ABSTRACT
If you’ve read the preceding five chapters, you’ve seen some of the ways in which concepts from psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, LGBTQ, and African American theories focus our attention on different aspects of human experience. Specifically, you’ve seen some of the ways in which our relationship to ourselves and our world is formed by our psychological wounds, by the socioeconomic class into which we were born and to which we now belong, by the capitalist system within which we were raised, by traditional gender roles, by our sexual orientation, and by our race. As we’ll see, postcolonial theory gives us tools to explore how all of these factors-as well as ethnicity, religion, and other cultural factors that influence human experience-work together in creating the ways in which we view ourselves and our world. Thus, concepts from postcolonial theory can help us understand human experience as a combination of complex cultural forces operating in each of us. Postcolonial theory developed the concepts we’ll study in this chapter
because, as its name implies, this theory emerged in an attempt to understand people from different cultures in terms of an important experience they all had in common: colonial domination by a superior European military force. Europe’s invasions of non-European peoples began at the end of the fifteenth century with the military competition among England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands to find new sources of wealth around the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century, England had the largest colonial empire, which covered a quarter of the earth’s surface and included India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland, as well as significant holdings in Africa, the West Indies, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Probably the most damaging effects of colonial domination were experienced by non-white populations, whose own cultures were completely or almost completely destroyed as British government officials and British settlers imposed their own language, religion, government, education, codes of behavior, and definitions of intelligence and beauty on the conquered peoples.
