Post-Colonialism Flashcards
Postcolonial theory
Emphasizes the tension between the metropolis (former conquerors) and the (former) colonies, between what within the colonial framework were the metropolitan, imperial center and its colonial satellites.
Focus of post-colonial theory
On the cultural criticism displacements-and its consequences for personal and communal identities – that inevitably followed colonial conquest and rule and it does so from a Eurocentric perspective.
Postcolonial perspectives emerge from (Homi Bhabha)
The colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of “minorities” within the geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the “rationalizations” of modernity.
Post-Colonialism challenges this idea
that the western thought is the canon
He said that the colonizers are also influenced by the colony. Is a syncretism.
Homi Bhaba
Otherness and politics of representation
issues about race, ethnicity, language, gender, identity, class, and, above all, power are problematized and deconstructed.
The language of rights and obligations that operates in the various Western cultures must be questioned on the basis of anomalous and discriminatory legal and cultural status assigned to migrant, diasporic, and refugee populations.
Homi Bhabha
Edward Said examines
how Western scholarly texts construct the Orient through imaginative representations (e.g. novels), through seemingly factual descriptions (e.g. journalistic reports and travel writing), and through claims to knowledge about Oriental history and cultures (histories, anthropological writings, and so on).
(post) colonial identity is inherently
Unstable
is a basic element of postcolonial discourse. Because of its inconsistency, this discourse is always subject the effects of differánce.
Stereotyping
Mimicry
the always slightly alien and distorted way in which the colonized, either out of choice or under duress, will repeat the colonizer’s ways of discourse. Bhabha argues that the cultural interaction of colonizer and colonized lead to a fusion of cultural forms that from one perspective, because it signals its “productivity”, confirms the power of the colonial presence, but that as a form of mimicry simultaneously unsettles the mimetic narcissistic demands of colonial power.
Gayatri Spivak is attentive to
difference or heterogeneity. The subaltern is central to her theoretical approach.
Strategic use of positive essentialism.
Spivak
Colonized people
any population that has been subjected to the political domination of another population.
Is both a subject matter and a theoretical framework.
Postcolonial criticism
Objective of postcolonial criticism as a subject matter
Analyzes literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination, from the first point of colonial contact to the present.
Objective of postcolonial criticism as a theoretical framework
Seeks to understand the operations—politically, socially, culturally, and psychologically—of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies.
Has decolonization been achieved?
No, becuase even if there are not longer colonies that rule geographical zones, the former colonizer’s ideologies are still present in former colonies.