Literature
Colonial Era
The Colonial Era refers to the period of time when European powers established colonies in various parts of the world, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This era was marked by the exploitation of resources and people, as well as the imposition of European culture and values on colonized societies. Literature from this era often reflects the perspectives and experiences of both colonizers and colonized peoples.
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3 Key excerpts on "Colonial Era"
eBook - PDF- Julie Mullaney(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
PART ONE CONTEXTS This page intentionally left blank 3 CHAPTER ONE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES AND POSTCOLONIALISM Postcolonial literatures encompass that complex and various body of writing produced by individuals, communities and nations with distinct histories of colonialism and which diversely treats its origins, impacts and effects in the past and the present. While there is much confusion about the relationship between the term ‘colonialism’ and the related term, ‘imperialism’, it is perhaps useful to pause and briefly distinguish them. Colonialism refers to the practice of plant-ing and securing colonies, initially for capital and commercial gain as in the operations of the British East India Company in the eighteenth century, then later as a means of consolidating and expanding the realm of (national) power or sphere of influence. Even the meaning of ‘colony’ has shifted in time. Initially, it was taken to refer to distinct kinds of farming settlement or plantation, often, but not always in distant locations (Ulster, Nova Scotia, New South Wales), but increasingly it came to refer, with the rise of the European empires in the nineteenth century, to those areas subject to systems of rule or control by the European powers (Howe 2002). Colonialism isn’t just or only a European phenomenon but it is a term that is commonly tied to European and North American expressions of ‘Imperialism’, often defined as the attitudes, structures, philosophies or processes that facilitate the practice of colonialism. Imperialism takes many forms and it is important to remain attentive to how both imperialism and colonialism are variously reconstituted today. Postcolonial literatures are also often variously termed the ‘new literatures (in English)’ which accentuates the recentness of their histories, or ‘world literatures’ which defines their ‘global’ nature and
- Susan Castillo, Ivy Schweitzer, Susan Castillo, Ivy Schweitzer(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
As Michael Crang (1989: 44) notes, ‘‘Geography and literature are both writings about places and spaces. They are both processes of signification, that is, processes of making places meaningful in a social medium.’’ In the remaining sections of this essay, I would like to illustrate this point by taking as an example the literature of Sauer’s region of expertise: vice-regal New Spain. Landscapes of Power in Vice-Regal New Spain In order to understand the geographically distinct evolution of colonial literary genres in the multiple cultural regions of the colonial Americas, it is necessary to place colonial texts not only in a comparative hemispheric geographical context but also in the transatlantic geographic context of their respective imperial realms. In other words, it is necessary to investigate the environmental, economic, social, and ideo-logical dynamics that produce the ‘‘colonial location’’ of a given text within the cultural geography of empire. As literary historians of colonial Spanish America have recognized, colonial narrative originates with the Spanish chronicles of the Discovery and Conquest, such as Corte ´s Cartas de Relacio ´n and Lo ´pez de Go ´mara’s Historia de la Conquista . These histories were profoundly informed by the experience and ideology of the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors, in which the Christian knights were rewarded for their military services and loyalty with feudal estates in Al-andalus, the former Moorish province that held out until the final fall of Granada in 1492. The conquerors of America during the early sixteenth century, though often of humble background, understood their quests in similar terms and were initially rewarded by the monarch with neo-feudal grants of Native tribute labor, called encomienda .
eBook - PDFEuropean Local-Color Literature
National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champetres
- Josephine Donovan(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
1 CHAPTER 1 Local-Color Literature and the Colonizations of Modernity Local-color literature is a literary movement that flourished in most Western countries in the nineteenth century. It emerged first in Ireland — then a British colony — in the early 1800s as a colonial literature, with Maria Edgeworth’s short novel Castle Rackrent (1800) acknowledged as the founding work in the genre. Like other colonial and postcolonial literature, local-color literature “emerged . . . out of the experience of colonization and asserted [itself] by foregrounding the tension with the colonial power, and emphasizing . . . differences from the assumptions of the imperial cen-tre” (Ashcroft et al. 2). More often than not, colonization of non-Western countries by Western powers entailed — indeed was ideologically justified by — the imposition of modernity upon colonized natives (the “white man’s burden”). Most of the native cultures seized and colonized by the imperial Western powers were premodern oral cultures deemed by the colonizers as inferior to Western modes of modernity. Similarly, in the construction of modern nation-states, regions within states were culturally colonized; that is, held up as inferior to externally imposed cultural standards of modernity, to which regional natives were urged instead to conform. With the imperial power representing and enforcing modernity, the indigenous author, writing from the standpoint of the colonized, Edward Said notes, often expressed a “negative apprehension . . . of ‘civilized’ modernity,” celebrating instead premodern traditions (“Yeats” 81). Such was the case with regionalist writers within states or empires, the local-colorists; schooled in the perspectives of modernity by virtue of education or class background, they were also knowledgeable about native local culture, which as a rule they affirmed in opposition to modernity.
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