Postcolonial Literature Texts
Primary and Secondary Resources for all your Postcolonial Literature Needs
Primary Resources
A story about heroic Indian villagers fighting the British in pre-Independence India. It's considered to be the first major Indian novel in English. Good stuff.
A classic text (it's a poem) of the Négritude movement, which took pride in black culture and identity, written by the Martinican poet Césaire.
The story of Okonkwo's fight against the British in Nigeria. This novel is a foundational text of postcolonial literature, so don't miss it.
Things keep falling apart after independence for a young Nigerian man in Achebe's second novel.
The events of this novel are set a few decades after the events of Things Fall Apart. And guess what? Things are still falling apart in Igbo land.
The prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It takes place (mostly) in Jamaica, and it tells us things from the perspective of a colonized woman who later becomes the madwoman in the attic in Brontë's novel.
This is the big novel of South American literature, and it tells us all about the postcolonial condition there... with lots of magic thrown in.
This is all about one trippy dream... oh yeah, and Caribbean identity.
A play about the clash between British colonial values and indigenous Yoruba values in Nigeria.
Kenyan colonial and postcolonial history make us this massive novel by Ngũgĩ. It's sad stuff (can't you tell by the title?), but it's eye-opening.
Indian history with crazy twists and turns? Look no further than the novel that made Salman Rushdie a star.
A gripping novel about a colonial official in an unnamed country who's implicated in the torture of natives.
Love multigenerational family sagas? Check out this one about a family from Chile.
Rushdie's novel is all about how and why things go wrong in Pakistan after partition from India.
Short stories. We get a panorama of Caribbean life and culture, with lots of gender issues thrown in.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe retold from the perspective of a woman.
Walcott's epic poem immortalizes the tiny Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia.
An autobiographical novel about of a young woman from the Caribbean who comes to the U.S. to work as a nanny.
A dying woman in South Africa becomes aware of the violence of apartheid.
A short but gripping book about the destructiveness of colonial education.
It's a novel about caste, family and nation. It deals with a love affair between an Indian woman and a man from a Dalit (untouchable) caste.
In this novel, follow Ned Kelly's adventures as a bandit fighting British authorities in Australia.
This novel tells us all about the colonial relationship between two Small Islands: Great Britain and Jamaica. That's right: Great Britain as a small island.
The story of Lilith, a slave girl growing up on a Jamaican slave plantation. It's a whole novel told in Jamaican dialect.
Secondary Resources
This is the book that got the whole field of postcolonial literary theory going. Said shows how colonial authors justified colonialism through their literature and writing.
You'll need to roll up your sleeves for this one, because the essays in this book are deep and difficult. They deal with culture, colonialism, and politics.
Want a good introduction to postcolonial literature? Look no further.
We'll be real with you here: this is a really jargony book of essays on colonialism and culture. Like, if there were an impenetrable jargon prize, this might win (we award Spivak the runner-up prize). But Homi Bhabha's a totally important postcolonial literary theorist, though, so don't give up.
Because Said is that important in the field of postcolonial theory, here's a second book by him. The title sums it up: it's all about culture and imperialism.