Postcolonial Criticism

Post-colonial criticism is an attempt to
reveal the story of oppressed people from their own point of view by correcting or critiquing
the perspective of the powerful. It is often called the view from below. For centuries, the
story of colonialism was told almost entirely from the perspective of the victorious colonizing
culture. Thus, Shakespeare's Caliban is depicted as a monster, a brute, and a savage because he
looks different, dares to desire a European woman, and resents obeying his new overlord. But if
we look at the story from his point of view, he generously came to the aid of helpless
shipwrecked people who would have died without him, only to have them use what he taught them to
enslave him, treat him with disdain, and steal his land. Likewise, Kipling's concept of the
colonized person as the "white man's burden" is a particularly notorious example of a
white colonizer, in this case England, brutally invading and subjecting a land and then casting
themselves as sacrificial heroes for imposing their will upon people who would love nothing
better than for them to go away. Because the narrative of the powerful is often blind to how
life looks and feels to the powerless, it has been important to critique how the literature of a
dominant group depicts the people below it.