English 3150 Critical Theory Today Ch. 12 Flashcards
Postcolonial Criticism
Effective at helping to see connections among all the domains of our experience—the psychological, ideological, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic—in ways that show us just how inseparable these categories are in our lived experience of ourselves and our world.
Postcolonial Identity
For postcolonial cultures include both a merger of and antagonism between the culture of the colonized and that of the colonizer, which, at this point in time, are difficult to identify and separate into discrete entities, so complete was the British intrusion into the government, education, cultural values, and daily lives of its colonial subjects.
Cultural Colonizations
The inculcation of a British system of government and education, British culture, and British values that denigrate the culture, morals, and even physical appearance of for- merly subjugated peoples.
Colonialist Ideology
Referred to as colonialist discourse to mark its relation- ship to the language in which colonialist thinking was expressed, was based on the colonizers’ assumption of their own superiority, which they contrasted with the alleged inferiority of native (indigenous) peoples, the original inhabit- ants of the lands they invaded. The colonizers believed that only their own Anglo-European culture was civilized, sophisticated, or, as postcolonial critics put it, metropolitan.
Othering
Practice of judging all who are different as less than fully human
Savage
Usually con- sidered evil as well as inferior (the demonic other).
Exotic Other
The “savage” is perceived as possessing a “primitive” beauty or nobility born of a closeness to nature
Eurocentrism
The use of European culture as the standard to which all other cultures are negatively contrasted.
Orientalism
Term used by art historians and literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures) by writers, designers and artists from the West.
Colonial Subjects
Colonized persons who did not resist colonial subjugation because they were taught to believe in British superior- ity and, therefore, in their own inferiority.
Mimicry
Reflects both the desire of colonized individuals to be accepted by the colonizing cul- ture and the shame experienced by colonized individuals concerning their own culture, which they were programmed to see as inferior.
Double Consciousness
A consciousness or a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two antagonistic cultures.
Diaspora
Separated from their homeland
Unhomeliness
To be unhomed is to feel not at home even in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has made you a psychological refugee, so to speak.
Hybridity or Syncretism
Postcolonial theorists argue that postcolonial identity is necessarily a dynamic, constantly evolving hybrid of native and colonial cultures.
Nativism or Nationalism
Emphasis on indigenous culture, especially when accompanied by the attempt to eliminate Western influences,
Postcolonial Women
Victims of both colonialist ideology, which devalues them because of their race and cultural ancestry, and patriarchal ideology, which devalues them because of their sex.
Inner Colonies
Colonies established among nonwhite peoples through the force of British arms, such as those established in India, Africa, the West Indies, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Post-Colonialism Today
Not a thing of the Past. olonialism is no longer practiced as it was between the late fifteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, through the direct, overt administration of governors and educators from the colonizing country. Today, through different means, the same kind of political, economic, and cultural subjugation of vulnerable nations occurs at the hands of international corporations.
Neocolonialism
Exploits the cheap labor available in develop- ing countries, often at the expense of those countries’ own struggling businesses, cultural traditions, and ecological well-being.
Cultural Imperialism
A direct result of economic domination, consists of the “takeover” of one culture by another: the food, clothing, customs, recreation, and values of the economically dominant culture increasingly replace those of the economically vulnerable culture until the latter appears to be a kind of imitation of the former.
Subalterns
People of Inferior status
Exile
Experience of being an outsider in one’s own land or a foreign wanderer in Britain.
