When they go to clean a land--

Iron underfoot and the vine overhead

And the deep on either hand.

We have trod that road--and a wet and windy road--

Our chosen star for guide.

Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread

Their highway side by side!

--Rudyard Kipling, Verses

As the quote from Rudyard Kipling reveals, European nations viewed their imperialism as a sacred mission to "clean" foreign lands of savagery, paganism, and backwardness; however, as this chapter demonstrates, the reality of colonialism proved it to be far other than "pure" in its motives. From the late 1870s, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, until 1914, when the European world exploded into war, seven countries molded the period through their expansion into Asia and Africa: Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, Belgium, and Japan. Spain, although an earlier colonial power, had lost most of her empire in the Americas by the time of the Napoleonic wars and her interests in the Phillippines and Cuba by 1898, but she still retained a small shred of empire in Morocco until 1945.

By 1914 one third of the global population and more than half of the land surface of the earth were under colonial domination. However, the dominions of the British Empire settled by whites, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, and New Zealand, were well on their way to full self-government by the onset of World War I as was the Union of South Africa, with a white minority control group of 11.5 million. Britain, though, would not relinquish her control of India until 1947, holding onto this vast colony and marking the first time in history so small a group had ruled over so many (In the 1920s, 164,000 British, 45,000 of whom were women, ruled over 400 million Indian natives). The racist philosophy with which Britain ruled her minions dictated that only whites had the necessary abilities for self-government, hence Britain’s reluctance to return India to her own people.

We can indicate the vast size of European empire at its height by listing the major dominions of Great Britain and France. Before independence, Great Britain ruled India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, South Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, East Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Jamaica and the British West Indies; while France controlled Indochina, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana.

Few European capitalists who were, in fact, profiting from colonial expansion were likely to criticize it, even with its employment of the African slave trade. British slave trade flourished in the 18th century, providing the sugar plantations of the Indies with cheap labor. In 1771, for example, 188 slavers sailed from London, Bristol, and Liverpool, transporting some 50,000 slaves. The rise in consumption of coffee, tea, and sugar in Europe is an indicator of the social changes brought about through trading. The sugar trade was instrumental in bringing wealth to Britons, and by the 19th century, even though British slaving had ended, many 19th century writers, such as Anthony Trollope and Thomas Carlyle, maintained the view that non-Europeans, especially dark-skinned non-Europeans, could only progress to civilization by means of white domination (Brantlinger 9).

Karl Marx, however, would draw quite different conclusions from his observations of colonial rule. Even though as a 19th century European his view was tainted by prejudice toward "lower" civilizations, Marx recognized the insidiousness of capitalism in the context of human oppression. "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization," Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, "lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked" (86). Later, Lenin would recognize as well the close connection between capitalism and imperialist expansion-- ". . . the more highly developed is capitalism, the more keenly felt the shortage of raw materials, and the more sharply delineated is competition and the search for raw materials throughout the whole world, so the more bitter is the struggle to acquire colonies" (Ansprenger 7).

The theories of postcolonialism covered in this chapter have evolved with the vast movement of decolonization around the globe in the second half of the twentieth century, sounding the theme of native resistance against empire which serves as a core issue in the development of postcolonial literary studies.

The theorizing of early Marxist thinkers about colonialism as well as linkages between contemporary marxism and postcolonialism are significant in theories of the "Third World," for prominent third-world thinkers themselves seemed to intuit the bonds between capitalism and imperialism, frequently espousing Marxism as providing a direction toward autonomy. The concept of a "three world" theory originated at the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia, April, 1955: the West was designated the first world, the Soviet bloc the second, and "underdeveloped" nations were lumped together as the third world. A constellation of terms circulates in any writing about postcolonial experiences, becoming part of the shared vocabulary of the discipline. Imperialism, central to understanding colonialist ideology, is defined by Edward Said as the practice, theory, and attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling distant territory (Culture and Imperialism 9). The term comprehends a network of relationships between a dominant and a subservient society. As we saw earlier, a number of Marxists have identified a connection between imperialism and capitalist societies in which finance capitalists seized the opportunity to divide the world among them.

Colonialism, then, was almost always the direct consequence of imperialism as settlements were implanted in distant territories, and colonization was the movement and settlement of people from the dominant culture to the colony. Two types of colonies may be identified: settler colonies and invaded colonies (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 25). Settler colonies, like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, were occupied by European colonists who dispossessed and overwhelmed the native populations. Invaded societies, like India or Nigeria, were those where indigenous people remained the majority and were colonized on their own territory, being under the rule of a colonizing minority. The process of decolonization occurring during the last 4 decades, however, has not left all formerly independent societies entirely free of the dominant culture. The condition described as neo-colonialism exhibits the fact that former colonies often remain economically dependent on the metropolitan center, and, thus, are only nominally independent. Furthermore, the term post-colonial, as emphasized by the hyphen separating the parts of the compounded word, should refer to the state achieved by formerly colonized countries after they have freed themselves from dependency; but it seems more accurate and current to define the term as embracing "all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2). In such a context, the hyphen is dropped in more recent discourse to de-emphasize the "after" connotations of the prefix. Regardless of a shared vocabulary, however, postcolonialism utterly resists being collapsed into a single postcolonial condition, for an array of differences exists among the culture and literature of peoples of nations formerly colonized (McClintock 256).

The issue of nationalism and its meaning to third world countries becomes a central concern as well in much of the writing of postcolonial theorists not only for its significance in carving up geographical space but also because of the central role that the rise of nationalism has played in the development of literature. The rise of European nationalism during the 18th and 19th centuries was especially coincident with the development of a major literary genre--the novel (Brennan 49). Nor has the study of postcolonial literatures any less significance for understanding the nation-centeredness of the postcolonial world--not only the world of new, decolonized nations but also a European and American world in which vast numbers of immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America have forced upon a mainstream public a new awareness of what it means to be British, French, or American. For the former colony, now become nation, and for the migrant enclaves within the metropolitan center, literature plays an active role both in representing the experience as well as structuring the forms of that experience (Noyes 1). Indeed, as Benedict Anderson argues, nations are "imagined communities,"and the function of literature takes on great importance as one of the unifying tools with which communities imagine themselves. "I propose the following definition of the nation:" Anderson writes, "it is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (15). Quoting Ernest Gellner to strengthen his proposition, Anderson adds: "‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’" The study of the development of national literatures and criticism is central to postcolonial studies, as the authors of the The Empire Writes Back suggest, for it is the study of national traditions of former colonies which serves as the first and most important step to challenging the claims of the metropolitan national center to exclusivity (17).

Phases of Postcolonial Literature

Several broad stages of development exist in postcolonial writing which cross geographical boundaries. There is first an imperialist period, when the writing is produced by a literate elite, usually themselves colonizers, who identify with the colonizing power and who compose in the language of the metropolitan center. There follows a period when writing is produced by natives under imperial license, but still in the language of the dominating culture. At this point, while there may be seeds of discontent embedded in the writing, the anti-imperialist potential has yet to be fully explored. The final step, that which displays emergent, modern post-colonial literatures, is the point at which the power of the dominating authority is abrogated and language and writing are appropriated for new and distinctive uses.

Postcolonial Subjectivity: Self, Other, and Place

A strong sense of self, indeed, often seems eroded through displacement or marginalization of cultural values, so a dialectic between place and displacement helps to define postcolonial societies. Postcolonial literatures, therefore, display a pervasive concern with myths of identity complicated by displacement as well as a concern with the language available to describe the experience of place. For some postcolonial critics, the interaction between self and place is a defining model of postcoloniality. The Australian poet Les Murray illustrates this feature of the postcolonial writer’s concern with place, writing: "time broadens into space" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 34). Another feature of the sense of self displayed in these literatures is the doubleness achieved through the intensive interaction of self and Other, where the native writer functions as both self and Other to the metropolitan center and dominating culture to which he/she, in large part, writes. Language shares a special relationship to identity in most postcolonial views, for it is through language that difference and absence come to be inscribed as a corollary to identity. Furthermore, the need to gain power over language, especially the language of the dominating culture, drives the postcolonial writer to seize that language and re-place it in a discourse adapted to his/her experience of self and place.

Postcolonial Discourse across Cultures

As postcolonial discourse continues to mature as a discipline, the importance of the comparison to the colonizing culture, or the metropolitan center, has faded as the efficacy of comparison among colonies themselves has grown. The result of such comparison has increased our knowledge about the literary and cultural patterns shared by these colonies, and a number of issues and concerns shared in the writing have come to the forefront of study. Certainly one defining mode of postcoloniality is a concern with identity which becomes fraught with its connection to place, to race, and to language.

Themes that echo throughout the works of writers of the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, include the celebration of the struggle toward independence for the community and the individual, the dominating influence of a foreign culture over the contemporary postcolonial society, the construction or demolition of houses or buildings in postcolonial spaces as a parallel for postcolonial identity, and the journey of a European interloper through an unfamiliar landscape with a native guide. The common formal devices employed by postcolonial writers include the use of allegory, irony, magic realism, and discontinuous narratives with a frequently recurring structural pattern of exile.

Invaded Colonies: Africa

The consequences of Columbus’s discovery of the New World were enormous for the continent of Africa; for Africa quickly gained the attention of European voyagers for a number of reasons, most importantly as a source of slave labor for the new plantations in the Americas. Africa was important, though, not only, as a land for Europe to plunder and control but also as the ancestral land of some of the earliest voices of protest against colonialism. Marxism, certainly with its context of revolution against oppression, was the greatest influence on African thought from the 1930s to the 1950s, exemplified in events like Jean Paul Sartre's connection to the "négritude" movement through the publication of his essay "Black Orpheus" in 1948 and the publication of Aime Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism in 1950.

Sartre's essay, an introduction for Leopold Senghor's Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry (1948), brought the issue of négritude, a pronounced assertion of the uniqueness of Black culture and identity, into the political arena and launched this concept into theory. Sartre critiques colonialism, insisting upon the right of Africans to fashion themselves. "Today," writes Sartre, "these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyes; black torches, in their turn, light the world and our white heads are only small lanterns balanced in the wind" (7-8). While gathering momentum and force in Francophone African cultures, négritude never achieved the same status in Anglophone African colonies. As Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel laureate, would write, "A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude" (Ashcrofts, Griffiths, and Tiffin 124). For Soyinka, as for other postcolonial writers, the flaw in négritude was its dependence upon the categories and features of the colonizing power to proclaim its being. However, Sartre inaugurated an important ideological moment, promoting commitment, the moral demand for choosing political sides and the right of the colonized to revolt, and calling for the end of colonialism.

Sartre was, of course, writing at a critical time in the history of decolonization. In 1947, one year before Sartre's essay, India gained its independence, the largest single country to do so, becoming a model to other colonized peoples seeking their freedom. The loss of India set the British empire irrevocably on the path toward dissolution, and in the 20 years following World War II, a large number of sovereign states emerged on the continents of Africa and Asia.

Senghor’s work falls within the domain of Francophone writing, that is, work by writers in French colonies using French as the official colonial language. A trio of Francophone theorists, Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, were also connected to the négritude movement and to Sartre’s support of the movement and saw increasingly in the late 1940s, 50s, and 60s that there was a need to speak out against colonial practices. In 1950, Aimé Césaire, a West Indian of African descent from the island of Martinique, published Discours Sur le Colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), a work that followed the lead of the Fifth Pan-African Conference of Manchester in 1945 and Kwame Nkrumah's Towards Colonial Freedom (1947) to argue for Black African independence. Earlier, in 1945, Césaire had worked with Leopold Senghor to develop the concept of négritude. Césaire hardly bites his tongue as he excoriates colonizing societies for fascism and racism. "Yes," Césaire writes, "it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him . . ." (14). The horror to white men, Cesaire insists, is that Hitler applied to the white man colonialist procedures that had previously been reserved for Arabs, Indians, and Blacks. Césaire espouses the notion that at the end of capitalism there is Hitler, a belief which links Césaire to earlier Marxist theories of the connections between capitalism and imperialism. What Césaire concludes is that the answer for colonized societies is not regression to earlier, pre-colonial African cultures, but movement for Black African societies beyond the present and the past to create a new society--one that, in Césaire's Marxist view, would come from the proletariat to evolve into a classless society. Césaire's work clearly demonstrates the influence of Marxist thought on this stage of incipient postcolonial theorizing and raises the important issue of the essential difference of Blackness.

Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (1952, Black Skin, White Masks, 1967) is a far-reaching psychological and sociological examination of the effects of colonization written by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and Martinican like Césaire. Fanon, too, picks up the issue of Black difference to focus on the intersection between white, colonizing self and Black, colonized other within the colonized person's own being. Not only, Fanon argues, is there an obvious exterior self/other conflict in the colonized world, there is an interior conflict as well. The colonized person can only become "whiter" by renouncing his/her blackness and adopting the colonizer's standards and language. Once such acceptance becomes embedded in the ideology, it is possible for the colonized person to read even a comic book with a stereotypic portrayal of Blacks and identify unquestioningly with the white attitude presented inside its covers. Négritude and the advancement of the uniqueness of Black personality becomes a means of negating this desire to assimilate and identify. Nationalism and the political struggle for liberation from colonialism should follow, Fanon felt, resulting in revolt against domination (Fanon participated actively in the Algerian revolution). Most interesting, however, is Fanon's insistent clamor to be heard as a Frenchman, an attempt to break down the stereotypic divisions--"What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the French people" (203). Even Fanon seems not immune to a deeply embedded desire to identify with the colonizer as he works to break with essentialist concepts of Blackness.

In "On National Culture," a chapter in The Wretched of the Earth (1963, Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961, preface by Sartre), Fanon problematizes the notion of nationalism as he had earlier problematized the notion of négritude, escaping the easy assumption that the natural consequence of decolonization was the formation of the nation. Fanon outlines three phases of native writing in a colonized country. The first phase demonstrates the power of the dominating culture as the writer tries to assimilate, in the second phase the native writer begins to question identity and his/her status as other, and in the third phase the native writer decides to fight back, serving as an awakener of his/her people. It is in this phase that a revolutionary literature is born, the moment of the writer turning to his or her people in the creation of a national literature. However important the creation of a nation and a national culture might be, Fanon concludes, it must lead to an international consciousness. Nationalism must not lead to the division of nations. "The consciousness of self," Fanon reminds us, "is not the closing of a door to communication" (247).

Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) continues the discourse of attack on the violence of colonialism. Memmi's work, along with Césaire's and Fanon’s, features recognition from Jean Paul Sartre in the form of an introduction to the 1957 edition. Furthermore, in the American edition, Memmi recognizes and dedicates the work to the American Negro, also colonized. Memmi, like Césaire before him, focuses on colonialism as a variety of fascism: " . . . every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom" (62). Like Fanon, Memmi uncovers the sick adherence of the colonized to the colonizer. The interest for Memmi, however, lies in the outward, rather than the inner, relationship. Memmi examines the master-slave bond formed as a result of colonialism and questions the complicity of the colonized with his/her own enslavement. "The bond between colonizer and colonized is thus destructive and creative. It destroys and re-creates the two partners of colonization into colonizer and colonized. One is disfigured into an oppressor, a partial, unpatriotic and treacherous being, worrying only about his privileges and their defense; the other, into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat" (89). Memmi also expands an important argument in the earlier discourse on colonialism, that of the dilemma for the colonized writer who must make the choice of the language of the colonizer or his own in which to write. "In the linguistic conflict within the colonized," Memmi writes, "his mother tongue is that which is crushed" (107). For the native writer, writing in the colonizer's language, then, amounts to bowing to the master's tongue.

The work of African writers of the diaspora like Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi from the West Indies has contributed effectively and raised significant issues in the work of postcolonial writers and thinkers on the African continent. Culturally and linguistically Africa is quite divided. Northern Africa is largely Arab in culture, outlook, and languages, perceiving itself as part of the Arab world. Sub-Saharan countries share a different, more specifically African tribal culture, while South Africa, with its weight of apartheid and minority white rule is yet another microcosmic cultural enclave. Among many issues African writers address, the importance of the choice of language for writing remains a particularly central one and the use of European languages by so many African writers attests to the impact of colonization on the development of African literature in the twentieth century. Anglophone writing, or African literature in English, dominates the literary scene on the continent, surpassing in output Francophone and Lusophone (literature in Portuguese) works. The publication of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drunkard in 1952 is customarily cited as the beginning of a sustained Anglophone literature in Africa although there are earlier works from writers on the Gold Coast. Tutuola was quickly joined in prominence by two other Nigerians, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the first Black writer to win the Nobel prize for literature.

While never as interested in Négritude theoretically as Francophone writers, Anglophone writers insist upon the necessity of recovering and rebuilding uniquely African views of art. At the core of this concern is a belief in the social role of the African artist in sharp contrast to a European preoccupation with individualism. Chinua Achebe’s essay The Novelist as Teacher" (1965) articulates this belief: "I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past--with all its imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure art. But who cares? Art is important and so is the education of the kind I have in mind" (45). These concerns remain a constant feature throughout Achebe’s work.

This project to resist the cultural incorporation of African writing by Europe has highlighted not only the distinctiveness of African writing for its social sense but also the recovery of the importance of African oral art as the indigenous equal of European literary tradition. The most influential exponents of this viewpoint were the bolekaja critics, Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike, (The Decolonization of African Literature, 1983) whose critical stance of attack (bolekaja means "come down and fight") focused on those African writers who, in their view, were most divorced from their own tradition. They argued that Eurocentric criticism of African fiction perceived the African writer as an "apprentice" European with only Western canons to emulate. Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo were two writers who, for Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike, emblematized this divorce from the African oral poetic tradition, while Achebe was applauded for his faithfulness to the African past. However, the work of Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madubuike becomes problematic in its assertion that "African literature is an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literatures" (4). Statements such as this constitute a denial of the syncretism of African culture and of the historical fact of colonization which inevitably leads to hybridization.

In East Africa, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986) emerged to dominate the critical scene by arguing compellingly against the colonizing power of the English language over the native mind and insisting that writing in the native language participates in the anti-imperialist struggles of native populations (Thiong'o 451). Thiong’o achieved prominence by first publishing in English as James Ngugi but turned away from African writing in English to publish in Gikuyu, insisting that it is only through the use of their native African languages that African writers can "decolonize" their minds. "How did we arrive," Thiong’o writes, "at this acceptance of the ‘fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature’, in our culture, and in our politics?" Thiong’o’s argument, with its formal idea of language as the bearer of culture, serves as a powerful reminder of the unsolved problems of the African writer.

These concerns are increasingly reflected in more recent African criticism; as the authors of The Empire Writes Back suggest, "the emergence of a criticism which sees the text as a site of activity and ‘decolonization’ as a political action . . . has begun to take shape" (132). While more concerned with philosophical constructions of "race," Kwame Anthony Appiah (In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, 1992) participates in this spirit of decolonization by chipping away at European racial essentialism. To dispel the essentializing and totalizing of racism, Appiah celebrates instead the fact that Africans don't share a common tradition, culture, language, or religion. He could embrace, Appiah concludes, a Pan-Africanism different from the essentialist conception espoused by earlier postcolonial thinkers; a new Pan-Africanism might be one released from the bondage of racial ideology while it allows for powerful commonalities among Africans. Another prominent African philosopher, V. Y. Mudimbe (The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, 1988), adds his voice to the challenge of cultural ethnocentricity, the notion that universal civilization has radiated from a European center. Mudimbe attacks Europe’s discursive construction of Africa, "Africanism," in much the same way that Edward Said’s earlier work attacks Europe’s "orientalizing" of Asia, insisting that even in the early decades of this century, historians like J. A. Hobson (Imperialism: A Study) linked the "the scramble for Africa to capitalism and capitalist search for higher profits from colonial conquests" (Mudimbe 2).

The Orient: Northern Africa and the Middle East

A critical date for the inception of theories of postcoloniality and colonial discourse as a new area of academic inquiry is 1978, the publication of Orientalism, the magisterial work of Palestinian critic Edward Said. Orientalism explodes the imaginary image of the Oriental produced by the discourse of the colonizer. Bear in mind that Said is using the term "Oriental" broadly to reference the "East" in the Western imagination. Using Foucault's theories on discourse, power, and knowledge, Said offers a view of how the Orient has been constructed through discourse in the consciousness of the West. For Said, the Orient presents the West with one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other, producing an internal consistency of Orientalism despite or beyond its having any correspondence with a "real" orient. The relation between the Occident and the Orient, especially India and Egypt, as the relation between colonizer and colonized, is a relation of power and domination. Therefore, the discourse of postcolonialism is grounded in a conflict for power which is focused in the control of the language of the colonizer. As Said reminds us:

Orientalist texts are representations, an important fact for Said, for this emphasizes their fictionality, heightening the recognition that their truth to the original is not what matters. Thus Said's emphasis in his analysis of Orientalist texts remains on their external features: style, figurative language, setting, and historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation. Said provides us with a powerful reminder of the pervasiveness and production of ideology as he reveals the web of knowledge in Orientalist texts that passes for truth. Said focuses on "textual attitudes" to highlight the the tenuous connection between textual representation and reality and the ways in which Orientalist discourse objectifies and masters its Oriental other.

In a recent work, Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said seeks again to dismantle the belief in the fixity of identity, the core of cultural thought in the era of imperialism. We can reread the cultural archive "contrapuntally," Said suggests, engaging in a simultaneous awareness of the metropolitan history that has been the dominating discourse and those other histories against which and together with which the dominating discourse acts. Rereading European novels this way will give us, in Said's view, an alternative narrative--a "writing back" to the cultural center with the potential to disrupt European narratives of Otherness. Within this context, Said re-reads Jane Austen, French Algerian author Albert Camus, and Irishman W. B. Yeats, among others.

Adding another example of the "exoticism" of the East for the West is Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1986). Alloula’s focus is the Western photographic image of women in French Algeria, veiled in public and exposed in the harem on French postcards in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The woman’s veil here becomes the metaphor for the exotic colony which must be unveiled, stripped by the Western eye for its own pleasure. But, as Alloula points out, the postcards, made using models in a photographer’s studio, do not represent Algeria or Algerian women but the Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female and her inaccessibility behind a veil in a forbidden harem. Alloula’s intent is to uncover the nature and meaning of the colonialist gaze and to subvert the stereotype so tenaciously attached to the bodies of Oriental women.

The Orient: India

Said's work in Orientalism has been credited with initiating much of the new work in postcolonial theories, and it remains a linchpin for those studies. As the editors of Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory argue in their introduction, the appearance of Homi Bhabha at an Essex conference in 1982 and the appearances of Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak in Essex in 1984 helped to sustain and expand the interest in colonial issues and discourse kindled by Said. Both BhaBha and Spivak, migrating from the Indian continent to Britain and the US respectively, are emblematic of an Indo-Anglian critical and literary interest. Indeed, as Aijaz Ahmad reminds us, India is now one of the world’s largest markets for production and dissemination of English-language books (In Theory 73). That should not obscure the fact, though, that India has an indigenous critical and literary tradition as old as, if not older than, Europe’s. Without doubt, indigenous Indian languages have been altered and hybridized by the presence of English, and currently there is some debate about the very status of Indian writing in English. In fact, this is yet another example of a debate about the progress of decolonization, and Indian critics have returned to a consideration of dhvani-rasa (suggestion-emotion) aesthetic theory to reconstitute a sense of the "Indianness" of the texts considered and assess their value by means of a native aesthetic.

The pervasiveness of English, though, and Indian adaptation of the colonizer's language is attested to by Meenakshi Mukherjee. As Mukherjee writes, the choice of English adapted to the postcolonial tongue:

Homi Bhabha, one of the earliest respondents to Said's message regarding the concoction of Western ideology about the Orient, is aware of the danger of colonialist "mimicry" in the search for power over truth through language in "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." Expanding upon Said's sense of the possession and power over the other that orientalist discourse provides the colonizer, Bhabha opens to view the marginalizing effect of colonial mimicry which demonstrates a "desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (126). Mimicry in colonial discourse, as it allows for mockery of the colonized, disrupts the self-imagined imperative and "purity" of the Western project to civilize and discipline the "savage." "Black skin splits under the racist gaze," Bhabha writes, "displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body" (132-33). Bhabha's work suggests that a theory and practice which embraces difference and absence rather than using these terms to assert power over that which is different and/or absent provides a model for changing the terms of social power. In his introduction to Nation and Narration, a volume of essays which addresses the themes of nation, narration, and the connections to postcolonial discourse; Bhabha discusses the image of nation, a problematic term for postcolonial studies, recognizing the achievement of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. Bhabha advances the notion, stemming from Anderson's work, that an ambivalence exists at the core of the idea of nation--a disjunction between those who write the nation and those who live it, i.e., the colonizers and the colonized. Western nations, too, Bhabha concludes, must come to be seen as being among the dark places of the earth so that we can explore new spaces from which to write the history of peoples and construct theories of narrative. The essay with which Bhabha closes Nation and Narration, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," reaches out to the metropolitan center, the city, to which "the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation" (319-20). It is the notion of a nation's margins formed by its exiles, and the means by which the culture and the history of that nation might be rewritten that Bhabha wants to consider here. Bhabha's work should remind us of the dark side of nationalism, when a body of people can turn to expel those who are foreign, different ethnically or racially.

Another central figure in the development of postcolonial theories from the continent of India is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism (1985)" demonstrates Spivak's compelling, sustained readings of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Frankenstein. Spivak takes up the issue of the confrontation between a "first world" woman and a "third world" woman in Jane Eyre and Bertha Rochester to explore the "worlding" of the Third World in the texts. Spivak begins by situating the Third World through the prevalent ideology of Jane Eyre, an ideology which must bestialize Bertha in order to install Jane as the appropriate wife for Rochester. Spivak continues with the reinscription of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea as an attempt to write the story of Antoinette, renamed Bertha by Rochester; and she concludes with an analysis, or deconstruction, of Frankenstein, arguing that Mary Shelley's monster deeply problematizes the concept of creating and marginalizing the Other. An important image in Spivak's essay is that of Bertha Mason, Jane Eyre's Other who must " . . . set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction" (270). In Other Worlds" Essays in Cultural Politics (1987) demonstrates Spivak’s versatility in moving from "world" to "world." Spivak begins with essays on canonical European literature, writing on Yeats, Woolf, and Wordsworth, among others. She then moves to a consideration of the status of English studies in the late twentieth century and closes with a section which explores the nature of subaltern studies and which provides specific readings of two texts by Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi.

The Caribbean as Crucible of Postcolonial Theory

While India may provide the largest market for books in English, the Caribbean serves as the locale for the most far-reaching literary theories of postcoloniality. The "central and unavoidable questions of the relationship between the imported European and the local, between ancestry and destiny, and between language and place" which underlie all other specific debates are most open to view in the work of Caribbean theorists (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 145). Of note as well is the fact that all the worst features of colonization are combined in this region--from the virtual annihilation of the native population to European plundering, piracy, and all the atrocities of the slave trade. We have already seen the enormous impact of earlier theorists from the Caribbean--Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi. We can add to that the work of earlier expatriate and Caribbean historian C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins (1938) charts the life of Toussaint l’Ouverture and the West Indian slave rebellion to predict a continuing history of agonized and unsettled Caribbean life.

The present-day population of the West Indies consists of a wide variety of racial groups, largely the result of diaspora from ancestral countries. Therefore, a deep concern with language is an essential component of Caribbean theory, especially given the nature of slavery and slavemasters’ deliberate efforts to separate common language groups so that within two or three generations the only language available to the slave was the European language.

Race and ancestry are also issues of extreme importance, and in the work of Edward Kamau Braithwaite (The Development of Creole Society 1770-1810, 1971) the importance of the African connection is tempered by his increasing concern with "Creolization." Braithwaite stresses African, Amerindian, and European ancestry as influences upon an identity emerging from a cross-cultural time-space dynamic while providing the basis for an indigenous literary theory in essays like "Jazz and the West Indian Novel" (1967-8). Wilson Harris (The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, 1983) is also a practitioner of Caribbean catalysis, arguing for a "womb of space" where the annihilation of the Caribs and the atrocities of slavery result in the contemporary mixing of Caribbean peoples, returning them to an original shared ancestry. Violence, destruction, and oppression in the past have in fact been transformative, Harris argues, for the production of contemporary generations. Harris also believes in the power of language to engage in a dialogue with the past: "is there within exploitation itself a ‘curious half-blind groping into a conception of heterogeneous community beyond static cultural imperative?" ("A Talk on the Subjective Imagination" 45). Deeply engaged as well with the notion of language and discourse, land and dispossession, ancestry and space is the work of Edouard Glissant (Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 1989). Glissant predicates his arguments on a deconstruction of the belief in individual agency, resisting as well the desire for pure origins and departing from the Caribbean’s fixation on prelapsarian innocence; instead, the collective "we" becomes, in Glissant’s view, the location of the true subject.

Settler Colonies: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa

White European settlers faced the problem of establishing their indigeneity rather than protecting themselves against an invader and, therefore, sought to separate from the metropolitan center for different reasons than those of the native occupants of invaded colonies. Settlers newly arrived in the colonies were well aware of the political force and hegemony of European languages and struggled against these to forge a literature which would be viable and different from rather than tributary to European literature. In addition, it was necessary for critics in the colonies to develop a critical language capable of evaluating an emergent literature. Postcolonial theories have benefitted from late twentieth-century poststructuralism with its problematizing of subjectivity and recognition of cultural relativity in the assignment of value. As the Canadian critic Diana Brydon points out: "We of course have been aware of these dangers for years, but in a discourse marginalized in its status as ‘Commonwealth literature’ and by its reliance, until recently, on the language of monologist or monocentric criticism" ("The Thematic Ancestor" 387).

Language and space, or using an imported language in an alien landscape, combine to form major concerns in the development of a settler aesthetic for critics in the colonies. Canadian writer Dennis Lee articulates compellingly the peculiar position of the writer, descendant of white settlers, in relationship to land and language:

Beneath the words our absentee masters have given us, there is an undermining

silence. It saps our nerve. And beneath that silence, there is a raw welter of

cadence that tumbles and strains toward words and that makes the silence a

blessing because it shushes easy speech. That cadence is home . . .

The impasse of writing that is problematic to itself is transcended only when the

impasse becomes its own subject, when writing accepts and enters and names its

own condition as it is naming the world. ("Cadence, Country, Silence" 165-6)

In addition to landscape and language, the tormented relationship between white settlers or descendants of white settlers and indigenous peoples remains a major feature of postcolonial aesthetic. In the construction of "indigeneity," white settlers had to move beyond the use of indigenes as subjects for writing and to begin to incorporate features of a native aesthetic into their own critical apparatus. To this end, the "Jindyworobak" (to annex or to join) movement in Australia during the 30s and 40s was an effort to develop an identifiable Australian aesthetic through appropriating aboriginal culture. Furthermore, in New Zealand, the position of the doubly marginalized Maoris is an interesting one because of a strong modern tradition of Maori language usage. Pushed to the edge of an already marginalized society, Maori writers face problems analogous to those of Indian or African writers with respect to choice of language for writing.

kept as nothing but a game preserve for

squalid savages.

--Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of

West, 1889

Among the oldest colonies, the United States is also the first postcolonial society to develop a national literature, facing the same issues of writing in an alien landscape in an effort to construct a narrative of the relationship between the native population and European settlers. But the United States grew to colonizing status as well in its settlement of the West, a fact which underscores the cultural, civilizing necessity which seems to drive colonialism, so blatantly indicated above in Teddy Roosevelt's view of how white Americans subdued native Americans and won the West. Such cultural participation in the development of the grand American narrative supports the claim made by Said and Bhabha that nations are narrations. If this is so, Said argues, then the power to self-narrate is also a power to block other narratives from forming, constituting a basis of connection between culture and imperialism (Culture and Imperialism xiii). Said reminds us as well that the word "imperialism" rarely turns up in records of American culture, history, or politics even though the connection is patently apparent. The course of American history is briefly charted by Said as follows:

The case of the American colonies is a special one, however, when we consider that as an incipient nation, having revolted against the oppression perpetrated by Britain, it would turn itself into the very kind of oppressive and aggressive force from which it had won its freedom. The history of the colonizing of the Americas records from the beginning instances of aggression and violence toward the indigenous populations; and it is only within recent memory that emphasis in historical representations of conflicts between settlers and Indians and the great Westward expansion has begun to shift away from the moral imperative of the white man's civilizing mission and toward a corrected vision of the native American's plight.

In addition to aggression against native Americans, the United States was a major participant in the history of slavery in the 19th century, bringing itself as a nation to its knees during the course of a bloody civil war over the issue of slavery and its importance to the economic foundations of the agrarian South. Cheap labor in the form of indentured servants, such as Asian "coolies" recruited to build the railroads, contributed yet another group to those oppressed in the underbelly of 19th century American society. The problem of cheap labor and the vast potential for its exploitation continues today most evidently in the vast numbers of undocumented laborers who have crossed the border from Mexico in search of a seemingly better life.

In switching its emphasis from the global postcolonial community outside the US, this chapter now focuses on "minority" writing and criticism within the global melting pot of the US in an effort to bring a discussion of American ethnic theories and minority literatures within the context of postcolonial discourse. Since very similar conditions to other colonies prevail, a number of issues recognized earlier in this discussion as significant in postcolonial theories remain in the forefront of consideration as our attention turns to ethnic minority concerns in the US. However, we should also note an intriguing difference: instead of a diaspora away from the colonizing nation, we see in the evolution of this nation a flocking of immigrants toward the US as a center, which requires us to look at the phenomenon of internal colonization. As an example, the experience of African Americans in the US not only provides us with a template for measuring the importance of minority concerns, and African American voices have insisted on the attention of the dominant white culture to justice and equality for all. In addition, the increasing recognition of African American literature in the literary "establishment" provides evidence of a literary and cultural renaissance that spreads across the boundaries of race to embrace other peoples of color--native American, Mexican and Latino(a) American, as well as Asian American.

Each of these minority groups has had to struggle against the viciousness of racism and the denial of access to avenues of power. Fred Hord, for example, bases the premise of his book, Reconstructing Memory: Black Literary Criticism, on the fact of internal colonialism as the premier African American experience (vii). "Internal colonialism," Hord argues, "is a form of domestic racist capitalism" (viii). Hord goes on to establish powerful links between the work of Fanon, Memmi, and Cabral and the nature of colonization in the US.

For the African American writer and theorist, race, the experience of racism as colonialism, and its connection to identity constitute pivotal concepts in writing. Charles Johnson reminds us that black American writing exhibits a crisis of identity, a crisis that has yet to escape fully the shackles of the past of slavery (Being and Race 8). We should be reminded here of the work of Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in their valuation of black difference and distinctiveness as a theory of négritude. Not only were Senghor and Césaire admirers of the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, but they themselves were influential in the thinking of later African American writers, like Amiri Baraka, who is the strongest contemporary voice for the theoretical continuance of négritude.

Among the most influential of contemporary African American critics, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores key concepts in black theory and criticism in several compelling essays and books. In his editiorial introduction to "Race," Writing, and Difference, Gates announces that the purpose behind the volume is to examine "the curious dialectic between formal language use and the inscription of metaphorical racial differences" (6). We should notice Gates's decision to enclose the word "race" in quotation marks, exposing the term as subject to challenge for its accuracy of representation. But Gates also seeks to employ an exploration of race as a meaningful category in the study of literature, observing its operations in the ideology of dominant cultures and in the writings of people of color both in the US and abroad. Just as important is Gates's determination not to use Western critical discourse "uncritically" in approaching the racially other literary text: "To attempt to appropriate our own discourses by using Western critical theory uncritically is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another" (15). Another collection of critical essays edited by Gates, Black Literature and Literary Theory, questions the relationship between "black" literatures and Western literatures; but, perhaps more importantly, Gates seeks an avenue for describing common presuppositions between black and Western critics as well as for examining the nature of "a signifying black difference" (3). In his introduction to the volume, "Criticism in the Jungle," Gates suggests that black critics "repeat" Western theories in their approaches to black texts in order to produce difference. Saliently, Gates "repeats" Marx to support this supposition, silently inflecting a seemingly innocent assumption with its racially charged, political implications:

the beginner who has learned a new language always retranslates it into his mother

tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to be able to express himself in it freely when he can manipulate it without reference to the old, and when he forgets the original language while using the new one (qtd in Gates 10).

Gates invites us to question how Western critical theory is the "mother tongue" of the black critic, and how forging a black critical/theoretical discourse is like learning a new language. Gates also takes up the issue of canon-formation in black literature, insisting in "Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; It's All Greek to Me," that we are at a crucial "moment of literary liminality in the African-American tradition . . . where tradition and the present, Africa and the West, Afro-America and America, black, indeed, and white face each other in confrontation" (72).

In his effort to explore the features of this liminal border, Gates has fixed upon an icon in his critical discourse--the signifying monkey. For Gates, this icon is resonant and rich with varied and ironic under- and overtones. The figure of the monkey, of course, tropes upon Western notions of the simian qualities of the black man. But the monkey is also a parallel to a featured performer in a Pan-African tradition, Esu-Elegbara, a trickster figure, as Gates informs us in "The Blackness of Blackness: a Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey." Gates writes that the signifying monkey is "he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language . . ." (286). The signifying monkey constitutes in a single icon the power of repetition and reversal, and Gates takes pains throughout this essay to explore the various meanings that "signifyin(g)" can have, marking the implications of the term for limning the parameters of an emergent black critical discourse. Gates develops this figure at much greater length in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, seeking to "identify a theory of criticism that is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn informs the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition" (xix). Again, Gates connects the two trickster figures in African and African American myth, Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey, in whose stories are inscribed formal language use and its interpretation. The trickster figures serve as points of conscious articulation of language traditions, and they are aware of themselves as traditions as they construct a meta-discourse in the vernacular. Together, Gates argues, the tricksters articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature.

In a recent essay, "African American Criticism," Gates explores the current state of the field. Gates correctly credits the women's movement for the increasingly elevated status of African American and other minority texts. Since 1970, the achievements of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara have proven to be the first crest of a wave of black women novelists and poets. A generation of scholars in black studies, including Houston Baker, Jr., Geneva Smitherman, and Arnold Rampersad, began to focus on the nature and function of black literature and its criticism, changing the focus on black-authored texts from sociological to aesthetic. Recent critics, Gates argues, seek to go beyond naming "the margin" in black texts to resituate these texts in all their specificity, "revealing the depth and range of cultural details far beyond the economic exploitation of blacks by whites" (308). In the future of black studies, Gates concludes, we need to examine the conceptual divide between minority discourse and postcolonial discourses as a way to shed light on the internal colonization within our own cultural borders.

Another major African American critic, Houston Baker, Jr., has contributed significantly to the emergent shape of black literary studies. In "Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro-American Literature," Baker identifies two dominant critical practices and a third emergent practice used to describe to African American literature. The first, prevalent during the 1940s and 50s comprised a "poetics of integration," where the dominant black critical voices argued that Negro writers are also American writers and Negro literature is a part of American literature as a whole. In the 1960s, Baker continues, another generation of black writers and scholars advocated cultural nationalism, spurring the black arts movement and black aesthetic critical practice of the late 1960s and early 70s. Baker illustrates his concerns about the emerging generation, brought forward largely from the new black middle class, by suggesting that this generation of critics preempts "the 'professional' asumptions (and attendant jargon) that mark the world of white academic literary critics" rather than utilizing the critical tools developed by the Black Aesthetic generation of critics (11). The essay eloquently maps the recent history of African American critical theory and revisits the issues of race and essentialism so central as postcolonial and ethnic cultural issues.

Just before the publication of "Generational Shifts" in 1981, Baker co-edited an important collection of criticism with Leslie Fiedler, Opening Up the Canon: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979. This was a daring volume, according to Gates's discussion of it in his "African American Criticism," given that its primary goal was to explode the notion that English was somehow a neutral container for "world" literature.

At the end of the 80s, Baker co-edited a collection of papers and responses from a conference held in April, 1987, Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the past and future of the field in a forum designed to encourage sustained critical dialogue and to set an agenda for Afro-American literary studies in the 90s. Papers by Gates, Baker, and Deborah McDowell, among others, identified a range of concerns from canon formation to the poetics of autobiography and the theory and poetics of black women's writing.

Baker has also been especially effective as a critic of black women's writing. His Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing is a work which he sees as a completion of a critical trilogy invested in the inescapability of theory, beginning with Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance and followed by Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. In Workings of the Spirit, Baker searches for the source of what he describes as a resistance to theory on the part of Afro-American women writers and scholars, fueled in part certainly by a suspicion of white men's, white women's, and black men's desires to "explain" Afro-American womanhood and creativity. Baker's applications of theoretical explanation engage the writing of Alice Walker, Zora Neal Hurston, and Toni Morrison, among others.

It is this very suspicion of theory that Barbara Christian takes up in "The Race for Theory." "The race for theory," Christian writes:

--with its linguistic jargon; its emphasis on quoting its prophets; its tendency toward

"biblical" exegesis; its refusal even to mention specific works of creative writers, far less contemporary ones; its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equation; its gross generalizations about culture--has silenced many of us to the extent that some of us feel we can no longer discuss our own literature . . . .(69)

By "us," Christian means precisely black, women, and Third World. Christian attacks hegemonic white male theory for pre-emption of language and power just at a time when the literature of marginalized people began to move to the "center" of discussion and upholds the value of literary criticism which, in her terms, is a means for canon-building and insuring that the work of women writing contemporaneously can establish a tradition that will survive.

The work of Christian and Baker with black women writers points once again to an important phenomenon in the contemporary field of literature, and that is the multiple emergence of female voices writing the black experience across the United States, and in Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Several anthologies of black women's writing and criticism should be mentioned for they attest compellingly to this fact. The 1982 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is a volume whose editors acknowledge "appears at an appropriate historical moment when Black women are consciously manifesting themselves culturally, spiritually, and politically as well as intellectually" (xxviii). The volume's essays address a wide range of social and cultural issues in black women's lives, closing with an emphasis on syllabus development for enhancing courses in black women's studies. The following year saw the publication of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, which brought a rich array of the work of women writers and scholars into print. Barbara Smith's introduction to Home Girls reiterates the significance of a vital movement of women of color. "One of the purposes of Home Girls," Smith writes, "is to get the word out about Black feminism to the people who need it most: Black people in the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa--everywhere" (xxxi). Smith's volume also works unflaggingly to counteract homophobia by heightening the presence of black lesbian women authors.

In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers suggest the power of "conjuring" as a way of providing a connection between black women and literary authority and as a frame for essays that range in discussion from early American autobiography penned by black women to placing contemporary Afro-American women's fiction. Hazel V. Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist also charts the course of difficulty for black women struggling against ideologies that would keep them trapped and silent. Carby traces the work of nineteenth century black women intellectuals countering ideology with an alternative black women's discourse to the emergence of black women novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A groundbreaking anthology, Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide by Ann Allen Schockley, followed on the heels of the growing critical insistence of the 80s that black women's writing had begun to delineate a new Renaissance era in literature. Schockley's anthology was the first of its kind, resurrecting and documenting the published contributions of black women from the colonial period to the New Negro Movement. Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance appropriately closes the decade of the 80s and opens the 90s with a reminder of the cultural continuum of which the current flowering in black women's writing is a part. Its editors, Joanne Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, situate their volume as "part of the continuing process of reading, rereading, and revising that has established the validity of Black women writing in America as a tradition within a tradition" (xxiv). Andree Nicola McLaughlin's introduction to the volume, "A Renaissance of the Spirit: Black Women Remaking the Universe," provides a stunning recognition of the seemingly impossible obstacles that black women have had to overcome in order to write:

Who would have believed that the "Kidnapped African" would be the architect of

a literary renaissance in a foreign land? Who would have expected that thrice within

a margin of one hundred years after slavery's abolition, the descendants of slaves--

for whose forebears reading and writing were against the law--would produce some of the most widely read writers in the modern world? . . . The literary upsurge by Black women in the second half of the twentieth century unveils a renaissance of the spirit inspired by those who have refused to surrender. Those who have resisted their oppression. Those who have undertaken to remake the universe to own their future (xxxi).

In fact, this movement operates within an even larger context of women of color, for women of other ethnic minority groups in the United States are coming to writing as well in increasing numbers. Stemming from the success of Native American writer N. Scott Momaday, whose work in the 60s earned him a Pulitzer Prize and initiated a Native American renaissance in writing, a number of Native American women have enriched the contemporary literary and critical canon, prominent among them, Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko. Allen's The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) seeks to dispel the stereotypic views an American colonizing culture has had of Native American life and literature. Allen has developed a series of woman-centered essays in a study of the matriarchal traditions in Native American culture. Allen is also, however, concerned to explore the importance of myth and ceremony and the relationship to geographical space, or the land, in Native American writing.

The upsurge in writing from women in the United States of Chicana or Latina backgrounds is yet another testimony to a literary revival among women of color. Similar to Allen's The Sacred Hoop in its efforts to escape the stereotypic myths about Mexican American or Latino(a) American life and culture is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldúa conceptualizes the necessity of the "mestizo/a," as a person of mixed race, to cross borders, whether geographical, cultural, or between the sexes. Similarly participating in an initiatory movement to value, analyze, and introduce into the university literary curriculum the writing of Chicana, Puertorriqueña, and Cubana writers is Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (1989). The editors of this work announce as their intention to feature the explosion in Latin American writing in the 80s. The work features a mixture of Latina women writers to establish the complexity of this work, placing a solid emphasis on "testimonio" as emblematic of a particularly Latin American discursive construction of "truthful" witnessing of real experience. The essays also focus on a paradox of self-affirmation in the work of Latin American women writers rather than on the quest for identity in "minority" literatures, recognize and celebrate a matriarchal heritage, and affirm a cultural "mestizaje," or hybridity, which insists upon the crossing of borders between languages, races, lands, and genders.

Yet a third ethnic group of writers has benefited from the critical work of Elaine H. Kim. Her essay "Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature" and her book Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context seek to explode the myths and stereotypes about the generations of Asian American immigrants and to write the history of their culture and literature. Vietnamese Writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha explores the nature of female woman-of-color identity in Woman, Native, Other (1989). Minh-ha writes, of the non-white Third World woman writer: "Today, the growing ethnic-feminist consciousness has made it increasingly difficult for her to turn a blind eye not only to the specification of the writer as historical subject (who writes? and in what context?), but also to writing itself as a practice located at the intersection of subject and history--a literary practice that involves the possible knowledge (linguistical and ideological) of itself as such" (6).

As an area of scholarly theoretical activity and academic literary study, the postcolonial condition has proven a major interest for at least the last ten years. A variety of collections of essays currently contribute to the range of positions which can be accounted for in postcolonial theories. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, in their edited collection The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, for example, seek to "describe and define," through their interpretation of minority discourse, "the common denominators that link various minority cultures" (1). With the continuation of vital work by postcolonial writers and thinkers, the contemporary situation of "Man" in the West, that is, white man as the model for all humanity described by Homi K. Bhabha, can begin to be corrected:

The invisible power that is invested in this dehistoricized figure of Man is gained

at the cost of those "others"--women, natives, the colonized, the indentured and

enslaved--who, at the same time but in other spaces, were becoming the peoples

without a history. ("Postcolonial Criticism" 463)