postcolonial literature

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a body of literary works produced by writers from societies that experienced European colonialism, and a field of critical inquiry examining how colonial power, resistance, cultural hybridity, and the legacies of empire shape literary production and reception; postcolonial literature encompasses writing from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East, as well as by diasporic writers in former colonial metropoles, and addresses themes including language choice — whether to write in the coloniser's language or an indigenous tongue — the representation of colonial and anti-colonial violence, the construction of national identity, and the recovery of suppressed cultural traditions; key theorists including Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have provided frameworks — including Orientalism, hybridity, mimicry, and the subaltern — that have shaped both the production and the critical reading of postcolonial texts