoanalyst and philosopher and applied that lens in his influential book Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon was preoccupied with the psychosocial impact of colonialism on colonized people. He established that violence was an inherent tool of colonialism but also interrogated whether postcolonial governments successfully overcame the cultural violence of colonization. Edward Said extended postcolonial theory’s focus to the Middle East in Orientalism (1978), using his experience as a Palestinian man educated in Europe to dissect the West’s perception of the so-called Orient. This book introduced the term “cultural imperialism,” the arm of imperial conquest that uses language, traditions, art, and politics to dominate a colonial population. An example of cultural imperialism is outlawing speaking native languages.

Postcolonial theory generally draws on Marxist, Foucauldian, and Gramscian analyses of power to examine how imperialist nations establish power relations that often outlast their reigns. One important Gramscian term in postcolonial theory is “subaltern,” which refers to the colonized people whose voices and perspectives are erased from their own history. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” extends discussions of the subaltern into an explicitly feminist context and interrogates whether postcolonial academics are reproducing colonial power hierarchies by speaking for subaltern subjects.

Alongside theoretical discourse, a rich body of postcolonial literature has emerged around the world. Some prominent examples of postcolonial authors are Nigerian writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chinua Achebe; Witi Ihimaera, New Zealand’s first published Maori author; Jamaican writer Marlon James; and Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. The genre includes many debates about cultural representation and language. For example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan author, no longer writes in English as a stance against British cultural imperialism in Kenya.