Colonialism in Postcolonial Literature
For many cultures around the world, colonialism was a massively traumatic thing. Imagine: all of sudden this stranger shows up in your town or your village, takes all your stuff, forces you to learn his language (only to tell you how lame you are), and then proceeds to run things any way he wants. Oh, and just to add a little icing on the exploitation cake, he does all this while destroying your environment, your culture, and your livelihood.
In fact, the effects of colonialism were so deep that even after independence, many countries and cultures continued to suffer from its effects. Often the colonizer's language displaced indigenous languages. Many people abandoned indigenous religions after being converted to Christianity by missionaries. Even the postcolonial "nations" that emerged after independence were modeled along Western-style European nations, with the same type of administrative and bureaucratic setup.
So, given what a huge deal colonialism was, is it any wonder that writers from formerly colonized countries became obsessed with understanding it, representing it, and challenging it? And given that the consequences of colonialism extended well beyond the actual period of decolonization (a lot of people say that these consequences continue even to this day), is it any wonder that writers are still dealing with the legacy of colonialism?
Chew on This
Check out how the conflict between colonizer and colonized divides the community in this chapter of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe.
Assia Djebar shows us France's violent colonization of Algeria in the 1800s in Part One of her novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.