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15ABOUT POSTCOLONIALISM-AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE
Nigora Shukhratovna Yahyokulova
Assistant of the Department of Uzbek Language, literature and foreign languages Samarkand Institute of Veterinary Medicine
ABSTRACT
The emergence of an anti-colonial African literature that unfolds especially after the years of independence fits into a postcolonial context. This first-generation literature aims to be the discursive answer to colonial representation in the mode of romantic fiction or travelogues. While cultural revaluation is part of its aesthetic project, it also attacks the stereotypes spread by Western hegemonic discourse expressed in non-fiction. But it claims, beyond a simple attempt to repair an image of African otherness deemed distorted, the right of citizenship for African cultures within a hybrid postcolonial space, where a diversity of 'alterities, in an attempt to transcend the reprehensible sides of colonization.
Key words: cultural revaluation, African culture, postcolonial period, post-independence period, colonial phenomen, postcolonial theorie.
INTRODUCTION
Depending on whether the emphasis is on one or another aspect of postcolonial issues, the definition of the concept may vary. For some, postcolonialism covers the postcolonial period chronologically while for others it also covers the entire colonial period. When the focus is on the post-independence period and on issues inherited from colonization (linguistic, identity, economic or political issues), Robinson (1997) suggests the term Post-independent studies. When the object of study is colonization as a geopolitical phenomenon on a global scale (a comparative study of different colonial situations), Robinson will speak of Post-European colonization studies. When the emphasis is rather on the tensions that characterize the relations between the former metropolises and the newly independent countries (new forms of domination, neocolonialism), Robinson prefers the term Power-relations studies.
Some scholars believe that there are several postcolonialisms. This is the case of Mishra and Hodge, who give the following definitions:
METHODOLOGY
We would want to distinguish sharply between two kinds of postcolonialism viewed as ideological orientations rather than a historical stage: the first, and more readily recognizable, is what we call oppositional postcolonialism, which is found in its most overt form in post-independant colonies at a historical phase of post-colonialism
(with a hyphen). [...] The second form, equally a product of the processes that constituted colonialism but with a different inflection, is a 'complicit postcolonialism' which has much in common with Lyotard's unhyphenated postmodernism: an always present 'underside' within colonization itself [1994: 284].
The first definition (with a hyphen) seems to apply to postcolonialism from the point of view of the colonized, while the second seems to apply to postcolonialism from the point of view of the colonizer.
Here is another definition proposed by Stephen Slemon which emphasizes the analytical aspect rather than the temporal aspect of the concept:
Definitions of post-colonial, of course, vary widely, but for me, the concept proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with the post-independent historical period in once colonized nations, but rather when it locates a specifically anti-or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment when the colonizing power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occluded tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relation [2,p.31]
While each of these definitions corresponds to a very specific postcolonial situation, the common denominator to all of them is first of all the relationship with the colonial phenomenon, and then its relationship to the various problems arising from colonization, whether at the national level or international. These multiple definitions underline the complexity of the notion of postcolonialism which can be seen as a generic term whose subsets would be colonial history, neo-colonialism and all the paradoxes of post-colonialism.
It was especially in the second half of the twentieth century that anti-colonial literary productions developed, which became the subject of so-called postcolonial studies. At the origin of postcolonial research, there is the colonial discourse on the one hand, and on the other its counterpart, the anti-colonial discourse as it is expressed in the literature from former colonies or from territories still under Western tutelage.
If postcolonial criticism has mainly been articulated around the 1950s, the voices of its precursors have been heard for a long time. After a few isolated texts dating from previous centuries (18th and 19th centuries), the first wave of theoretical texts denouncing colonialism appeared in the context of the struggles for decolonization. The reflections of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Albert Memmi on the phenomenon colonial will inspire postcolonial theorists such as Said, Spivak, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin or Homi Bhabha, to mention just a few names.
The ideas on which postcolonial theories were to feed first originated within colonized peoples and therefore during colonization. The long-prepared demand for independence only erupted in the 1950s at the end of a long development, one of the crucial moments of which we believe can be located in 1921, the year when Réné
Maran won the Goncourt prize with Batouala, veritable roman nègre, which firmly questions the dehumanizing practices of the "civilizing and colonial mission", even if it does not seem to oppose colonization as such.
DISCUSSION
We can also say that the voices that galvanized liberation movements in many countries, preceded postcolonial theories as such. That said, Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Amilcar Cabral or Steve Biko will have marked in their own way the criticism of colonial and anti-colonial discourse.
In the literary field, postcolonialism can be summed up by these words of Walder: I would say that the basic claim implied by the use of post-colonial in relation to literature is twofold: on the one hand it carries with it the intention to promote, even celebrate the 'new literatures' which have emerged [over this century] from the former colonial territories; and on the other it asserts the need to analyse and resist continuing colonial attitudes [4,p.284]. The history of the notion of postcolonialism shows an evolution. Criticism starts, in the middle of the previous century, from a postcolonial vision often considered Manichean based on the dichotomy between colonial space and the metropolis, and leads, at the dawn of the present century, to a ground of negotiation, to which resistance paved the way.
RESULTS
The postcolonial discourse articulated around the critique of colonialism which is precisely its object. This discourse that can be characterized as decolonizing is also that of postcolonial studies, in which all the literature produced by writers who have had some colonial experience participates. Colonial discourse is rooted in the history of Western thought and in its evolutionary conception of humanity. The idea of progress and civilization as a universal notion will have inspired, even accredited this type of discourse and, consequently, the "civilizing mission" that it underlies.
Colonial discourse proceeds precisely by interpellation. The discursive construction of the colonial subject takes place through mechanisms of subjugation and questioning. Discursive hegemony produces an image of the colonial subject by which he is challenged as such. Once the image is internalized, the colonial subject ends up identifying with it.
The discovery of the world, thus pushing communities to think about their relationships, has led to the theorization of the superiority of certain communities over others. Linguistics, like colonial theology and anthropology, were brought to bear.The study of languages projects a certain vision of linguistic groups and their relationships which will serve as legitimacy for the colonial enterprise [1,p.51].
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From its very beginnings, which coincided with the Renaissance, the role of linguistics in the phenomenon of imperialist expansion is all the more significant as it explains the hierarchy that prevails in the current linguistic landscape of many of the countries resulting from colonization. . Calvet dates back to the Renaissance to make the link between linguistics and the systematic pejoration of so-called exotic languages. The contribution of literature to the dissemination of (post) colonial ideology is immense. In the literary field, colonial discourse is essentially the result of romantic fiction (travelogue and adventure literature). This multifaceted production addresses issues such as exoticism, racial or cultural conflicts or certain aspects of colonization. Many of these works have a political dimension. Popular adventure literature is one of the sources of the colonial imagination and of what is said today about Africa in social discourse. The (post) colonial discourse appears, in short, as the discourse on African otherness from a Western perspective. Prior to colonization, it is in turn the result of accounts by explorers, missionaries, travelers, anthropologists and colonial administrators.
CONCLUSION
Thematically, African literature has a number of characteristics. Generally speaking, the first literary productions put colonization on trial. This literature is revolt, nostalgia for the past, back to basics, but also going beyond this past in the sense that, in addition to the concerns of a scorned history, problems directly linked to the situation of African countries after independence (conflicts generation, modernism vs tradition, the feminist question, the colonial city, the rural exodus, neo-colonialism, etc.). In short, Francophone and Anglophone African literature shares similarities with postcolonial literature, given that it addresses issues directly related to the colonial past, on the one hand, and that it seeks, on the other hand, to go beyond the ideologies that generated it. The thematic diversity of African literature, including that of the three works in the corpus to be studied, reflects, beyond the process of colonization, a serious critique of African societies. Criticism of postcolonial African society goes beyond the Black / White or colonizer / colonized dichotomy; the concerns of African literature being, among other things, the questioning of aspects of African cultures which have stumbled with the cultural changes engendered by the colonial fact, and the paradoxes of a society in the grip of a form of neo- colonialism where the reins of power are in the hands of an African elite, even if the latter generally remains under the influence of the former colonial powers. The fact remains that the balance of power is no longer reduced solely to a relationship of domination between the colonizer and the colonized, but also between the new African ruling classes and their peoples.
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ISSN: 2181-1601
And in general, the new generations of African writers are increasingly abandoning colonial questions in favor of specific themes, even if these are often inseparable from those of their first generation predecessors.
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2. Slemon, S. (1990) 'Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World', World Literature Written in English (30) 2: 30-41pp.
3. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, What Was Postcolonialism? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 284p.
4. Walder D. Post-Colonial Literatures in English Wiley-Blackwell 18 avril 1998, 248 p
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