Postcolonialism and Climate change in Literature

 Postcolonialism and Climate change in Literature 

Introduction                                                                                                               With the term “Postcolonial”, understood not as limited to the implicit temporal marking of the “Post”, but as the sign of a critical orientation, and representation of experiences the colonial encounter, including those of slavery, oppression and resistance migration, race, gender, and colonial space-making as well as the responses to the discourses of a reconstituted imperial Europe in modern times. In earlier it assumed that postcolonial literature is the reflection of colonized countries’ conditions under imperialism but this discourse now changed. It’s not only the depiction of people’s condition in colonized countries but it draws the plight of human psyche, indigenous culture, colonial negotiation and the diasporic sentiments of the third world counties were either dominated or subjugated by the white supremacy. It focuses on the plight of the oppressed minorities, tribal groups and women. The “Post” in Postcolonialism does not signify that all forms of colonialism and imperialism have ended rather is still there in the mind of the colonized people psychologically. The year 1945 immediately invokes the end of World War II and it also a date during which many significant changes were taking place in the formerly colonized world and many countries liberated from the colonial oppression such as India got freedom from the British, Philippines liberated from the Japanese occupation, Syria and Lebanon gain independence. Overall Africa, Asia and Latin America got freedom and control their own destiny and from these countries emerges new literary writings what we called postcolonial literature.                                                                                                                                                                                            The shift between colonizer and colonized, the alteration of global political economy, and the rise of different social agents all over the world reflected in the writings of postcolonial writers. The representation of the colonized countries and retrieving the historiography, political activity and see its social significance in a completely new light. Broadly speaking postcolonialism seems to follow the colonialism in a linear way but the whole process is not so simple because even in post-colonial era, we see colonialism in the form of neocolonialism taking place in Palestine, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Edward Said who gave a solid base to postcolonial criticism. Said concentrates on representing the Orient and shows us the binary opposition between the East and the West. Said asserts that the West misrepresented the ‘Orient’ in certain aspects and creates a hegemonic space what we called ‘Third Space’. And the cultural difference is central preoccupation of postcolonial writings. The voices of the Third World countries are known as the voices of margin and the postcolonial writers want to remove the stigma of marginality and disclose the reality of the post-colonial world. 

Analysis

Postcolonialism is not a term only, it is a concept that was developed in 21st century and is a intellectual response to colonialism. A radical break from the past, postcolonial literature sought to shed its links to the British political, educational, and cultural system, colonial power and emerging postcolonial elite. Postcolonial writers seek to present the destructive side of colonialism as part of their anti-colonial critique. In literature , history is thus a central theme in almost every genre in postcolonial writing from Africa to South America. Writers from former colonies often find the need to negotiate, understand, and recover their traumatic pasts. This negotiation is often is an attempt to achieve an identity different from the one imposed on them by the colonizer and challenged the stereotypes put forward by the white supremacist. And therefore a process of decolonization starts in post-colonial writings to established themselves in the social periphery and reconstruction the cultural and national histories and identities. Such reconstructions call into questions the histories and the framed images created by the colonizer. 

Postcolonial literature functions as a counter discourse , providing alternative representations to European ones. A revival of native cultural beliefs, forms, and identity crisis were essential of the postcolonial literature. In Things Fall Apart, the protagonist Okonkwo and his community suffered from colonial oppression and identity crisis. Achebe portrays the colonial encounter and how the Igbo society fall apart with the comings of whites. They destroyed their religion, faith in outcast, traditions and beliefs. And politically the white men captured the land and break down the unity of the community. The white invasion clearly reveals in the conversation of Okonkwo and Obirika. He says “now he has won our brothers- and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart”. A significant genre in Postcolonial aboriginal writing is Life writing. Numerous Postcolonial novel deal with this traumatic theme of religion and faith, the relation between Christian missionaries and native peoples. The continuous affects of colonialism and retrieving histories is the triumph of post-colonial writers. In Derek Walcott’s play “Dream on Monkey Mountain”, explores the identity under colonialism. Throughout the play the theme of native mimicry and adoration of Western culture is underscored. 

Tracing the first beginning of postcolonialism, the importance of Edward Said can be remarkable. Theoritically speaking , Said is consider the one who gave the base for postcolonial discourse as an academic field of study. In his book Orientalism, he criticizes the paradigm of power and the colonial discourses. 

“Orientalist ideas took a number of different forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First of all, Europe there was a vast literature about the Orient inherited from the European past…..Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism”(43).                                                                                                    

While the voices against the Western attempt to culturally dominate the colonized nations had been raised by Mahatama Gandhi in India, Ceasire and Franz Fanon in Africa, it was left to the Palestinian-American Edward Said to forcefully articulate the position of the colonized nation. During the colonial rule, the colonial masters studied them with the motive of culturally dominating them and economically exploit them. The people were portrayed as ignorant, irrational and sentimental. One can finds this process of domination in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. And theses narratives seeks to understand the oppression, resistance, and adaption which occurred during the colonial rule. Postcolonial writers, especially the first generation from the 1950s and 1960s, were conscious of their nation building, since the nation is also a cultural construct, built out of and upon the artistic, folkloric, theoretical, and philosophical discourses about the nation. Postcoloniality brought in its wake a new process of exclusion, whereby certain groups and classes dominated other ethnic groups, communities, races and classes. They have been critiques the oppressive nature of colonial master and states the negotiation between individual and community. The practice of the west imagining the East and created binary split between the colonized and colonizer, savage and civilized, the powerful and powerless highly expressed by the works of postcolonial writers. The most prominent female voices of Africa seen in the works of Buchi Emecheta. The Joys of Motherhood is the prime example of an individual woman’s struggle within the colonial and African patriarchy. Nnu Ego’s struggle for her identity represents the struggle as a woman and mother .

“She died quietly there, with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made many friends, so busy had she been building her joys as a mother.”

In the wake of the stupendous domination of literary critical imaginaries by the postcolonial writings from the very beginning immediately changed the global images and structure .

The rise of print capitalism and mass media play as an agent to spread the postcolonial saga and changed the imperial paradigm. While one hears the term ‘Postcolonialism’, immediately the images of the colonial world and the oppression by the whites come in his or her mind. The historical transformation from colonial to postcolonial never finished the supremacy of the European countries on Eastern countries. Edward Said questioned and revealed the high European imperialism from the mid 20th  century until the end of second World War in his canonical texts such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Said charged the colonial fixity over East which exactly overflowing in the text. The postcolonial novels shows the reality and reclaiming the lost glory and giving voice to those who were actually unheard. In the ground a new mode of writing emerged which involves the brutal past and historical memory, while simultaneously looking forward to the future. A sense of identity crisis, dislocation from the original homeland and retain the past till the death are another important features of the postcolonialism. Due to the wake of postcolonialism, the world got changed and features the new kinds of literature from the ‘Third World’. Research in social sciences and gender, sex has focused on the status of colonized people in postcolonial societies, in postcolonial women’s writing usually focused the women’s body, the women’s personal relationship, and her sexual identity. The women in postcolonial societies doubly colonized. 

The continuing effects of colonialism features the themes of postcolonial writings. Identity crisis , the elements of magic realism with the postcolonial touch bring back the reality in various works. In the novel A House for Mr. Biswas, the Hanuman house symbolically represents the White supremacy and Mrs. Tulsi represents the colonial power. Mr.Biswas suffered from this colonial oppression and identity crisis :

“At Hanuman House, in the press of daughters, sons-in-law and children, he began to feel lost, unimportant and even frightend. No one particularly noticed him.” And the novel became the postcolonial novel by representing the colonial Trinidad .

Climate Change 

In the cultural realm, postcolonialism established traditions by interfering with local customs, setting up norms of conduct, rejecting native beliefs as superstitions and finally ensuring that the native himself believed all through the medium of Western education. The changing political and demographic landscapes and new modes of media representation that have gained prominence since the end of the cold war. Diaspora, cultural alienation, nationalism, the making of mimic native men and the identity crisis became the part of postcolonial writings. Nationalism provided some of the fieriest protest and resistance writing in almost every nation state in modern times. Almost every postcolonial literature today had its nationalist literature. It is this cultural movement that changed the paradigm creating by the Europeans. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart constantly questions the European generated images and reveal how colonialism was violent, selfish and destructive . Henry Derozio who shows his nationalist approach in his poem “The Harp of India”,women writers like Meena Alexander and Buchi Emecheta critiqued nationalism and ‘national identity’ for its gender biases. Most of these writers saw the colonial legacy of corruption and oppression to portray the pangs and woes of the native. The postcolonialism is the searching of own’s identity and voice. Though the climate is changed, the nation is independent but how they are in the net of colonialism in the form of ‘new imperialism’ or ‘new orientalism’. New literary forms came up still carrying the burden of the exploitation in order to understand the postcolonialism. Homi K Bhaba is one of the most important figures in the field of postcolonialism , he invented the terms like hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. A kind of resistance was there in their writings and by these terms Bhaba tries to say the cultural shifts among the indigenous people and new transcultural forms arise from cross cultural exchange. Ngugi wa Thiongo who wrote Decolonizing the Mind and said to reject the colonial imposition like farewell to English and accept the native language. The River Between by 

Thiongo presents the colonial period, when white settlers arrived in Kenya. And the novel focuses Kenny’s struggle for independence. Broadly postcolonialism subverted the neo-colonialism in the poor countries. America is the superpower of the world who tries to dominate its position in the ‘Third’ world counties by selling books, arms, and making films, documentaries. On the other hand China wants to maintain their position in the world as a new arising super power. In literature the continuous changing of the climate make the nation more conscious about their ideology regarding the literature. Global population follows the technology and communication system that continually evolved and came to be sedimented in the social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. All these have an impact on and have been reflected in postcolonial writings. The representation of the colonized world affect the sense of immediacy that gets translated many works into the literary aesthetic domain in a short time. Reinterpretation of historical event and population dispersal that came out of the diasporic imaginary world in the field of postcolonial climate change. The Alegierian liberation struggle, the Vietnam war , World War 1and 2 had such an impact on the imagination of postcolonials everywhere. Rewriting of the slavery became the prominent in postcolonial writings like J.M.Coetzee’s Foe and Life and Times of Michael K and Beloved by Toni Morrison. It chronicles the life of a black woman named Sethe. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness examines the horrors of Western civilization in Africa’s Congo region. 

Postcolonial novels of diaspora insist on seeing the nation state for understanding societies and cultures that they produce. Magical realism in postcolonial novels, urbanization and modernity, linguistics, cultural and geographical displacements features the postcolonial writings and critiques postcolonialism. The issue of split identity and the idea of natin has always been the central concern of postcolonial writing. With magical realism, postcolonial writers challenged the realistic narrative and present an alternative reality. The postcolonial 

environments beautifully presents by Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children. The profound change in postcolonial world and almost all the forms of dislocation are associated with colonialism and the diasporic experience became the central topics of postcolonial thought and literature. Edward said in his book Culture and Imperialism (1983), Said analyses the rise of