Postcolonial
literature, which includes literary criticism, is any literature that depicts or interprets
colonialism and imperialism from the point of view of the colonized. It is also characterized as
the view-from-below or the subaltern view.
For too long, many contend, the
story of colonized, displaced, or oppressed peoples was told from the point of view of the
conqueror. Notorious examples are Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden,"
which praises white colonizers for all they put up with trying to "civilize"
ungrateful "savages" and the genre of "happy plantation" literature,
including Gone with the Wind, that portrays black people as contented and
joyful in slavery.
Post-colonial literature tells a far different story. Most
often, it is written by a member of a colonized or subaltern group. Writers with knowledge of
what it is like to be colonized or oppressed, such as Chinua Achebe, or, in the non- world,
Franz Fanon or Edward Said, often can give an authentic and corrective view of what that
experience feels like and how it has been misconstrued by the ruling classes.
Post-colonial critics take the perspective of the oppressed and colonized in works of
literature. Many critics, for example, have come to the defense of Shakespeare's Caliban in
The Tempest, who teaches Prospero how to survive and then is enslaved by
him and called a monster.
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