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.
