ABSTRACT

Postcolonialism deals with the issues such as Orientalist discourse, loss of culture, identity, ethnicity, oppression and their portrayal in the modern era. As an academic discipline, it adopts a deconstructionist attitude and it questions what the colonized do and how s/he behaves when s/he is confronted by the colonizer. Although it is hard to pinpoint the starting date of Colonialism, which is the former version of Postcolonialism, it can be asserted that it gained momentum in the late 19th century. While Colonialism is a more crude form of exploitation of the Oriental countries mostly exemplified by military expeditions, Postcolonialism is an academic and cultural endeavor to reveal a more subtle version of social degradation, political manipulation and textual distortion. Postcolonial age, which is marked by the Declaration of India’s Independence, leads postcolonial studies to criticize romanticized adventure stories of the West about Oriental countries and Occident’s embedded ideology in them. Within the frame of Postcolonial studies, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said wrote his famous work Orientalism, in which he criticizes Western based representation of the East and highlights how knowledge and discourse are linked with power to define and name the Orient. The objective of this study is to introduce Colonialism and primarily Postcolonialism, its major representatives and elicit their arguments to deconstruct the Eurocentric vision and mission enforced against the Orient.