Race, Identity and Post-Colonial Literature

AQA's Modern Times option requires you to study literature that engages with the cultural, social, and political changes of the post-1945 world. Few changes have been more profound than decolonisation, mass migration, and the emergence of post-colonial literary voices. This lesson examines three novels that place questions of race, identity, and representation at the centre of their concerns: Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997), and Bernardine Evaristo's Mr Loverman (2013).

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The Post-Colonial Context

Key Concept	Definition
Post-colonialism	The study of the cultural, political, and literary effects of colonialism — both during colonial rule and after independence
The Other	Edward Said's concept: colonised peoples are constructed as fundamentally different from (and inferior to) the coloniser. This "Othering" justifies domination
Hybridity	Homi Bhabha's concept: post-colonial identities are not "pure" but mixed, combining elements of coloniser and colonised cultures
Voice and representation	Who gets to tell the story? Whose language is used? Post-colonial literature reclaims narrative authority for previously silenced voices
Double consciousness	W.E.B. Du Bois's concept: the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that devalues you

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Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)

Context

Walker is an African-American writer from Georgia. The Color Purple is set in the rural American South in the 1930s — a world shaped by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the systematic oppression of Black women by both white racism and Black patriarchy.

Walker coined the term "womanism" — a feminism that centres the experience of Black women, who face both racial and gender oppression (what Kimberlé Crenshaw would later call "intersectionality").

Form and Narrative Voice

The novel is an epistolary novel — told entirely through letters. Celie's letters are addressed first to God (because she has no one else to talk to) and later to her sister Nettie.

Technique	Effect
Celie's voice	Written in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) — grammatically non-standard but poetically powerful. The choice of dialect is a political act: it asserts the validity and beauty of a language that has been stigmatised
Letters to God	Celie's isolation is so complete that God is her only audience. The shift from God to Nettie marks her growing sense of human connection
The epistolary form	Creates intimacy — we read private documents. But also raises questions of audience and power: who controls communication? (Mr _____ hides Nettie's letters for decades)

Key Themes

1. Race and Gender: Intersectionality

Celie is oppressed not only as a Black person in a racist society but as a woman within her own community. Her stepfather rapes her; her husband beats her. The novel shows how patriarchy operates across racial lines — and how Black women are doubly marginalised.

Key Quote: "He beat me like he beat the children." Celie describes Mr _____'s violence with chilling matter-of-factness — the normalisation of domestic abuse.

2. The Reclamation of Voice

The novel's central movement is Celie's transformation from silence to speech, from object to subject, from passive victim to active agent. Her relationship with Shug Avery is the catalyst: Shug teaches her to value herself, her body, and her voice.

3. Spirituality and the Colour Purple

The title refers to Shug's theology: "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." God, for Shug, is not the patriarchal God of organised religion but an immanent, sensuous presence in the natural world. Celie's spiritual journey — from addressing God as "Sir" to experiencing the divine in nature and human connection — parallels her liberation from patriarchal control.

4. Sexuality and Liberation

Celie's sexual relationship with Shug is presented as a natural and liberating discovery. In a novel set in the 1930s American South, this is radical — challenging both the heteronormative assumptions of mainstream society and the homophobia within Black communities.

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Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things (1997)

Context

Roy's debut novel is set in Kerala, India, in 1969 and 1993. It explores the aftermath of colonialism, the rigidities of the Indian caste system, and the ways in which social rules — the "Love Laws" — determine "who should be loved, and how. And how much."

Key Themes

1. The "Love Laws"

The novel's central tragedy is the relationship between Ammu (a divorced Syrian Christian woman) and Velutha (an Untouchable carpenter). Their love violates the caste system — the most powerful social boundary in Indian society. The consequences are catastrophic: Velutha is beaten to death by police; Ammu is destroyed.

2. Caste and Untouchability

Roy presents the caste system not as an abstract social structure but as a lived experience of humiliation, violence, and exclusion:

"They were not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas."