Colonialism/Anti-Colonialism Flashcards
What is colonialism?
‘The physical occupation of one place by peoples associated with another place. Colonialism involves not just the removal of resources and wealth from the new land, but actually occupying the territory, building settlements, and often also agriculture, and industry’ (Sharp 2009: 3).
What does Colonialism look like?
Formal Colonies
Settler Colonialism - when settling communities seek to make their cultures of knowing dominant. Strips native populations of their lands and epistemologies. e.g. British in USA.
Consent and Coercion - colonialism functioned with cultivation of consent, teaching that colonial rule was a good system to live under, establishing acceptance of ‘modern’ values.
‘Mission Civilisatrice’
Link between Geography and Empire?
Geography as a discipline emerged with colonialism, it was needed to create, name and bound landscaped ‘undiscovered’ and produce knowledges about them.
Crush (1994: 337) ‘Imperialism itself was an act of geographical violence through which space was explored, reconstructed, re-named and controlled’.
Renaming as a form of appropriation and power
Conceptualized unfamiliar space in Eurocentric terms, situating it within a culture of vision
What is Postcolonialism?
- epoch
- method*
- political project*
Postcolonialism as method
‘Postcolonial approaches are committed to critique, expose, deconstruct, counter and… to transcend, the cultural and broader ideological legacies and presence of imperialism’ (Sidaway 2000: 594)
Postcolonialism as political project
A political project – critique of past inequalities and resistance against colonial power/discourse
Postcolonialism as a ‘commitment to a future free of colonial power and disposition,’ sustained partly by critique of continuities between colonial past and colonial present (Gregory, 2004)
Postcolonialism as theory
Challenges Western assumptions, stereotypes and ways of knowing.
Colonial production of binary oppositions: west/east civilization/savagery; modern/traditional; enlightened/ignorant
Social construction of the European as civilized and the native as savage - pervaded all interactions with colonised populations and assumptions about land use, work, family life etc.
Key scholarship on (post)colonialism
FANON
Argues colonialism is deeply psychic. It creates a structure of knowledge whereby people of colour are unable to think of themselves outside of that structure.
SPIVAK
Argues colonialism is founded on epistemic violence, stripping ability of peoples to speak.
BHABHA
Hybridity, this space where colony and metropole come into dialogue together, and both are constituted from this space.
What does postcolonial geography look like?
Critical Colonial Histories - Reappraisal of geography’s history, in particular its colonial complicity -highlights the closely bound nature of the history of modern human geography with the history of colonialism.
Modern day echoes of colonialism?
Sidaway (2000) & Slater (2004) look at geopolitics and the postcolonial relationship – the new culture of imperialism
Harvey (2003) The ‘war on terror’ globalization and the contemporary American empire
Gregory (2004) - Said’s imaginative geographies continue to articulate in the colonial present. traces the history of British and American involvements in the Middle East and charts the violence of colonial imaginations played out in today’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine
Critiques of postcolonialism
Doesn’t sufficiently challenge the colonial logic.
To what extent can people from the metropole give marginalised people a voice? (reinforcing colonial project)
Decoloniality?
Mignolo (2009:178) - ‘De-colonial thinking presupposes de-linking (epistemically & politically) from the web of imperial knowledge and disciplinary management’.
