Postcolonialism Flashcards
Occident
British, French and Americans in opposition to Oriental
How did Gramsci split society?
Civil society = voluntary affiliations, were influence of ideas, institutions and others works though consent (e.g. culture, family,)
Political society - works through domination (e.g. police, army, bureaucracies)
The Medieval/Renaissance conception of the Wild Man, was a distillation of anxieties underlying which three securities provided by the Christian institution of ‘civilized’ life?
Sex (as organized by family)
Sustenance (provided by political, social and economic institutions)
Salvation (provided by church)
To which Freudian concept does the Wild Man have many commonalities?
The Id - both are without language and are driven and govern by base, animalistic desires.
Give some qualities of the Wild Man
Deformed, lecherous, drunken, naive, violent, rebellion, lazy
What is the main Uniformitarian premise of humanity, with which the conception of the wild man disagrees?
All men are alike, there is a cohesive human essence, present in each individual
What did Zico propose as the key to the diversity of language?
Diversity is not to do with the arbitrary nature of signs, but the variety of human natures.
Define ambivalence
The ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another. The colonizer often regards the colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while the colonized regards the colonizer as both enviable yet corrupt. In a context of hybridity, this often produces a mixed sense of blessing and curse.
Define alterity
the political, cultural, linguistic, or religious other. The study of the ways in which one group makes themselves different from others.
Define colonial education
the process by which a colonizing power assimilates either a subaltern native elite or a larger population to its way of thinking and seeing the world.
Define diaspora
the voluntary or enforced migration of peoples from their native homelands. Diaspora literature is often concerned with questions of maintaining or altering identity, language, and culture while in another culture or country.
What is essentialism in a post-colonial context?
the practice of various groups deciding what is and isn’t a particular identity. As a practice, essentialism tends to overlook differences within groups often to maintain the status quo or obtain power. Essentialist claims can be used by a colonizing power but also by the colonized as a way of resisting what is claimed about them.
Define exoticism
the process by which a cultural practice is made stimulating and exciting in its difference from the colonializer’s normal perspective. Ironically, as European groups educated local, indigenous cultures, schoolchildren often began to see their native lifeways, plants, and animals as exotic and the European counterparts as “normal” or “typical.”
Define hegemony
the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all, often not only through means of economic and political control but more subtly through the control of education and media.
Define hybridity
new transcultural forms that arise from cross-cultural exchange. Hybridity can be social, political, linguistic, religious, etc. It is not necessarily a peaceful mixture, for it can be contentious and disruptive in its experience.
Define abrogation
a refusal to use the language of the colonizer in a correct or standard way.
Define metanarrative
a large cultural story that seeks to explain within its borders all the little, local narratives. A metanarrative claims to be a big truth concerning the world and the way it works. Some charge that all metanarratives are inherently oppressive because they decide whether other narratives are allowed or not.
Define mimicry
the means by which the colonized adopt the culture (language, education, clothing, etc.) of the colonizer but always in the process changing it in important ways.
Define orientalism
the process (from the late eighteenth century to the present) by which “the Orient” was constructed as an exotic other by European studies and culture. Orientalism is not so much a true study of other cultures as it is broad Western generalization about Oriental, Islamic, and/or Asian cultures that tends to erode and ignore their substantial differences.
Define subaltern
the lower or colonized classes who have little access to their own means of expression and are thus dependent upon the language and methods of the ruling class to express themselves.
Define worlding
the process by which a person, family, culture, or people is brought into the dominant Eurocentric/Western global society.
What is colonial ideology?
Colonizers belief in their own superiority over colonized.
What is a colonial subject?
A member of a Subaltern group who has internalized the colonialist ideology that they are inferior to the dominant colonizers - they have a colonized consciousness
What is unhomeliness?
The feeling of having no stable cultural identity - occurs when people who do not belong to dominant culture have rejected their own culture as inferior and therefore have no true home within any culture
What are Said’s two devices for studying authority?
Strategic location (way of describing author’s position in text with regard to oriental material he writes about)
Strategic formation (way of analyzing relationship between texts and the way groups, types and genres acquire mass/density and referential power among themselves and them in culture at large).
According to Said, Orientalism is shaped by exchange with which four types of power?
power political
power intellectual
power moral
power cultural
