What is Commonwealth Literature?

As a term in literary regional studies, Commonwealth literature is generally believed to refer to the literary products of the independent countries of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean-sand North America which were once colonized by the United Kingdom.The works of writers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Malaysia and Singapore are therefore regarded as Commonwealth literature

Commonwealth Literature, Post-Colonial Literature in English, New Literature in English, World Writing in English – these are just some of the terms being used to describe the writings of ‘members’ of the former British Empire.n a famous and scathing essay, the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, once asserted that “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist”, and he has been supported in this view by other authors.Commonwealth Literature’ is thus used to cover the literary works from territories that were once part of the British Empire, but it usually excludes books from the United Kingdom unless these are produced by resident writers who originate from a former colony. The great irony, however, is that much of the best literature that has emerged from Britain in the last years has been produced by writers from or with roots in colonies.Commonwealth Literature’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘post-colonial literatures’ although the latter could include literatures in other languages as well, such as French or Portuguese.Commonwealth Literature’ is really an academic label which means little to the public at large. Ask anyone to name five famous Commonwealth authors, and you’ll probably receive a look of blankness.
List of posr-colonial writer:
Edward Said,
Gayatri Spivak,
Franze fannon
Bill Ashcroft,
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o1
Chinua Achebe,
Leela Gandhi,
Gareth Griffiths,
Abiola Irele,
Hamid Dabashi,
Helen Tiffin,
Khal Torabully,
Robert Young.

Commanwealth Countries

Asia

Bangladesh
Brunei Darussalam
India
Malaysia
Pakistan
Singapore
Sri Lanka
This all countries are from Asia.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published works of non-fiction including, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

He has received many awards for his writing including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

India is the Commonwealth’s largest nation by far, and several significant characteristics are implicated in its huge size and population.The first is the number of languages that are

spoken. There are over 840 languages spoken by almost one illion people.These languages are, in turn, a reflection of the hugely diverse religions that comprise the country, ranging from the predominant Hindu through the Buddhist, the Jains, to the significant Muslim minority.These religions have a very long continuous history and have spawned literatures of great antiquity and extraordinary beauty, such as those found in Sanskrit, Tamil, Gujarati, Arabic and Kashmiri. India has also had longer contact with Christianity than most countries in Asia, with the founding of a Roman

Catholic Mission in Goa in the fourteenth century

Edward Wadie Said

Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.Born in Mandatory Palestine, Said was an American citizen from birth by way of his father Wadir Saïd, a U.S. Army veteran of the First World War (1914–18).

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives The Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a seminal work, Orientalism has been a subject of scholarly controversy.

Gayatri Spivak:

Gayatri Spivak born in Calcutta, Spivak attended the University of Calcutta and Cornell University, where she studied with Paul de Man and completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature.Her critical interests are wide-ranging: she has written on literature, film, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, historiography, psychoanalysis, colonial discourse and postcolonialism, translation, and pedagogy East and West. She argues forcefully that these disciplinary and theoretical categories must each be articulated in ways that do not "interrupt" each other, bringing them to "crisis." Spivak's own work is resistant to any easy categorization. Spivak has concentrated on examining deconstruction and postcolonialism, and its implications for feminist and Marxist theory. She engages not so much the specifics of colonial rule as the forms that neocolonialism currently assumes, both in the intellectual exchanges of the First World academy and in the socioeconomic traffic between the industrialized and developing nations. In the last decade, Spivak has been associated with revisionist.

Franze Fannon:

Frantz Omar Fanon ( 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a Martiniquais-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization,ansssd the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

The Wretched of the Earth

Black Skin, White Masks

Fanon is best known for the classic analysis of colonialism and decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth.Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century.

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe”
― Frantz Fanon

Fanon resisted an oversimplified comparison with Marxist theory, Fanon's analysis of the colonizers' fabricated identity of the colonized is derived from the structure of Marx's monetized social relations and the fetishism of the commodity which produces these relations.Fanon combined psychoanalysis and Marxism, understanding that colonized people were traumatized and could never create their own cultures unless they were truly liberated. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon described the process of “decolonization,”Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy explores the range of ways in which Frantz Fanon's decolonization theory can reveal new answers to perennial philosophical questions and new paths to social justice. The aim is to show not just that Fanon's thought remains philosophically relevant, but that it is relevant to an even wider range of philosophical issues than has previously been realized.

This all about the the post-colonial writer andtheir views about commanwealth literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon#Work

http://www.scientificterrapin.umd.edu/Fall2011/articles/Marxism.php

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