Postcolonialism Quotes

Britain's unique success as an industrialised nation-state prompted strong imitative endeavours not only across Europe, but also in Asia. Now many people, who were once humiliated into a sense of nationality by British rule, loom larger than their former masters.

And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

The generation that migrated to the West in the 1970s or 1960s has now lived more in the West than India, and India has changed so much. My parents fall into that category.

Obama remains frozen in his father's time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century.

I think that I altered history in 'Elizabeth,' and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to 'Slumdog Millionaire' or 'Gandhi.' They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.

Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.

'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.

I was attracted to 'Half of a Yellow Sun' because of the story.

To the Left, Islam, like the rest of the 'Third World,' is one of the many victims of Western Imperialism.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

I'm a member of the African diaspora: my parents left the Caribbean and came to London for a better life.

You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.

While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’.

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

I was an American Studies student at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and pretty much as a graduate student, too.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

I'm kind of transatlantic Eurotrash.