Postcolonialism

So I was thumbing through Charles Bressler's Literary Criticism (second Edition), a text I used in college for a course on literary criticism, and I found these useful questions he preposes to help us understand how to read a text from a postcolonial perspective:
1) What happens in the text when two cultures clash, when one sees itself as superior to another?
2) Describe the two or more cultures exhibited in the text. What does each value? What does each reject?
3) Who in the text is "the Other"
4) What are the worldviews of each of the cultures?
5) What are the forms of resistance against colonial control?
6) How does the superior or privileged culture's hegemony affect the colonized culture?
7) How do the colonized people view themselves? Is there any changes in this view by the end of the text?
8) What are the characteristics of the language of the two cultures? How are they alike? Different?
9) Is the language of the dominant culture used a form of oppression? Suppression?
10) In what ways is the colonized culture silenced?
11) Are there any emergent forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
12) How do gender, race, or social class function in the colonial and postcolonial elements of the text?

As a teacher I could imagine myself defaulting to these questions to keep me in focused on a postcolonial interpretation, or using these questions as a scaffold for students to help gain deeper understanding of a text as they unwrap its postcolonial elements.

I also wanted to share a documentary I found on Youtube about Orientalism, a strand of postcolonial thought.  It's long but it's really worth the invest in time as it presents some interesting ideas of American perception of the Middle East.  Said makes the case that often American's perception of the Middle East are monolithic and informed by media and political agendas, so we're not able to have an informed understanding of the diversity of humanity in places like the Gaza strip.  Said shows that perceptions and prejudices towards the Other, in this case Arabs, are not historical attitudes found only in colonial literature, but are real perspectives in contemporary American and Western society.   If we can show our students how our perceptions influences our attitudes and worldviews, we can not only help them find different voices within a text, but we can assist them in evaluating their hidden prejudices about a text and about life.  

Orientalism: the creation of non-European stereotypes that suggested so-called Orientals were indolent, thoughtless, sexually immoral, unreliable and demented.