Postcolonialism 3 Flashcards
Irina Bokova (UNESCO, 2015)
Suggested that these acts of image breaking are a form of cultural cleansing
Francesco Rutelli (2016)
Argues that people who participate in image breaking wish to annihilate the sense of belonging and memories that these artefacts represent
Raphael Lemkin
Argues that iconoclasm is essentially genocide on the specific institutions and buildings of a culture or environment
Haldrup et al. (2006)
With the colonial expansion of European powers from the 15th century onwards, a discourse of civilization values started. Europe was identified with the process of modernity and the primacy of science and rationality; religion was being replaced with science and reason.
The Western cultural identity was defined as an outward movement through colonization of the new world, in contrast to oriental and savage others.
Reproduction of orientalism is dependent on a daily reproduction (not simply through institutions). It is centrally performed, practices and renegotiated in everyday life; establishes itself as natural and self-evident.
Orientalism must be taken beyond the institutional sense- it needs to cover the everyday, reproductive performativity
We can look at identities of the nation state to unpack this; mobilizations of ‘us’ ‘here’ ‘we’ are all at play. Concerns about our imagined communities link up more and more with questions on acceptance of the other, refugees and immigrants (Anderson, 1991).
Delaney (2002)
Explores some of the aspects of the relationship and relevance of geography to the question of race in North America. The question for geographers is ‘how does the racial formation shape space, give meaning to places and condition the experience of the embodied subjects?
Elements of the social (race, gender etc.) are not simply reflected in spatial arrangements- instead, spatialities are regarded as constituting and reinforcing aspects of the social. Race is what it is and does what it does precisely because of how it is given spatial expression. Space in an enabling technology through which race is produced
Delaney questions what geography (in terms of knowledge production about race) is for- his answer is through teaching. This teaching needs to unveil white privilege and white self-interest in dismantling patterns of racism.
To be white is to be unmarked in the cultural economy of race. White people can simply forget about race- it is somewhere else. Whiteness takes on the appearance of being normal, natural and neutral. The spatialities which produce this are therefore maintained.
McKittrick (2006)
This is an interdisciplinary analysis of black women’s geographies in the black diaspora. It seeks to consider what kinds of possibilities emergence when black studies encounter human geography.
Enabling us to think about the place of black subjects in the context of taking up spatial histories as they constitute our present geographic organization; engaging with a narrative that locates and draws in black histories and subjects to make visible the social lives that are often displaced and rendered un-geographical.
The relationship between black women and geography opens up a conceptual arena through which more humanly workable geographies can be imagined. Women are negotiating a geographic landscape that is upheld by a legacy of exploitation, exploration and conquest.
Social practices create these landscapes and contribute to how we organize, build and imagine our surroundings. Black subjects are not indifferent to these practices and landscapes- they are connected to them through crude racial-sexual hierarchies and their stake in the production of space.
By considering the histories of transatlantic slavery, we are able to see that black women are both shaped by and challenge the traditional geographic arrangements
The category of the black women is intimately connected with past and present spatial organizations. Racism and sexism are not simply bodily or identity based; they are spatial acts and illustrate black women’s geographical experiences and knowledges as they are made possible through domination.
This form of slavery profited from black enslavement by extracting material and philosophical black subordinations.
Closs-Stephens (2011)
This paper explores the imaginative geographies that enabled and legitimated a diverse range of violent practices in the War on Terror after the events of 9/11. From the ‘black sites’ of extraordinary rendition, to detention centres, to the complicity of the UK government and US in acts of torture
The author draws upon Said’s (1978) work as a way to understand the divisions made between ‘us’ and them’. Such distinctions are entrenched in how we understand who we are and our relationship to others in the world . The task of unpacking and resisting the imaginative geographies of the War on Terror must begin by interrogating the temporal narratives that underpin them.
Focuses on Hamid’s (2007) fiction book ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. Traces how the main character shifts from being seen as an ‘exotic other’ to being coded as a ‘suspected terrorist’ in NYC post 9/11. Since this event, we have been taught to be ‘on the lookout’ for suspicious people (Amoore, 2006).
Like the above, postcolonial novels offer material for destabilizing the spatial and temporal coordinates of dominant imaginative geographies. BUT, they also reproduce this dominant view of the world as expressed in Manichean geographies.
