Postcolonial-Feminist elements in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India

Abstract

Since postcolonial studies took the academic world by storm in the late 1980s, it has proven to be one of the most diverse and contentious fields in literary and cultural studies, a field of apparently endless argument and debate. Postcolonial literature and theory investigate what happens when two cultures clash and when one of them empowers and deems itself superior to the other. This theory moves beyond the bounds of literary studies and investigates the social, political, and economic concerns of the colonized and the colonizer. It highlights the various strategies adopted by colonized nations to resist this domination, and to decolonize their own lands and minds. In his essay, "The postcolonial and the postmodern: the question of Agency", in The location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha asserts "postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of third world countries and the discourses of minorities within the geopolitical division of East and West, North and South"