Media and Development Cooperation Flashcards
Media Development in a Human Rights Context: Article 19 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.“
Article 19 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Human Right Freedom of Expression
-General Comment No. 34
Right to hold and express opinions.
-Free and pluralistic Media Landscape (incl. Internet)
-Free access to information (public transparency)
-Restrictions must be within the rule of law and according to international and national standards
-Condemnation of any form of political, religious or ethnical hate and violence
Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.10
Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.
Duty Bearers and Rights Holders: features
-Rights-holders have entitlements and claims regarding their human rights. They are active contributors to development processes, and not just passive beneficiaries
-The duty-bearers are governments and state institutions with the obligations to respect, promote, protect and fulfil human rights.
The Human Right Lens for Project Management: actors
All connected: duty bearers, rights, principles & methods, rights, right holders
Strategic Model of Right to freedom and expression and of access to information. What projects require
Right to freedom and expression and of access to information (in center)
(1) political and legal frameworks:
* - Advising state and government institutions
* -Strengthening media self-regulation
* -Supporting human rights advocates
(2) participation in society
* -Empowerment of marginalized individuals and groups to participate in public dialogue
* -Digital safety, media and digital literacy
(3) professionalism and economic viability of the media sector
* Strengthening of professional networks
* Professional dialogue
* Organizational development
* Media viability
(4) qualification
* -Curricula development
* -Dual education structures combining theory and practice
* -Capacity building through networks and institutions
+ digital transformation
Digital transformation crosses all areas Developments in key areas related to digital technologies, e.g.
* Innovation
* Regulation
* Digital security
Projects require:
* Strong ownership
* Multiple fields of action and environments
* A multi-stakeholder approach
-Necessary to work within the political context, as well as supporting changes to this context
-Need to support governments as duty bearers
-Dilemma of media development - those most in need often can’t be reached due to authoritarian regimes
What is Development?Definition, where from, Goal
-The term development refers to national economic growth emerged in the United States beginning in the 1940s and in association with a key American foreign policy
-All approaches are concerned with the relationship between development and governance
-Goal: how to shape the future of the newly independent states (at the end of colonialism) in ways that would ensure that they would not be drawn into the communist Soviet bloc?
What are Development Theories? Definition, Primary agent, Essence & definition of Modernization theory
-Development theory refers to research and writing that resulted from efforts to shape the future of newly independent states (after colonialism).
-Most development theory equates development with national economic growth and sees the state as its primary agent.
-Modernization theory emerged following World War II to address the issue of how to shape the economies of states emerging from European colonization.
-Modernization was, thus, conceived of as the relations of production and standards of living characteristic of western Europe and the United States.
What are Development Theories? Foreign trade: goal and what is traded
International trade in products would enable more efficient resource allocation and greater earnings. These could be translated into savings and then used to promote development.
By disseminating:
* Technology
* Knowledge/Skills
* Entrepreneurship
* Encouraging capital inflow
* Stimulating competition
* Increasing productivity
Foreign trade together with foreign investment and aid, would be the engine of growth for developing countries.
What is Development Communication?: first definition
A first definition of development communication was given in the early 1970s:
‘the art and science of human communication applied to the speedy transformation of a country and the mass of its people from poverty to a dynamic state of growth that makes possible greater social equality and the larger fulfilment of the human potential’ (Quebral 1971: 69).
What is Development Communication?: wider understanding of the field, 2006
The wider understanding of the field led to the latest definition agreed upon in the World Congress on Communication for Development in 2006:
Communication for development is a social process based on dialogue using a broad range of tools and methods. It is also about seeking change at different levels including listening, building trust, sharing knowledge and skills, building policies, debating and learning for sustained and meaningful change. (cit. in Servaes 2012: 65)
What is Media Development?: who is dominating, how approaches changed
- Both development cooperation and media development are dominated by the industrialized countries of the North, which implement their understanding of development, media and communication into the receiving countries.
- The theoretical approach that informs this practice, however, has changed over the past decades.
- While modernization and dependency theories considered the receivers of media assistance pure objects of change, more recent conceptualizations highlight active involvement and participation of local publics
Three crucial elements of the modern-day practice of media development:
- the consideration of a given context
- the integration of different stakeholders
- the evaluation of media development activities
Development Communication vs. Media Development + history of the term
-While media development focuses on traditional media, development communication encompasses all communication processes which work in favour—or against—development:
-Communication for development typically sees the media as a means to achieve broad development goals, while media development sees strengthening the media as an end in itself (Kalathil 2011: 4).
-The field was previously named ‘media development aid’ to reflect the broader endeavour to engage in the so-called third world. The term later changed to ‘media development cooperation’ or ‘media assistance’ to underline a more *cooperative *approach.
How efficient and reasonable is development assistance?
-Impact scepticism is a key term in this debate.
-On the one hand, critics of development assistance consider development plans interventionist and label them as the paternalistic tyranny of Western technocrats (Easterly 2016).
-A participatory approach tries to overcome the deficiency and instead focuses on the strengths of the societies in question.
The conceptualization of communication and the role of the addressees
-The conceptualization of communication and the role of the addressees are at the heart of the debate.
-This debate has its theoretical foundations in the successive paradigms of modernization and dependency theory
-Development is seen as a unilinear evolutionary process; it is coined as modernization and has to be promoted via the media.
-Interventions within modernization had a similar approach:** receivers of media assistance were primarily seen as objects of change** prescribed by industrialized donor countries
- These perceptions and concepts regarded the training of journalists as the gold standard to induce media change.
-The simplistic view of change in the modernization paradigm is solely based on economic factors as drivers of development was reflected in media assistance practice.
What is Media Development?Reaction on conceptualization, Dependency Theory
In a critical reaction to the conceptualization of the dichotomy between the so-called first and third worlds, researchers later looked at the effects of dependency in the peripheral nations and postulated a state of dependency and underdevelopment, which was seen as a result of the domination of the industrialized world over the patterns of development
Neocolonial Discourse
-Neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity often includes the reduction of decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, to an imaginary place, such as “the Third World.“
-Including everyone under the Third World concept ignores the why those regions or countries are considered Third World and who is responsible.
Cultural imperialism
-The influences of the dominating industrial world, media were seen as instruments of cultural imperialism, which is
‘the sum of processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system’ (Schiller 1976: 9).
-Media assistance therefore was not top-ranking among countries in the global South, instead many of them working together in the Non-Aligned Movement, struggled for a New World Information and Communication Order
Media and ‘Non-Alignment’ to the two major power blocs during the cold war
-After WWII, during the Cold War, to overcome the political dynamics of the divide between the capitalist West and the communist Soviet Union, postcolonial nation-states united under the umbrella of ‘Non-Alignment’, that is, a ‘third world’ of countries with no political allegiance to either the two major power blocs.
-The formation of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), and the tri-continental meeting initiated at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 resulted in a series of declarations on national economic development and calls for rectifying the imbalances in the of information from the West.
-The particular emphasis on information and the role of the press and media in safeguarding national sovereignty of the newly independent nations became a point of contention and spilled over in the subsequent international and global debates under the auspices of UNESCO (1950s–1980s) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU; 2000 onward).
Criteria for development other than only economic ones
Criteria other than only economic ones are integrated into the notion of development such as:
* equity provision of basic needs
* meaningful employment
* rich and varied interpersonal relationships
* protection of the environment and native cultures’ (Melkote 2003: 127).
From this perspective, the industrialized countries do not fulfil the requirements of sustainable development either, thus highlighting the critique of a purely economic understanding of development (see Berger 2010: 67).
Participatory Communication: what should be taken into account
The participatory approach contextualizes media within a broader context of communication for development.
Outcomes of media assistance activities have to take into account:
* substantial changes in the communicative environment
* evaluation of the interventions and
* the money being invested by donors
All has to follow a qualitative and comprehensive logic (see Lennie and Tacchi 2013)
Institutional dynamics inside development agencies, donor organizations and governments are said to often undercut the use of participatory approaches.
Waisbord (2008) argues that ‘participatory communication runs contrary to a mentality that prioritizes achieving rapid results within time-bounded funding cycles’.
Media development organizations: how they address journalists
Data show that media development organizations frame their journalism support activities as
efforts to contribute to human rights **
* freedom of expression
* access to information
In doing so, they addressed journalists as
‘human rights defenders’**
or ‘change agents in the information ecosystem’
who fulfil functions that ultimately contribute to the welfare of citizens and society as a whole
MD: Civil rights organizations and political actors + important concern
-Civil rights organizations and political actors were included as part of multi-stakeholder activities with the aim of improving their relationship with media and journalists
-These activities include measures to improve the flow of information between the two groups
-However, there was also widespread concern about offering support to political actors
Modernization is not Modernity
- Modernity refers to a condition of social existence that is radically different to all past forms of
human experience. - Modernization refers to the transitional process of moving from “traditional” (Terminology!!) communities to modern societies
Modernization theory: definition and examples
Theory explaining how societies develop and become modern.
Definition - Inglehart and Welzel define mpdernization as: the** process** by which societies move from traditional or pre-modern conditions to those of modernity, characterized by industrialization, urbanisation, and the growth of a mass society
Examples:
(1) Rationalization - the replacement of traditional motivators of actions (religious beliefs,traditions etc.) with pure logic and the scientific method
(2) Urbanization - the process of population movement from rural areas to cities. It leads to a more diversified and industrialized economy
Modernization as a Process: In the postwar period
- In the postwar period modernization theory developed as a form of comparative analysis that
specifically targeted the political transitions of excolonial states towards modern societies. - Modernization as a process is utilized a comparative form to analyze transitional processes between and within Western and non-Western (mainly ex-colonial) in political-economic terms.
Modernization as a Process: geoculturally pluralistic character
It used ethnography as a way of exploring the continued
existence of communities in the modern world.
* Peaked during the Cold War, the legacies of modernization
theory – both its insights and its oversights – are still felt
in International Relations.
* Attempts to capture the geoculturally pluralistic character of modern world development.
Wallerstein defined geoculture as ‘a set of ideas, values, and norms widely accepted throughout the worldsystem and that constrained social action thereafter’.
Sociopolitical differences in studying modernity and modernization: sociological & anthropological approaches
- The sociological investigation of modernity is temporal
- The anthropological/comparative study of modernization is
geocultural. - These two articulations of difference have impacted significantly
upon approaches to and debates within International Relations. - The unresolved relationship between temporal and geocultural
difference provides one of the deepest challenges to the investigation of the form and content of international relations.
Fear of the ‘West’ about modernization
of ex-colonial societies.
- Western powers were scared the modernization
of ex-colonial societies. Disorder would lead them
towards the Communist orbit - Special concern: colonialism had destroyed the
majority of local political infrastructure - Fear of the ‘West’: the attempt to retain order and
stability in the midst of modernization could
therefore result just as easily in authoritarian, rather
than democratic rule
Geoculture definition
Wallerstein defined geoculture as ‘a set of ideas, values, and norms widely accepted throughout the world-system and that constrained social action thereafter’.
Political Economy Critiques of “Modernization”: region, arguments
The most concentrated and influential critique of modernization theory emerged out of the Latin American experience after World War II
* Originated in the UN-sponsored Economic Commission for Latin America. Economists such as Raúl Prebisch (1963) claimed that modernization was not a spontaneous but rather a politically induced process.
* Political intervention and regulation had to tackle the imbalance caused by an international division of labor that placed manufacturing in the First World and primary commodity production in the Third.
Scholars versed in Marxist-Leninist theories of imperialism
Scholars versed in Marxist-Leninist theories of imperialism argue that in the peripheral economies, unlike the core economies,
capitalism had to be understood as effecting the “development of underdevelopment” (Frank 1971; Amin 1976).
* The condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation in the center (ex-colonial) societies was the denial of a growth process in
the periphery.
Social anthropology: The Anthropological Critique of Modernization
- Social anthropology, the intellectual wellspring of
modernization theory, has also come under for intellectual complicity in the European colonial
project. -
Through a narrative of history, ethnography places cultural groups paradoxically in the past, thus rendering them as primitive and feminized objects to be scientifically represented by the modern masculine subject in the form of the ethnographer (for the gender dimension see MacCormack and Strathern
1980).
Modernization Theory - “Multiple modernities”: essence, example
- Scholars of the “multiple modernities” thesis claim that it addresses the plurality of human development
- It has been criticized as effectively a modernization narrative in anthropological disguise (Englund and Leach 2000).
-
Example: the **threshold **for when a civilization can be
understood to have reached its modernity is determined not by reference to the cultural codes and understandings of that
civilization but by reference to an abstracted description of a particular stage of human development that is itself anchored, ultimately, in an ideal-typical reading of the West European modern experience (Bhambra 2007)
Criticism of Modernization Theory
- Modernization theory is too general and does not fit all societies in the same way.
- Modernization of a society required the destruction of the indigenous culture and its replacement by a more Westernized one.
- Modern simply refers to the present, and any society still in existence is therefore modern.
- Proponents of modernization typically view only Western society as being truly modern and argue that others are primitive or unevolved by comparison. That view sees unmodernized societies as inferior even if they have the same standard of living as western societies..
- Opponents argue that modernity is independent of culture and can be adapted to any society.
- Modernization theorists ignore external sources of change in societies.
Hall and Gieben 1992 Formations of Modernity
Modern societies are characterised by changes in:
1. Political structures
e.g. secular power, large complex hierarchies
2. Economic processes
e.g. monetized exchange, large scale production and consumption, private property ownership
3. Social relations e.g. decline of traditional social order, fluid class divisions, gender-based relationships
4. Cultural practices
e.g. decline of religion, knowledge economy, intersectional identities,
‘imagined communities’
The term culture does not possess a fixed, singular definition: main factor
The term culture does not possess a fixed, singular definition.
Variations in the meaning of the term culture are a result of a series of historical and social conditions but, more importantly, the way in which the term has been used.
[One difference between modern societies and traditional societies has to do with the way personal identity is made
Modernity, according to Giddens: definition and factors
Modernity is associated with:
* A certain set of attitudes towards the world and the idea of the world as open
to transformation by human
intervention
* A complexity of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a
market economy
* A certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy
Bhambra (2007): cultural codes
Bhambra (2007) notes that cultural codes are important elements of multiple modernities evident in:
* Emphasis on individual autonomy
* Freedom from traditional forms of authority
* Cultivation of reflexivity and exploration
* Active construction and mastery of the social and natural worlds through research and policymaking
What is Dependency Theory?: roots, description, model (elements)
- Has ist roots in Latin America in the 1960s.
- Is a school of thought in social science which
seeks to contribute to an understanding of
underdevelopment, an analysis of its causes, and to a lesser extent, paths toward overcoming it. - Provided an alternative approach to looking at
unilinear growth models
Perifery (cheap labour raw materials) -> Semi perifery -> Core (high-cost consumer goods)
Dependency theory: definition and examples
Dependency theory explains the global economic system by describing how developing countries depend on developed countries for economic growth
Definition: Lustig (1977) explains dependency theory as a: body of thought that explains the persistent poverty of most developing countries by the fact that they are dependent on advanced countries for trade, investment, and technological progress
Example: Colonial exploitation: The earliest example of dependency is colonization whtn European nations made colonies through their superior military technology. They exported natural resources from other places to Europe. They then manufactured these materials and sold them back into colonies, creating an economic system of exploitation.
- The idea that resources flow from a
“periphery” of poor and underdeveloped
states to a “core” of wealthy states - This is enriching the wealthy states at the
expense of the poorer states. - A central contention of dependency theory
is that poor states are impoverished and
rich ones enriched by the way poor states
are integrated into the “world system”.
Criticism of Dependency Theory
- The principal criticism of dependency theories has been that the school does not provide any substantive empirical evidences to support its arguments.
- Many exceptions are there which do not fit in with their core periphery theory, like the newly emerged industrial countries of South East Asia.
- Dependency theories are highly abstract and tend to use homogenising categories such as developed and underdeveloped, which do not fully capture the variations within these categories.
- Base their arguments on received notions such as nation-state, capitalism and industrialisation
Eurocentric biases are inherited in these theories of dependency school
- They assume that industrialisation and possession of industrial capital are crucial requisites for economic progress.
- There is an inability to think beyond the state as the primary and essential agent of economic development.
- There is a Eurocentric bias in overlooking or de- emphasising of production
undertaken by women, and in not realising the dangerous implications for the environment of industrialisation and over exploitation of resources.
World systems theory: definition, regions
World-systems theory is a socioeconomic and political approach that explains the economic development and dynamics of capitalistic world economy analyzing the mechanisms of international market trade, economic division of labor between core and periphery regions, and interest of capitalist class in markets
Regions:
(1) Core Areas - technology advanced and industrialized capitalist nations/regions
(2) Periphery Areas - poor countries that primarily subsist by exporting primary products
(3) Semi-Periphery Areas - countries that act as the periphery to core countries, and core to the countries on the periphery
What is World System Theory?: core areas, periphery areas, semi-periphery areas
Core Areas:
* Small set of technologically advanced and industrialized capitalist nations/regions
* Characteristics: higher incomes, large tax bases, and high standards of living
(G-7 group and China)
Periphery Areas:
* Poor countries that are mostly exporting primary products such as agricultural produce and natural resources to the core countries.
* Characteristics: small tax base, low incomes, and low levels of human development index (sub-Saharan African, parts of Latin America and Central
Asia)
Semi-Periphery Areas:
* Act as the periphery to core countries, and as a core to the countries on the
periphery.
* Regional powers with moderate levels of development indices and growing capitalist economies. (India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Israel, Nigeria)
Immanuel Wallerstein: year & basic concepts
- Developed in the 1970s
- Claims that rich core capitalist societies succeed by
exploiting poorer peripheral ones. In between are
semiperipheral societies, a precarious global middle class - Its main goals are to explain unequal development and
wealth between societies in the modern capitalist world
since 1500, and to understand the cyclical patterns of
expansion and contraction that characterize the world
system. - The periphery therefore can only advance through global
revolution that will end the world capitalist system.
Criticism of World System Theory
- Overemphasising the world market while neglecting forces and relations of production.
- Conceptual dimensions and the relationship between conceptual structure and the way it
theorises social change and action: - Is a theory of the world system without a system theory. Its actual conceptual units are
social systems', one of which is themodern world system’. - Focus on nation states (William I. Robinson)
- Focused on economy and not culture
- Prioritization of the world market means the neglect of local class structures and class struggles (Robert Brenner)
Criticism of World System Theory: renewal of coloniality, “core-centric” origin
- Appears to be a renewal of coloniality (Anibal Quijano, 2000, Nepantla, Coloniality of power,
eurocentrism and Latin America).[50] - Criticizing the “core-centric” origin of World-system and its only economical development,
“coloniality” allows further conception of how power still processes in a colonial way over
worldwide populations (Ramon Grosfogel, “the epistemic decolonial turn” 2007): - “by ‘colonial situations’ I mean the cultural, political, sexual, spiritual, epistemic and
economic oppression/exploitation of subordinate racialized/ethnic groups by
dominant racialized/ethnic groups with or without the existence of colonial
administration”.
Modernity at large: Arjun Appadurai, main feature, when appeared
Arjun Appadurai
* Modernity was very much a product of the Enlightenment.
* Modernism originated in the late-sixteenth century after the rise of capitalism.
* Not limited to economic dimensions, for it also contains cultural and political ones
* Understanding and theorizing associated with modernity is a part of Western social science (was shaped by such leading Western social scientists as Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, Max Weber, and Emile
Durkeim).
* Sees Western social science as problematic because it reinforces the sense of a single moment (which he calls the modern moment) serving as a dramatic and unparalleled break between past and present.
* Western social science has focused on categorizing and typologizing traditional and modern societies, practices that distort the meanings of change and the past and assumes that the Western experience of modernity is universal.
Modernity: main characteristics and factors
- Modernity is irregularly self-conscious and unevenly
experienced in different parts of the world - Modernity is experienced differently over space and
throughout time - Media and population migration are the most important
factors defining today’s global world - Considers globalization as both cultural homogenization
and, at the same time, cultural heterogenization
Five dimensions of global cultural flows:
- Ethnoscapes (people that move around in the world )
- Mediascapes
- Techno-scapes
- Financescapes
- Ideocapes
What is Postcolonial Theory?: what it examins and what thinks
- Postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized.
- Postcolonial theory holds that decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that is based on cultural interactions between different identities (cultural, national, and ethnic as well as gender and class based) which are assigned varying degrees of social power by the colonial society
What is Postcolonialism?: definition, focus, example of theory
- Postcolonialism deals with the long term and ongoing effects of colonisation on cultures and societies
- Focus is often placed on the material effects of colonialism, as well as the way in which colonialism shapes discourse (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2007)
- Eric Williams (1944) argued
that in Capitalism and Slavery that colonialism supposedly ended in the West Indies for economic reasons, rather than humanitarian reasons.
Defining Postcolonial
- Postcolonialism: Ashcroft, Griffiths und Tiffin primarily refer to ‘discursive practices’ and ‘cultural strategies’, but define the field as ‘the totality of practices… which characterise the societies of the post‐colonial world from the moment of colonisation to the present day’ (1995: xv).
-
Williams and Chrisman have a narrower understanding of postcolonial theory and see it as the ‘critique… of the
process of production of knowledge about the other’ (1994: 8). - A similar focus can be found in the work of Young: ‘Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the
elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western way of seeing things. …
‘postcolonial theory’ involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as
needs, developed outside the west’ (2003: 4, 6). - Loomba, on the other hand, wants to broaden the field beyond the analysis of structures of knowledge and
regards the central quality of postcolonial approaches in their ‘contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism’ (1998: 12). - Williams and Chrisman are justified in characterising postcolonial studies as ‘critiques of the production of knowledge about the Other’ (1994: 8).
Tension between Postcolonial Studies and Development Studies: difference
Both have a common object (the global South and North‐South relations) a closer look reveals significant differences in the following points:
- Applicability
Both is related to different disciplinary origins (economics vs. literature).
DS Knowledge in development studies as a rule has to abide by the principle of leading to/being translated into practical applications and solutions.
PS Knowledge in postcolonial studies is often confined to the critique of representations.
- Theoretical objective
DS The traditional aim is the transformation of society according to expert plans and universal concepts.
PS Postcolonial studies question theses concepts because of their Eurocentrism (‐ the concept of ‘development’ being the classical example). - Methodological focus
DS Primarily concerned with measurable socio‐economic change, mostly on the macro‐level (economic growth, purchasing power, income distribution).
PS Concerned with questions of culture, representations and identities and with processes and experiences on the micro‐level
Postcolonialism and the Media
- The postcolonial intellectual tradition is crucial to articulating
cultural, film, and media formations from the perspective of
(formerly) colonized people and countries. - Postcolonial theories and concepts potentially repoliticize media
theory by questioning Western assumptions about technological progress and innovation. - Postcolonial theories of media force a rethink of the tenets of traditional media theories while, at the same time, media theories demonstrate the centrality of media, in all its forms, to understanding the postcolonial condition.
Homi K. Bhabha: where and when was born, what developed
- 1949 born in Mumbai, Indian-British scholar
and critical theorist. - One of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies
- Developed a number of the field’s neologisms
and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence
Homi K. Bhabha: Terminology
Hybridity
* Describes the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism.
* Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we
transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations
Ambivalence
* Culture as consisting of opposing perceptions and dimensions.
* Duality that presents a split in the identity of the colonized other— allows for beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer’s cultural identity.
* Colonial signifiers of authority only acquire their meanings after the “traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior archaic image or identity.
* Paradoxically, this image cannot be ‘original’ (repetition that constructs it) —nor identical (difference that defines it.)
* The colonial presence remains ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference.
Homi K. Bhabha: Cultural difference: definition, difference with cultural diversity, “fixity”
- Alternative to cultural diversity. Cultural difference is a process of identification, while cultural diversity is comparative and categorized.
- Cultural diversity: culture is an “object of empirical knowledge” and pre-exists
the knower - Cultural difference sees culture as the point at which two or more cultures meet and it is also where most problems occur, discursively constructed rather than pre-given, a “process of enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable.’”
- An important aspect of colonial and post-colonial discourse is their dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the construction of otherness.
- Fixity implies repetition, rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder. The stereotype creates an “identity” that stems as much from mastery and pleasure as it does from anxiety and defense of the dominant, “for it is a form of multiple and contradictory beliefs in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.”
Homi K. Bhabha: Terminology
Mimicry
- Mimicry appears when members of a colonized society imitate and take on the culture of the colonizers.
- Colonial mimicry comes from the colonist’s desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is, as Bhabha writes, “almost the same,
but not quite.” - Mimicry is a sign of a double articulation; a strategy which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power.
- The colonized’s desire is inverted as the colonial appropriation now produces
a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence; a gaze from the Other is the counterpart to the colonizer’s gaze that shares the insight of genealogical gaze which frees the marginalized individual and breaks the unity of
man’s being through which he had extended his sovereignty. Thus, “the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence.”
What is Neo-colonialism?
- Neo-colonialism is a term
which refers to various forms of influence or control of former colonies after their political independence. (Ashcroft,
Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2007) - In 2018, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned of ‘new colonialism’. “there is a new version of colonialism happening because poor countries are unable to compete with rich countries…”
- In what ways is this a valid concern today
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: sphere of interest, roots
- Born 24 February 1942 one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals
- Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment’s Institute for
Comparative Literature and Society. - Best known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
- 2012 awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy
- 2013 received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the
Republic of India. - 1999 confirmed her separation from the discipline in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Maintains position in a 2021 essay titled “How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today”
How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism
- Liberators of India took possession of the already existing colonial state-machine and modify it for postcolonial purposes, with a new constitution, whose land reform statutes were quickly suppressed (Bardhan 1984; 2003; 2018).
- So-called national liberation is not a revolution because it is not in fact a national liberation.
- As Marx and Engels warned in 1872: “The Commmune
[Paris Commune of 1871] has provided a particular piece of
evidence, that ‘the working class [read “the national
liberators”] cannot simply take possession of the readymade state-machine and set it in motion for its own goals’” - With the simultaneity brought in by globalization,
precolonial structures of power and corruption are
coming back and beginning to inhabit the polity. - This catches the relay of the difference between the
national liberators and the masses and becomes part of
the difficult burden of the heritage of postcolonialism. - In India it is the caste system, which never quite went away
and is much older than colonialism. Colonialism was
yesterday. This is thousands of years old. - “To come to grips with the heritage of postcoloniality, the only solution that I have so far
proposed has been a holistic education—from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines—
that can only be a dream.” - By subaltern I mean Gramsci’s minimal definition:
“social groups in the margins of history” (1975, 2277). - The heritage of postcoloniality leads to global labour export and migration
- We will be a global community, each one of us globalizable, upstream from politics, an island of languaging in a field of traces.
- Postcolonialism was focused on the nation state. To supplement globalization, we need archipelago-thought.
Édouard Glissant, the thinker of creolity, has said: “Translation is therefore one of the most important kinds of this new
archipelagic thinking” (1996, 27). We must displace the heritage of postcoloniality into island-thinking.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Island-Consciousness
- In today’s world everything is modern. The promise is of a level playing field.
- If we develop island-consciousness, know that the globe is a cluster of islands in a sea of traces, and approach the heterogeneity of the ocean-world with patience, collectively, and bit by bit, rather than all at once, it’s maybe the only way to find out why that field, that cluster, floating in the world-ocean, is so uneven a reliefmap.
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Postcoloniality celebrates a national liberation based on an orientalist nationalism, I have argued. Creolity as history celebrates archipelagic thinking. Think creolity as history, then, rather than the bounded nation upon
a bounded continent which was colonialism and its heritage. A hard task, to
save a world.
