Postcolonial Theory And The Rewriting Of History
COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM
Colonialism is synonymous with imperialism but they are defined differently depending on their historical mutations. Colonialism might not exactly be the encounter between peoples or simply conquest and domination. Colonialism was not an identical process in the different parts of the world but everywhere it locked the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in the human history. Colonialism is not just a segment of past history that we have come out of. It is a legacy and inheritance that has gone down into the very recesses of our making. In simple and unambiguous terms, it is the stuff of our consciousness. As a theme, it permeates in fiction with a renewed vigour and subtlety, hardly realized ever before. The fiction does no longer simply recount the colonial history in terms of political details. It goes into the very processes of colonialism, its ever-changing subtle forms of hegemonic control. Colonialism emerges as a very discourse of post-colonial culture that shapes and controls identity, the very processes of self-formation at the subterranean level, rather imperceptibly and even surreptitiously.
Before going any further on the discussion of post-colonial culture and its symptoms and implications , let us try to understand what exactly is colonialism. The earliest example of colonialism is the poor Caliban who is colonized by Prospero in the famous The Tempest by Shakespeare. Here prospero is creating a community in the island of Bermudas. The very process of “forming a community in the new land necessarily meant the unforming or re-forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder , negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellions. Such practices produced and were produced through a variety of writings- public and personal records, letters, trade documents, government papers, fiction and...
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