32.15.03 · world-history / colonialism-imperialism

Postcolonial theory: Said's Orientalism, Spivak's subaltern, and Bhabha's hybridity

shipped3 tiersLean: none

Anchor (Master): primary sources: Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961); Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957); Said, Orientalism (1978); Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988) and 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' (1985); Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994); Guha, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency' (1983) and Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983); Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000); secondary: Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001); Loomba (2005); Ahmad, In Theory (1992); Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967); Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929-35)

Intuition Beginner

From the late 1400s to the mid-1900s, European powers colonized most of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. The formal empires ended in the decolonization wave of the 1940s to 1960s, but their cultural and intellectual legacies persisted. Postcolonial theory emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of analyzing those legacies: how colonial ways of seeing the world survived political independence, shaping scholarship, literature, policy, and self-image. The theorists asked a pointed question: if empire is gone as a political fact, why does so much of its thinking remain? Postcolonial theory is the critical study of that remainder.

Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary scholar at Columbia, made the foundational move in Orientalism (1978). He argued that the "Orient" as described in Western scholarship, travel writing, novels, and painting was not a neutral description of real places. It was a construction: a picture built up over centuries in which the East appeared exotic, irrational, feminine, static, and backward, set against a rational, masculine, progressive West. This picture was produced through unequal power, and it did political work, making colonial rule look like a civilizing mission rather than conquest.

Two later thinkers sharpened the analysis. Gayatri Spivak asked "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988): can the most marginalized colonized people, especially women, ever be represented in Western theory, or are they always spoken for by others? Homi Bhabha turned to hybridity, arguing that colonized subjects both imitate colonial culture and twist it, producing a "third space" where colonial authority is never fully stable. The shared thread is that decolonization is not finished when flags change; it continues in the work of seeing how colonial categories still structure what counts as knowledge.

Visual Beginner

The picture shows Orientalism as a one-way production line. On the left sit the actual places and peoples of the Middle East and Asia. In the middle, Western scholars, travellers, novelists, and painters redraw them through a filter labeled "Orientalism": the output on the right is the "Orient" of European imagination, exotic and backward, which then flows back left as the justification for colonial rule. Spivak's blockage is drawn as a wall between the subaltern and the Western theorist who claims to represent her. Bhabha's third space is drawn as a cracked mirror in which the colonized subject reflects colonial authority back, distorted.

The load-bearing feature is the loop: colonial knowledge is not a passive report on the East but a machine that manufactures the East it claims merely to describe, and the manufactured image then licenses the power that produced it.

Worked example Beginner

Walk through Said's most famous reading, the analysis of Gustave Flaubert's Egyptian travel writing in Orientalism (1978).

Step 1. Set the scene. In 1849 to 1851 the French novelist Gustave Flaubert travelled in Egypt and recorded his encounters in letters and notebooks. Among them is an account of the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem, whom Flaubert met in 1850 in upper Egypt. Flaubert wrote about her at length. She left no account of the meeting.

Step 2. See what Flaubert produced. His descriptions fix on the exotic, the erotic, and the timeless. The Egyptian woman appears as a figure of sensuality stripped of interior life, history, or voice. The prose presents itself as observation, as recording what was simply there.

Step 3. Watch the repetition. Later European writers repeated Flaubert's descriptions as canonical knowledge about the Orient and about Egyptian women. A single Frenchman's encounter, written through a tourist's and a colonial power's assumptions, hardened into "what the Orient is like."

Step 4. Read Said's point. The knowledge produced here is not knowledge of Kuchuk Hanem, who is silent in the record. It is knowledge of a Western fantasy projected onto her, authorized by the imbalance of power between a French man who writes and an Egyptian woman who cannot answer back.

What this tells us: Orientalist "knowledge" is manufactured in encounters structured by unequal power, with the colonized subject silenced, and then circulated as fact. The Flaubert and Kuchuk Hanem case is the paradigm.

Check your understanding Beginner

Exercise (easy, multiple choice).

Said's central claim in Orientalism (1978) is that the "Orient" of Western scholarship and literature is:

A. A neutral, accurate description of Middle Eastern and Asian societies B. A Western construction that served and enabled colonial power C. A body of knowledge produced entirely by Middle Eastern scholars D. A purely literary genre with no political consequences

Hint

Said argued that knowledge of the East and power over the East were two sides of one operation, drawing on Michel Foucault's link between knowledge and power.

Answer

B. The "Orient" is, for Said, a construction built up in Western writing over centuries. It is not a neutral report on real places but a picture produced through unequal power, and it did political work by making colonial rule appear to be a civilizing mission rather than conquest.

Formal definition Intermediate+

Postcolonial theory is the critical analysis of the cultural, political, and economic legacies of European colonialism, focused on how colonial ways of producing knowledge about colonized peoples survived formal decolonization. Its load-bearing concepts are the discourse of Orientalism, the subaltern, hybridity, and mimicry.

Definition (Orientalism, after Said 1978). Orientalism names a discourse: a system of statements, institutions, vocabularies, and images by which European culture produced "the Orient" as an object of knowledge and of rule. It operates at three levels at once, the academic study of the East, the imaginative repertory (novels, travel writing, painting) through which the East was figured as exotic and backward, and the institutional link binding this knowledge to colonial administration. Its defining feature is that it produces the object it claims only to describe.

Definition (the subaltern, after Guha and Spivak). The subaltern is the figure rendered outside every institutional voice that could make itself heard in the historical or theoretical record, the peasant, the labourer, and above all the colonized woman, whose agency is spoken for by elites (colonial or indigenous) rather than represented by her. Ranajit Guha introduced the term for the Subaltern Studies project; Spivak sharpened it into the question of whether the subaltern can be represented at all within Western theoretical languages.

Definition (hybridity, mimicry, and the third space, after Bhabha 1994). Hybridity is the formation that results when colonized subjects take up colonial culture without simply reproducing it. Mimicry is the colonized subject's partial, almost-but-not-quite imitation of colonial authority, which destabilizes that authority by producing a likeness that is also a mockery. The third space is the unstable zone of translation and negotiation in which both meaning and cultural authority are made.

Counterexamples to common slips Intermediate+

Conflating "postcolonial" with "after colonialism." The prefix "post" marks a continuing condition, not a finished period. Postcolonial theory studies how colonial structures persist after formal independence, in borders, economies, curricula, and categories of thought. Treating it as the history of a completed era erases its object.
Reading Said as saying "all Western writing about the East is false." Said's claim is about the discourse that produced the Orient as an object, not a blanket verdict that every European text is mendacious. The argument concerns the systematic relation between knowledge and power, not the sincerity of individuals.
Treating "the subaltern" as a synonym for "oppressed people generally." The term has a precise use: those whose voice cannot reach the archive or the academy on its own terms. Applying it loosely to any dominated group loses the force of Spivak's representation problem.
Reading Bhabha's hybridity as harmonious cultural mixing. Bhabha's hybridity is not a comfortable fusion but a tense, destabilizing reproduction-with-a-difference that unsettles colonial authority. "Mestizo cosmopolitanism" readings miss the antagonism.

Key concepts: Said's Orientalism thesis Intermediate+

Thesis (Said, Orientalism, 1978). Orientalism is the corporate institution, an archive of statements, academic chairs, government bureaus, travel genres, and literary conventions, for dealing with the Orient by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it. The Orient so produced is a Western construction whose internal coherence was manufactured, not found, and whose function was to enable and legitimize colonial power.

Argument (the knowledge-and-power reconstruction).

Premise (the archive). There exists in modern European culture a large, internally organized archive of texts, disciplines, and institutions devoted to "the Orient," running from philology and biblical scholarship through government "Orientalist" bureaus to novels and travel books.
Premise (the regularity of the representation). Across this archive and across centuries, the East is figured in a strikingly stable pattern: exotic, sensual, irrational, static, feminine, backward, against a Europe figured as rational, dynamic, masculine, and progressive. The regularity persists across authors who disagree about almost everything else.
Premise (Foucault's link between knowledge and power). A discourse is not a mere aggregate of texts; it is a system that produces its objects. What a culture can say about a thing, and what counts as authoritative knowledge of it, are bound to the institutions that produce, circulate, and act on that knowledge.
Intermediate conclusion. The "Orient" of the archive is not a distorted copy of a prior, independent East; it is an object produced by the discourse. The stability in Premise 2 is evidence of production, not of correspondence, since no real region could remain so static across centuries of upheaval.
Conclusion (the legitimating function). Because the discourse produces its object as backward and childlike, and because knowledge and rule are bound together in the same institutions, the discourse licenses the conclusion that the Orient requires European management. Orientalism is therefore not an accompaniment of empire but one of its conditions of possibility.

Reconstruction. The argument turns on the move from regularity to production. A representation that stable, across so many independent voices, cannot be tracking an independent object that itself never changes; the invariance lives on the representing side. Once the Orient is understood as produced rather than reported, the link to colonial administration becomes structural rather than accidental: the same institutions generated the knowledge and exercised the rule. The Flaubert and Kuchuk Hanem case instantiates the general mechanism at the level of a single text.

Bridge. The Saidian thesis builds toward 32.23.01 decolonization by reframing political independence as incomplete until the colonial categories of thought are also dismantled, and appears again in 30.10.02 feminist theory and intersectionality as the load-bearing analysis of how the colonized woman is doubly misrepresented, by colonial discourse and by metropolitan feminism that presumes to speak for her. The foundational reason the thesis works is that a discourse produces its object, so changing the political arrangement alone cannot dissolve the object it made; this is exactly the structure that identifies Orientalism with an active apparatus rather than a passive vocabulary, and the bridge is from the literary archive to the machinery of empire. The pattern generalises from the Orient to every region Europe administered, and recurs in the Subaltern Studies reading of the Indian peasant archive, where the same production-and-rule mechanism structures the colonial record of rural insurgency.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 3 (medium, multiple choice).

Bhabha's concept of mimicry holds that the colonized subject who imitates colonial culture:

A. Becomes fully identical to the colonizer and is accepted as equal B. Produces a partial, "almost the same but not quite" likeness that destabilizes colonial authority C. Abandons indigenous culture entirely and thus reinforces colonial rule D. Is irrelevant to the stability of colonial power

Hint

For Bhabha the value of mimicry lies in the gap between copy and original, which makes authority look arbitrary.

Answer

B. Mimicry, in Bhabha's formulation (The Location of Culture, 1994), produces a subject who is "almost the same but not quite." The partialness of the resemblance exposes the arbitrariness of the colonial standard it imitates, turning imitation into a quiet form of subversion. The gap is where the instability of authority is generated.

Exercise 4 (medium, short answer).

In three or four sentences, explain why Spivak concludes that "the subaltern cannot speak," distinguishing "representation as speaking for" from "representation as re-presenting."

Hint

Spivak separates two senses of "represent," the political proxy (vertreten) and the artistic or theoretical depiction (darstellen). Her worry is that the second silently substitutes for the first.

Answer

Spivak separates vertreten, representation as a political proxy ("speaking for" someone in their absence), from darstellen, representation as depiction or signification ("re-presenting" someone in theory). Her argument is that the Subaltern Studies historian and the Western theorist who would let the subaltern speak are still operating in darstellen, and that this depiction silently installs itself as vertreten, a proxy voice. The subaltern as such, the figure with no institutional access to the record, is then produced by these very acts of representation and cannot be recovered behind them. Hence the subaltern as such cannot speak within the available theoretical languages; she can only be spoken for.

Exercise 5 (medium, multiple choice).

The Subaltern Studies Group (Guha, Spivak, Chakrabarty) is best described as:

A. A French poststructuralist school focused on language B. An Indian historiographical project that rewrote colonial history "from below," centering peasant agency C. A British colonial administrative bureau D. A literary movement of expatriate novelists

Hint

The group took its name from Gramsci's term for subordinated groups lacking autonomous political voice and applied it to the South Asian colonial archive.

Answer

B. The Subaltern Studies Group, formed around Ranajit Guha in the early 1980s (with Spivak and later Dipesh Chakrabarty), re-read the colonial archive of Indian peasant insurgency to recover the agency that elite, both colonial and nationalist, historiography had erased. Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) and "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" (1983) are the programmatic texts.

Exercise 6 (medium, multiple choice).

Fanon's analysis in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) of decolonization violence holds that:

A. Violence is unnecessary and always counterproductive B. Violence purges the colonized subject's internalized inferiority and forcibly dissolves the colonial world C. Violence is purely a tactic with no psychological dimension D. Violence should be avoided in favor of negotiation with the metropole

Hint

For Fanon the colonial world is a Manichaean one of compartments, and decolonization replaces it by force; violence also has a therapeutic function.

Answer

B. Fanon argued that the colonial world is a compartmentalized Manichaean order sustained by force, and that decolonization therefore necessarily replaces it by force. He further held, in the chapter on violence, that this violence has a cathartic function: it releases the colonized from the muscular and psychic tension imposed by colonial domination and reconstitutes them as historical agents. The claim is normative and contested, and is distinct from a merely tactical defence of armed struggle.

Exercise 7 (hard, short answer).

Aijaz Ahmad's critique (In Theory, 1992) charges that Said's Orientalism totalizes the West into a single, transhistorical "Orientalism." In four or five sentences, state the critique and Said's strongest available reply.

Hint

Ahmad worries that if Orientalism is one monolithic discourse, then there is no internal opposition and no historical change within the West, which flattens both the archive and the politics. The reply turns on distinguishing the discourse's regularity from uniform agreement.

Answer

Ahmad's charge is that by treating Orientalism as a single discourse spanning from Aeschylus to modern philology, Said flattens real ideological conflicts within Europe, erases the anti-colonial and radical currents inside the West, and risks making the West an undifferentiated enemy, a move Ahmad reads as complicit with a nationalist essentialism. The strongest reply concedes that Said's rhetoric sometimes overstates the unity but insists the claim is about the regularity of the representation, the stable pattern across authors who differ otherwise, not about uniform agreement. On this reading individual dissidents do not refute the discourse, because a discourse is precisely what persists across disagreement; the contestation Ahmad demands is visible at the level of counter-hegemonic traditions that the discourse contains but does not fully determine. The exchange is a live dispute over how totalizing a discursive formation can coherently be.

Exercise 8 (hard, multiple choice).

Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) extends the postcolonial critique to the discipline of history itself by arguing that:

A. European history is empirically superior and should be copied everywhere B. The categories of European historicism are themselves a colonial inheritance that structures, and distorts, the writing of non-European pasts C. History as a discipline should be replaced by anthropology D. The subaltern can be fully recovered by better archival method

Hint

"Provincializing" Europe means demoting its historical categories from universal to local, while acknowledging their inescapability.

Answer

B. Chakrabarty argues that the discipline of history, with its categories of historical time, progress, and the modern, is a European inheritance that postcolonial historians cannot simply discard but also cannot use neutrally. Historicism's staging of Europe as universal and the rest as belated reproduces colonial temporality inside scholarship itself. Provincializing Europe is the project of writing non-European pasts through these categories while exposing their limits, an asymptotic task, since the subaltern past cannot be fully captured in them.

Advanced results Master

Result 1 (Orientalism as a discourse, Said 1978). Said's load-bearing result is the identification of Orientalism as a discourse in Foucault's sense: a regular, institutionally backed system of statements that produces "the Orient" as its object. The consequence is that Orientalist texts cannot be corrected one by one, because the object they distort is itself the discourse's product. The critique therefore targets the apparatus, not individual bad descriptions.

Result 2 (the subaltern and the impossibility of transparent representation, Spivak 1988). Spivak's result separates vertreten (political proxy) from darstellen (depiction) and shows that the scholarly attempt to recover the subaltern's voice operates in darstellen while pretending to vertreten. Through the case of bhuvaneswari bhaduri, a young Bengali woman who took her own life in 1926 during the independence struggle and whose act was overwritten by subsequent male-nationalist accounts as a concealed pregnancy, Spivak demonstrates that even suicide, the extremal speech-act, is rewritten by the dominant record. The subaltern as such is produced, not recovered, by these representations.

Result 3 (hybridity, mimicry, and the third space, Bhabha 1994). Bhabha's result is that colonial authority is structurally unstable, because its reproduction in the colonized subject is necessarily partial. Mimicry yields a subject who is "almost the same but not quite," and the gap is the site at which authority is deranged. Hybridity names the formation that results; the third space is the zone of translation in which meaning and cultural identity are negotiated. The political consequence is that colonial power is never securely installed; it is continually re-performed and therefore continually contestable.

Result 4 (the psychopathology of colonization, Fanon 1952, 1961). Fanon's result, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), is that colonization installs itself in the psyche: the colonized internalizes the colonizer's gaze and is constituted as inferior at the level of the body. Decolonization is therefore not only a change of government but a psychic reconstitution. On the question of violence Fanon advanced a normative thesis, that decolonizing violence is cathartic and world-dissolving, which remains one of the most contested claims in the field and must be presented as Fanon's position, not as settled doctrine.

Result 5 (Subaltern Studies: historiography from below, Guha 1983). The Subaltern Studies result is methodological: the colonial archive is not a neutral record of peasant life but a document of counter-insurgency, organized so that elite voice, colonial or nationalist, is legible and peasant agency is not. Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) and "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency" (1983) read the archive against its grain to recover the political consciousness colonial record-keeping was designed to obscure. The method generalizes to any archive produced under asymmetric power.

Result 6 (the field's internal contestations, Ahmad 1992; Bhabha vs. Spivak). The field is internally contested. Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (1992) charges that Said's totalizing "Orientalism" flattens class and internal European opposition and risks an essentialized West. Bhabha and Spivak diverge on agency: Bhabha's hybridity locates subversion in the instability of colonial discourse itself, whereas Spivak insists on the harder limit that some subjects are not recoverable at all within available theoretical languages. These are live disputes, and a responsible account marks them as such rather than resolving them.

Synthesis. The postcolonial formation builds toward 32.23.01 decolonization by treating political independence as the start, not the end, of the analytical work, and appears again in 30.10.02 feminist theory and intersectionality as the account of how the colonized woman is constituted at the crossing of colonial and patriarchal representation. The foundational reason the four thinkers cohere despite their disagreements is that each refuses the distinction between knowledge of the colonized and power over the colonized: this is exactly the move that identifies Orientalism, the subaltern's silencing, colonial mimicry, and the insurgent archive as four sites of one apparatus, and the central insight is that the apparatus produces the objects it acts upon. Putting these together, the pattern generalises from Said's literary archive to Guha's peasant record to Fanon's clinic to Bhabha's colonial enunciation, and the bridge is from the claim "empire is over" to the harder question of which colonial categories still organize what can be thought. The pattern recurs wherever a knowledge-system under asymmetric power presents itself as neutral description, and the field's internal contestations, Ahmad's, Spivak's against Bhabha's, Chakrabarty's against historicism, are the standing proof that the critique is applied to itself and not spared.

Full proof set Master

Proposition (Said's discourse thesis, reconstructed). The "Orient" of modern European Orientalism is an object produced by a discourse, not a distorted copy of an independent East; the production is bound, through shared institutions, to the exercise of colonial power.

Reconstruction. (i) There is a stable, centuries-long pattern in the European figuration of the East as exotic, static, feminine, and backward, visible across authors who disagree about other matters; such invariance cannot track an independent object that itself changes, so it lives on the representing side. (ii) The representing side is institutionally organized, in philology, government bureaus, and literary genres, so it meets Foucault's criterion for a discourse: a system that produces its objects. (iii) The same institutions generate the knowledge and administer the rule, so the production of the Orient and the rule over it are phases of one operation. (iv) Therefore the "Orient" is manufactured by the discourse, and the manufacture is a condition of possibility for colonial power rather than its decoration. $□$

Proposition (Spivak's representation limit, reconstructed). The subaltern as such cannot speak within the available theoretical languages, because every attempt to represent her voice operates by depiction (darstellen) that installs itself as proxy (vertreten) and thereby produces, rather than recovers, its object.

Reconstruction. (i) The two senses of representation, vertreten as proxy and darstellen as depiction, are conflated in ordinary scholarly practice, so that a depiction is treated as if it restored a voice. (ii) The subaltern is defined precisely by having no institutional access to the record, so her voice is absent from every archive the scholar can read. (iii) What the scholar reconstructs is therefore a depiction, which, because it is taken to stand for the absent voice, functions as a proxy and substitutes a further representation for the voice it claims to recover. (iv) The bhuvaneswari bhaduri case shows this even at the extremal speech-act of suicide, which the dominant record rewrites; the limit holds a fortiori for ordinary cases. (v) Hence the subaltern as such is not recoverable behind the representations that produce her, and the honest conclusion is that she cannot speak here. $□$

Connections Master

Colonialism and imperialism: colonizer and colonized 32.15.01. This unit takes the survey of European colonialism as its empirical substrate. The Saidian thesis reframes the colonizer/colonized relation already mapped there by showing that the ideological apparatus, the "civilizing mission," was not a post-hoc excuse but a knowledge-system that produced the colonized as an object of rule in advance of the act.
Decolonization: India, Algeria, Vietnam, Congo 32.23.01. The political decolonization chronicled there is the precondition postcolonial theory interrogates. Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and the Subaltern Studies historians argue that flag-changes leave the colonial categories intact; the present unit supplies the theoretical machinery for reading the post-independence persistence of those categories that the decolonization unit can only register as aftermath.
Atlantic slave trade: African, European, and American perspectives 32.16.01. The multi-perspectival method of that unit, restoring African and diasporic agency against a European archive, is the empirical sibling of the Subaltern Studies method formalized here. Both turn on reading an archive produced under asymmetric power against its grain; Guha's "Prose of Counter-Insurgency" generalizes the move that the slave-trade unit applies case by case.
Feminist theory: intersectionality and performativity 30.10.02. Spivak's critique is load-bearing for intersectional feminism: the figure of the colonized woman is constituted at the intersection of colonial and patriarchal representation, and metropolitan feminism's claim to speak for her repeats the proxy-substitution Spivak names. The present unit supplies the postcolonial half of the intersection; 30.10.02 supplies the gender-performativity half.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1950) ^{[Cesaire1950]} and Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) ^[Memmi1957] established the precursor charge that colonialism worked on the colonizer's psyche as much as on the colonized's, and Cesaire's thesis that colonization "decivilizes" the colonizer framed the moral inversion the later theorists inherit. Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist working in French Algeria, developed the psychopathology of colonization in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the politics of decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) ^[Fanon1961], the latter written during the Algerian war of independence and published the year of his death. Fanon is the bridge between the anticolonial generation and the academic postcolonial theory of the 1970s and 1980s.

Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) ^[Said1978] is conventionally treated as the founding text of postcolonial theory as an institutional field; it fused Foucault's account of discourse with close literary reading of the European Orientalist archive. Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) ^[Spivak1988], building on her earlier "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" (1985), brought deconstruction (Derrida), Marxism, and feminism to bear on the Subaltern Studies project Ranajit Guha had founded at the start of the decade. Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) ^[Bhabha1994] collected the essays, written across the 1980s and early 1990s, that reformulated the field around hybridity, mimicry, and the third space; Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) extended the critique to the discipline of history itself.

Bibliography Master

@book{Said1978,
  author = {Said, E. W.},
  title = {Orientalism},
  publisher = {Pantheon Books},
  address = {New York},
  year = {1978},
}

@incollection{Spivak1988,
  author = {Spivak, G. C.},
  title = {Can the Subaltern Speak?},
  booktitle = {Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture},
  editor = {Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L.},
  publisher = {University of Illinois Press},
  address = {Urbana},
  year = {1988},
  pages = {271--313},
}

@book{Bhabha1994,
  author = {Bhabha, H. K.},
  title = {The Location of Culture},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  address = {London},
  year = {1994},
}

@book{Fanon1961,
  author = {Fanon, F.},
  title = {Les Damn\'es de la terre},
  publisher = {Maspero},
  address = {Paris},
  year = {1961},
  note = {Eng. trans. \emph{The Wretched of the Earth}, Grove Press, 1963},
}

@book{Fanon1952,
  author = {Fanon, F.},
  title = {Peau noire, masques blancs},
  publisher = {Editions du Seuil},
  address = {Paris},
  year = {1952},
  note = {Eng. trans. \emph{Black Skin, White Masks}, Grove Press, 1967},
}

@book{Cesaire1950,
  author = {C\'esaire, A.},
  title = {Discours sur le colonialisme},
  publisher = {Editions R\'eclame},
  address = {Paris},
  year = {1950},
  note = {Eng. trans. \emph{Discourse on Colonialism}, Monthly Review Press, 2000},
}

@book{Memmi1957,
  author = {Memmi, A.},
  title = {Portrait du colonis\'e, pr\'ec\'ed\'e du portrait du colonisateur},
  publisher = {Buchet/Chastel},
  address = {Paris},
  year = {1957},
  note = {Eng. trans. \emph{The Colonizer and the Colonized}, Beacon Press, 1965},
}

@book{Guha1983,
  author = {Guha, R.},
  title = {Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  address = {Delhi},
  year = {1983},
}

@book{Chakrabarty2000,
  author = {Chakrabarty, D.},
  title = {Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference},
  publisher = {Princeton University Press},
  address = {Princeton},
  year = {2000},
}

@book{Ahmad1992,
  author = {Ahmad, A.},
  title = {In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures},
  publisher = {Verso},
  address = {London},
  year = {1992},
}

@book{Young2001,
  author = {Young, R. J. C.},
  title = {Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction},
  publisher = {Blackwell},
  address = {Oxford},
  year = {2001},
}

@book{Loomba2005,
  author = {Loomba, A.},
  title = {Colonialism/Postcolonialism},
  edition = {2nd},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  address = {London},
  year = {2005},
}

Prerequisites

32.15.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005) Ch. 1; Said, Orientalism (1978), Introduction; accessible overviews of the field
intermediate: Said, Orientalism (1978); Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988); Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994), Chs. 1-4; Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2005)
master: primary sources: Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950); Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961); Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957); Said, Orientalism (1978); Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988) and 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' (1985); Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994); Guha, 'The Prose of Counter-Insurgency' (1983) and Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983); Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000); secondary: Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001); Loomba (2005); Ahmad, In Theory (1992); Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969); Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967); Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929-35)

References

Said, E. W. — Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978) · Introduction and Chs. 1-3; the foundational statement of Orientalism as a discourse
Spivak, G. C. — 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Nelson/Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) · pp. 271-313; the subaltern-representation argument and the bhuvaneswari bhaduri case
Bhabha, H. K. — The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994) · Chs. 1, 2, 9; mimicry, hybridity, and the third space
Fanon, F. — The Wretched of the Earth (1961, Eng. trans. Grove 1963) · Chs. 1-2; colonizer/colonized psychopathology and decolonization violence
Cesaire, A. — Discourse on Colonialism (1950, Eng. trans. Monthly Review Press 2000) · full text; the precursor charge that colonialism barbarised Europe
Memmi, A. — The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957, Eng. trans. 1965) · portrait galleries of colonizer and colonized and the 'good colonizer' impasse
Loomba, A. — Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2005) · Chs. 1-3; the canonical modern survey
Young, R. J. C. — Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001) · historical framing of the field and the Subaltern Studies lineage

Estimated time

beginner: 25m
intermediate: 50m
master: 85m