Introduction to postcolonial studies (1)

13 Fevereiro 2017, 10:00 • Ângela Fernandes

Trying to answer the question: "What is postcolonial literature", we discussed Edward Said's final remarks in his seminal work, "Culture and Imperialism": "No one today is purely one thing". Then we tackled Salman Rushdie's essay "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist" and reflected on his ideas, namely that we must discuss literature in terms of its real groupings, which may also be international groupings, based on imaginative affinities; and that we must remember that the English (and the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese ...) language ceased to be the sole possession of the English (French, Spanish, Portuguese...) people some time ago.Then, we talked about the term "postcolonial" and what we mean by colonialism and imperialism. Lastly, we talked about postcoloniality as a process of decolonization of the mind (Ngugi wa Thiongo)