Introduction. What the postcolonial means to us: European literature(s) and postcolonialism

Extract

‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘postcolonial’ are fashionable terms in literary studies these days. Henk Wesseling, in his ‘Editorial’ in the European Review (12(3): 267–271, 2004), with regard to another fashionable term, ‘empire,’ warned that the same word may mean different things to different people. So too it is with ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’.

To begin with, there is the matter of orthography. I have used unhyphenated ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism.’ In fact, the hyphenated forms are the older and more conventional. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin use them in their 1989 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, still a landmark publication in the field, as does John Thieme in his 1996 Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Both restrict the use of ‘post-colonial’ to ‘writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain’ (Ref. 1, p. 1) and ‘the anglophone literatures of countries other than Britain and the United States’ (Ref. 2, p. 1). Both spurn chronology, reaching back to the 19th and early 20th centuries for examples of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Ashcroft et al. and Thieme thoroughly differ, though, as to the term's precise charge. Ashcroft et al. see ‘post-colonialism’ as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,’ and this because they find there to be ‘a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’ (Ref. 1, p. 2). Thieme finds this use of the term problematic, because of its association with ‘writing and other forms of cultural production which display an oppositional attitude towards colonialism, which are to a greater or lesser degree anti-colonial in orientation’ (Ref. 2, p. 1-2).