POST COLONIALISM

THE SINGAPORE GRIP

                        Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end.

                 A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.

CRITICISM

   This story falls under the theory of post colonialism. Post-colonialism (also Post-colonial Studies, Post-colonial Theory, and Postcolonialism) is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyse, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and of imperialism. Drawing from post-modern schools of thought, Post-colonial Studies critique the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analysing the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neo-colonialism; the how and the why of an imperial régime’s representations (social, political, cultural) of the imperial coloniser and of the colonised people. As a genre of contemporary history, post-colonialism questions and reinvents the modes of cultural perception — of viewing and of being viewed. As anthropology, post-colonialism records human relations among the colonial nations and the subaltern peoples whom they had ruled and exploited in the colonies. As critical theory, post-colonialism presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and the praxis of Neo-colonialism, with examples drawn from the humanities — history and political science, philosophy and Marxist theory, sociology,anthropology, and human geography; the cinema, religion, and theology; feminism, linguistics, and post-colonial literature, of which the Anti-conquest narrative genre presents the stories of colonial subjugation of the subaltern man and woman.

                     Why it is under the theory of post colonialism?

            It is simply because the story discusses the revolution of the old times, the colonialism and imperialism. there are peoples who fight against the powerful peoples. they fight for their freedom amd their teritory. it also discuss how a powerful person invqde a particular place because he knows that no one can beat him. the colonialism of old times in Singapore was written on this novel. it is like the history of singapore. it views the political views during those times and how those powerful person rule that country.