Postcolonialism | Meaning

Fanon described a catastrophic process of alienation. The colonized person is taught to see themselves through the colonizer’s eyes—as violent, lazy, and inferior. They are told that to be civilized is to be white, French, or British. This creates a deep psychic split. The colonized individual puts on a "white mask" over their "black skin," desperately trying to perform an identity that is not their own. This leads to anxiety, self-hatred, and violence turned inward on one’s own community.

The mid-20th century saw a wave of decolonization. From India’s independence in 1947 to the "Year of Africa" (1960), when 17 African nations gained sovereignty, the map of the world was redrawn. Yet, for the newly independent nations, freedom came with catastrophic baggage: arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans, mono-crop economies designed for export, weak or non-existent infrastructure, and a crippling lack of trained administrators and professionals. postcolonialism meaning

We see it when Western media represents the Global South as a monolith of poverty, war, or exotic spirituality – a new Orientalism. We see it in the European migrant crisis, where the "Other" is once again depicted as a threatening, irrational flood against a civilized, Christian fortress. We see it in debates over reparations for slavery, the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, and the toppling of statues of Cecil Rhodes and Christopher Columbus – all struggles over who has the right to represent history. Fanon described a catastrophic process of alienation

Writers like Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) chose English, but deliberately broke it. In Things Fall Apart , Achebe weaves Igbo syntax, proverbs, and rhythms into the English sentence. He creates a new, "Afro-English." Other writers, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), took a more radical path, renouncing English entirely and writing only in his native Gikuyu. In his essay "Decolonising the Mind," Ngũgĩ argues that language is the very carrier of culture. To write in the colonizer's language is to continue to think in his categories. Postcolonial literature is an act of counter-narrative . For centuries, Western novels like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness presented colonialism as a noble, if difficult, civilizing mission. The native was a prop, a savage, or a "noble savage." This creates a deep psychic split