Literature and Power: A Postcolonial Perspective

Who Tells the Stories

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe said: “Until the lion has its own historian, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Postcolonial theory raises the question: who is telling the story, from whose perspective, who has the right to speak, whose experience is considered “universal”?

The traditional Western canon—Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe—was presented as “universal” literature. Postcolonial critics (Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha) demonstrated: it is particular, it carries assumptions about who is the “center” and who is the “periphery”, who is the “subject” and who is the “object”.

Edward Said and “Orientalism”

The Palestinian-American critic Edward Said (“Orientalism”, 1978) analyzed how Western culture—literature, academic science, politics—constructed the image of the “East” (the Middle East): exotic, irrational, sexual, potentially dangerous. This “orientalism” is not a description of reality, but a creation of knowledge/power that justifies colonial dominance.

By analyzing Conrad’s “Nostromo” or Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”, postcolonial critics saw things European readers did not see: the colony as a background, characters of color as auxiliary, the African or Asian world as wildness requiring “civilization”.

Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966) is a response to “Jane Eyre”: the story of Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha—a Caribbean woman locked in the attic. Rhys gives voice to a character to whom Brontë did not give a voice.

Achebe and the African Novel

Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (1958) is the first great English-language novel about Africa from an African point of view. The title is from Yeats (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”). The novel tells of the destruction of Ibo society by the arrival of British colonialism—not through villainy, but through the systemic mismatch of two civilizations. The main character, Okonkwo, is neither a victim nor a villain, but a tragic figure unable to adapt to the new world.

Achebe directly polemicized with Conrad: “Heart of Darkness” portrays Africa as “darkness”, devoid of history and subjectivity. This is racism—regardless of the artistic merits of the text.

Magical Realism and Latin America

Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) is the novel that created “magical realism” as a global phenomenon. In it, the dead converse with the living, yellow butterflies accompany Mauricio Babilonia, and Macondo’s history—family and political—repeats itself cyclically. Realism and magic are indistinguishable: in a world where colonial history is reality, the supernatural seems just as plausible.

Márquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende—the Latin American “boom” of the 1960s–70s—shifted the center of world literature from Europe and showed that the “periphery” produces great texts.

Question for reflection: Whose voices are absent from the “official narrative” of your organization or industry—in corporate history, success stories, “role models”? What does this say about the structure of power?