Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 21 The language question in India and Africa
- 22 English and the development of postcolonial literature
- 23 Religion and postcolonial writing
- 24 Postcolonial responses to the Western canon
- 25 Island writing, Creole cultures
- 26 Magical realism
- 27 Palimpsest and hybridity in postcolonial writing
- 28 The narrative forms of postcolonial fiction
- 29 Poetry and postcolonialism
- 30 Primitivism and postcolonial literature
- 31 Popular culture and postcolonial literary production in Africa and India
- 32 Film and postcolonial writing
- 33 Fanon, Memmi, Glissant and postcolonial writing
- 34 Negritude and postcolonial literature
- 35 Publishing, prizes and postcolonial literary production
- 36 Key journals and organizations
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
30 - Primitivism and postcolonial literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- 21 The language question in India and Africa
- 22 English and the development of postcolonial literature
- 23 Religion and postcolonial writing
- 24 Postcolonial responses to the Western canon
- 25 Island writing, Creole cultures
- 26 Magical realism
- 27 Palimpsest and hybridity in postcolonial writing
- 28 The narrative forms of postcolonial fiction
- 29 Poetry and postcolonialism
- 30 Primitivism and postcolonial literature
- 31 Popular culture and postcolonial literary production in Africa and India
- 32 Film and postcolonial writing
- 33 Fanon, Memmi, Glissant and postcolonial writing
- 34 Negritude and postcolonial literature
- 35 Publishing, prizes and postcolonial literary production
- 36 Key journals and organizations
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The one who made too much of an effort to understand, the one who underwent the agonies of a conversion, the one whose idea was that of renunciation when he embraced the customs of those who forged their destinies in this primeval slime in a hand-to-hand struggle with the mountains and the trees, was vulnerable because certain forces of the world he had left behind continued to operate in him.
Titles are never simple or innocent especially when they appear to be so. This holds true for the seemingly innocuous title of this chapter. For what should give us pause in the title is the innocent, commonplace conjunction. Why is ‘primitivism’ – a term that summons up colonial projects and projections and enables the West to assert its modernity and maturity – linked through the conjunction ‘and’ to ‘postcolonial literature’ which, one can justifiably assume, would reject the scandalous problems associated with the term ‘primitivism’? If, as literary and art historians have informed us repeatedly, modernist art and literature relied heavily on the resources provided by so-called primitive cultures, then surely postcolonial writers and artists would be critical of any form of primitivism that energized Western modernism? What, then, is the status of the conjunction in our title? Does it imply some kind of relation between primitivism and postcolonial literature? What sort of relation do we have here? Is it an antagonistic relation in which postcolonialism is opposed to primitivism? Or a complementary relation in which postcolonial literature finds primitivism useful as a strategic partner?
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature , pp. 982 - 1005Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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