Blog #6

The topic given to my group is Postcolonialism. we found the most useful information from our book "Literary Criticism" by Charles E. Bressler. The piece that we looked at went over the historical development of postcolonialsism, the assumptions, and the methedology.
For the history it tells us how the Western europeans were the colonizers and a lot of African and asian countries were the colonized. In the nineteenth century Great Britain was shown to be the largest colonizer of them all controlling almost a quarter of the world's land mass. It was then thought that British people and even Western Europeans were much superior to everyone else and would take over the world as the people with all the power. 
For the assumptions it tells us that all postcolonialist critics believe:

• European colonialism did occur.
• The British Empire was at the center of this colonialism.
• The conquerers not only dominated the physical land but also the hegemony or ideology of the colonized peoples.
• The social, political and economic effects of such colonization are still being felt today

It goes on to say that it's believed that the people developing postcolonial theories and practicing the approaches to textual analysis are from a heterogenous group. However there are many critics from different kinds of backgrounds; some did come from European or American culture, some were born and raised in non western cultures but now live and work in the west, and others who still live and work in subaltern cultures.
In methodology we learn that there are two main approaches to use for textual analysis and they are postcolonial criticism and postcolonial theory. 
Also there are three significant questions you can ask when analyzing a postcolonial text and they are:

1. Who am I?
2. How do I develop into the person i am?
3. To what country/countries or to what cultures am i forever linked to?

Its said that colonialism is not just a thing in the past but that it very much exists today, just in more subtle ways.