Postcolonial Criticism

Postcolonial criticism is a movement in the humanities that analyzes the cultural consequences of colonialism: the mechanisms of imperial domination in texts, the construction of the image of the 'other,' the hybridity of identity, resistance, and the decolonization of consciousness. Its foundational works are Edward Said's 'Orientalism' (1978, on how the West constructed the image of a subordinate East), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?,' and Homi Bhabha's 'The Location of Culture' (the concepts of hybridity, mimicry, the 'third space'). Postcolonial studies are closely linked to feminist and discourse criticism. For Ukrainian culture the postcolonial approach is especially relevant as a tool for understanding imperial and Soviet domination; it is applied by Marko Pavlyshyn, Tamara Hundorova, Mykola Riabchuk, and Ewa Thompson ('Imperial Knowledge'), examining the decolonization of the Ukrainian literary canon.