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The first position defines cultural identity in terms of ‘one, shared culture, a sort of collective one true self’…It reflects the common historical
experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people’. The second sense, it is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It
belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural
identities come from somewhere, have histories 223.
B. Critical Approaches
The writer employs postcolonial approach as a tool to analyze the three short stories written by Jhumpa Lahiri. However, postcolonial approach is
relatively new approach and emerged as a distinct category in 1990s. Thus, it is not mentioned in several contemporary literary theory books. This chapter
enlightens the beginning of the emerging postcolonial criticism, the characteristics of postcolonial criticism as well as explains on three stages in seeing postcolonial
criticism. The source is mainly taken from Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory.
1. The Beginning of the Emerging of Postcolonial Criticism
Postcolonial criticism appears to criticize the universal standard of literature claimed by the liberal humanist critics which stated that the great
literature has a timeless and universal significance. As a result, it disregards cultural, social, regional and national differences.
This universalism is rejected by postcolonial criticism. Barry said that whenever a universal signification is claimed for a work, then, white, Eurocentric
norms and practices are being promoted by a sleight of hand to this elevated status, and all others correspondingly relegated to subsidiary, marginalized roles
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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193. Barry also emphasizes on what Frantz Fanon remarked on what he called as ‘cultural resistance’ in his book, The Wretched of the Earth published in France
in 1961. Fanon argued that the first step for colonialized people in finding a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past, and continued to erode the
colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued 193; emphasis added. A major book which inaugurates postcolonial criticism is written by
Edward Said, entitled Orientalism published in 1978, which is a specific expose of the Eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both the superiority of
what is European or Western, and the inferiority of what is not 193. Said identifies a European cultural tradition of Orientalism, which is a
particular and long-standing way of identifying the East as Other and inferior to the West. The Orient, he says, features in the Western mind as a
sort of surrogate and even underground self’. This means that the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which
Westerners do not choose to acknowledge cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, and so on. At the same time, and paradoxically, the East is seen
as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive. It also tends to be seen as homogenous, the people there being anonymous
masses, rather than individuals, their actions determined by instinctive emotions lust, terror, fury, etc. rather than by conscious choices or
decisions. Their emotions and reactions are always determined by racial considerations they are like this because they are asiatics or blacks or
orientals rather than by aspects of individual status or circumstance 193- 194; emphasis added.
2. The Characteristics of Postcolonial Criticism
