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• December 13, 2024
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If you’re aiming to qualify for the UGC-NET English exam, you must have come across the post-colonial writers and post-colonial literary theory. We guess that you have started following their works as it is one of the major components of the UGC NET English literature syllabus. So, you can’t miss out on this. Also, if you need proper guidance, you can join the UGC-NET coaching in Delhi. There are many coaching institutes like Sahitya Classes that offer best UGC-NET crash course for a duration of 50 days in which you can access more than 300 videos covering the different topics mentioned in the NET exam syllabus for English literature. Let’s not divert the actual discussion. We will go ahead and cover post-colonial literature in a while. Read on…

What is Post-Colonial Literature?

Professor Ato Quayson defined postcolonialism as a “studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies and at the level of more global developments thought to be after-effects of the empire.” Further, the postcolonial literature often focuses upon the experiences like slavery, migration, resistance, suppression, difference, race, gender, and place. Further, it responds to discourses of imperial Europe. Quayson also states: 

“The term is as much about conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper, as about conditions coming after the historical end of colonialism. A growing concern among postcolonial critics has also been with racial minorities in the west, embracing Native and African Americans in the US, British Asians and African Caribbeans in the UK and Aborigines in Australia and Canada, among others. Because of these features, postcolonialism allows for a wide range of applications, designating a constant interplay and slippage between the sense of a historical transition, a socio-cultural location and an epochal configuration.”

Edward Said’s Orientalism is considered to be one of the most pioneering works in the postcolonial literary discourse. In this work, Said argued to look at the correlation between knowledges that oriental scholars produced and how these were redeployed in the constitution of colonial rule. Prof. Quayson also commented that to understand the developments in the postcolonial literary studies, we need to trace the process. Studying postcolonial literature will only be feasible if you have a serious understanding of the changing face of global politics with the emergence of newly independent states; of the wide-ranging re-evaluation begun in the 1980s of the exclusionary forms of western reason and in the perception of their complicity with imperial expansion and colonialist rule; of the debates that raged about empiricism and culturalism in the social sciences from the 1960s; and of the challenges to dominant discourses of representation from feminist, gay, lesbian and ethnic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Must-Read Postcolonial Writers for UGC-NET English 

Post colonial literature is an amalgamation of various sources and inspiration. While studying for the UGC-NET English, you must follow wors like Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Ingolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, among many others. Shakespeare’s Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest have been taken as key texts for the application of postcolonial modes of analysis. Thus, Prof. Quayson stated: 

“Postcolonial literature is a broad term that encompasses literatures by people from the erstwhile colonial world, as well as from the various minority diasporas that live in the west. Postcolonialism has also been a term used to reinterpret western canonical literature from a variety of fresh and diverse perspectives.”

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is one of the postcolonial works that you must definitely read. The work explores cultural exile and quest for self in detail. Although its main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom, never leave Dublin, the novel draws a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), the epic story of a man’s alienation from his home, exile to strange lands, and search for a way back home (metaphorically, a search for the self). On the surface, Joyce’s novel does not appear to be concerned with Ireland’s struggle for freedom from centuries of British rule. 

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Another novel that explores exile and alienation is George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin”. This autobiographical bildungsroman presents the author’s childhood in Barbados from his point of view at the age of twenty-three while living in London. He is led into retrospection by the alienation he experiences in the capital of the colonizers. 

Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) addresses the cultural and social alienation of women in India with an unusual twist on the theme of exile. 

The postcolonial literature also traces the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized. It comes as a direct confrontation likewise, in E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924). 

Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) addresses the cultural and social alienation of women in India with an unusual twist on the theme of exile. 

In the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, struggle, confrontation, and rebellion are evident from start to finish. Achebe’s novel depicts struggle and conflict within the Igbo community before and during colonization. It is precisely this contrast, as well as the focus on customs and interpersonal relations in the village, that sends a message.

The postcolonial literature also showcases the blending of various cultures and the broader context remains in establishing identity. The need for an identity not imposed by occupying forces comes from a lack created by the violent intrusion and disruption of “home” by foreign powers. In V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), the house that a Hindu resident of Trinidad, Mr. Biswas, insists on buying but cannot afford becomes a symbol of independence and identity. In 2001, Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) deals in more complex terms with the issue of establishing cultural identity in postcolonial Britain and India. Regarding the formation of the postcolonial subject, this novel underscores ambivalence and posits that identity is composed through hybridity. 

These are some of the postcolonial authors that we have covered in this blog. So, if you’re preparing for UGC-NET English, this blog will be helpful to understand the contributions of postcolonial writers. Besides this, if you need NET best coaching for UGC in Delhi, you can join Sahitya Classes. At Sahitya Classes, you will get comprehensive crash course for UGC-NET English in which all topics in the UGC NET English literature syllabus will be covered. Additionally, you will get PYQs, test-series, free paper 1 classes, and rapid-fire quiz sessions. You will also get UGC NET English study material pdf. So, if you’re looking for UGC-NET online classes, you can consider Sahitya Classes as you can prefer to study anytime, anywhere. You can join the next offline batch starting from January 15, 2025. So, why wait? Enroll now!

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