Postcolonialism

Question 1

What are the two forms of postcolonialism?

Answer 1

• Temporal - historical claim
• Ideological - theoretical approach

Question 2

What is the difference between Imperalism and Colonialism?

Answer 2

• Imperialism is the phenomenon that originates in metropolis
• Colonalism is what happens in the colonies as a consquence of imperial domination

Loomba, 1998

Question 3

What are contact zones?

Answer 3

• Spaces of colonial encounters
  
  • Difference bounded up within these spaces
• “Come into contact with each other and establish on going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and conflict” (Pratt, 1992)
• Akin to the ‘frontier’ from a European expansionist perspective
• Threshold of civilized society – do not have much knowledge
• Subjects’ identities constituted in and by their relations to each other

Question 4

What are the two major claims to postcolonialism?

Answer 4

1. There is nothing essential to culture
2. Knowledge connect with operations of power

Question 5

What are the claims around knowledge in postcolonial theory?

Answer 5

• Knowledge about ‘Others’ and other places circulated in Europe
• Consolidates certain ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’

Question 6

What are the claims about culture in postcolonial studies?

Answer 6

• ‘Cultures’ of colonizer/colonized transformed through colonial encounter
• Production of alterity
• Implication: nothing essential about ‘culture’
  
  • Invented, produced and historically constituted
• ‘Culture’ as a project of control
  
  • Sets up categories of (convenient) opposition
  • Introduces power dynamism
  • Superiority

Question 7

What were the major developments post WWII?

Answer 7

• US hegemony replaces European powers
• Power defined through abstract geography of the world market rather than territory
• Technological transformations of concepts of space

Question 8

What is critical history of geography?

Answer 8

Sensitive to the various ways in which geographical knowledge has been implicated in relationships of power

Driver, 1992

Question 9

How did visual representations play a role in shaping imaginative geographies?

Answer 9

• Exhibitions of colonial booty –> constructing symbolic geography that reinforced distance between subjects and consumers of these images
• Photographs claimed to represent the world as it really was: each person, each race, in their own place

Driver, 1992

Question 10

What does Said’s memoir ‘Out of Place’ capture?

Answer 10

• Captures the interplay between a sense of place and a sense of self
• Neither are fixed or bounded

Blunt and McEwan, 2002

Question 11

What do Ashcroft et al. (1998) critically remark about contact zones?

Answer 11

• Every contact zone is different and each post-colonial occasions needs to be precisely located and analysed for its specific interplay
• Shows that geography should lie at the hear of postcolonial critiques

Ashcroft et al., 1998

Question 12

What two binaries are cast in postcolonial theory?

Answer 12

• Temporal binary between colonial past and postcolonial present
• Spatial binary between colonial centres and postcolonial margins
  
  • Two way relationship between metropolis and colony (Loomba, 1998)
  • Error to dismiss postcolonial critique on the grounds of itself being Western –> impact of non-European thought on European thought as itself European (Young, 2016)

Question 13

What does Chakrabarty (2000) argue in his book?

Answer 13

• Argues that discipline of history was rooted in idea of human progress
• Overriding theme was to show how societies had either developed, or failed to develop, in a ‘modern’ direction
• Led to development of particularly writings by colonial rules in colonised regions
• “Why can we [Third World historians] not return the gaze?” (p. 29)

Question 14

What false distinction does Postcolonalism look to dispell?

Answer 14

False distinction between colonisation as ‘a system of rule, power and exploitation’ and ‘a system of knowledge and representation’

Hall, 1995

Question 15

What did Marx say about representation?

Answer 15

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”

Question 16

What is a discourse?

Answer 16

A series of representation and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible

Question 17

What is Spviak’s premise around the subaltern?

Answer 17

Human subjects are not fixed essences; identities and subjectivities are shifting

Question 18

What are Spivak’s two concerns about giving the subaltern a voice?

Answer 18

• Cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people through categorization as ‘subaltern’
• Dependence upon western intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak themselves

Question 19

What were the effects of British outlawing sati?

Answer 19

• • British outlawing of sati - Hindu practice of burning a widow on her husband’s pyre
• Might have saved some lives and given women a voice of free choice but also served to secure British power and underscore difference between British ‘civilization and Indian ‘barbarism’

Question 20

What are the critiques of postcolonalism?

Answer 20

• Seeking ‘whole truth’ for a postcolonial geography reproduces the epistemological drive of the colonial project itself
  
  • Creating rational, universal knowledge about world as one of the quests of colonialism
• Should aim instead to open layers of questions about what is taken for granted in western geographical narratives
  
  • Mistaken for this narratives to be self-contained, universal and eternal truths
  • McNeece (1995): ‘To become aware of what it means to confront difference, to look again at what we think we know’

Question 21

How does Jazeel (2014) alternatively conceptualize subalternity as?

Answer 21

Reimagined as a word to evoke spatialities obstructed by the Euro-American power

Question 22

What is Jazeel’s appeal for postcolonial geographies?

Answer 22

Continute to dwell in the domain of representation

Jazeel (2014)

Question 23

What is Haldrup et al. (2006) banal orientalism?

Answer 23

• Banal orientalism event in European context through everyday routine way of talking and acting in life
• Language force people to think in ‘us’ – ‘them’ dichotomies – a habit that enables internal orientalization to be (re)produced
• Material items are inscribed with symbols that are regularly negotiated in a European context
  
  • The prohibition of scarves in different countries (France and Denmark) are (re)producing symbols of belonging

Question 24

What does banal orientalism equip people with?

Answer 24

Equips people with an identity and ideological consciousness and internalises them within the them of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘homeland’ and the world at large

Hadrup et al. (2006)

Question 25

What are the sensous geographies of Otherness?

Answer 25

• The haptic is often taken for granted as an essentially physical capability of the human body
• Touch, tactile receptivity and spatial orientation is not neutral from gender, age and cultural difference
• Arab/Muslim culture –> mutual touching and organisation of person space
• Western space –> maintenance of private, personal space
• Haptic space of the Other is seen as threatening, crowded and intruding –> mad behaviour must be adapted to ‘our mentality’

Hadrup et al. (2006)

Question 26

What is practical Orientalism?

Answer 26

To challenge the ‘big’ regimes of knowledge does not work without at the same time challenging the ‘small’ imaginations and affects constructed encounters in everyday life

Hadrup et al. (2006)

Question 27

What is a materialist argument?

Answer 27

• Reality is an effect of the way the material world is arranged
• World is arranged to be viewed like a picture
  
  • Objective form
  • Objective truths
• ‘Le spectacle’ –> represent for a person the view of a place (Mitchell, 1991)
• Certain expectation of arrangement

Question 28

What is a European point of view?

Answer 28

• Attempting to be objective
• ‘European gaze’ –> politically charged
• Believe that their gaze has no effect (Mitchell, 1991)

Question 29

What is the double desire?

Answer 29

• Wanting to be part of the world but observe it at the same time
• Orient as an exhibition

Question 30

Why is bourgeois an insecure project?

Answer 30

• What it means to be middle class is not secure
• Making of middle-class sensibilities through construction of the colonies

Question 31

What is liberalism?

Answer 31

• Self governing of the individual; opposition of any government or regulatory body
• Ideas of 19th Century Victorian management of ‘how to live’

Question 32

How is India and Britain invovlved with each other in a paradoxical way?

Answer 32

• India implicated in Britain in a paradoxical sense in terms of a common origin but also fundamentally different
• British as agents of ‘progress’ to set India on a path of modernity but ensured that India also remained in antiquity
• Historical development that made imposition of British rule a necessary culmination

Metcalf 1995

Question 33

How did the Victorians aim to classify India?

Answer 33

• Aimed to classify India’s ‘difference’ through scientific ways of ‘knowing’
• European based system –> one way ‘knowing’

Metcalf (1995)

Question 34

What facilitated the creation of difference?

Answer 34

• Decline of racial rather than environmental or culture
• Difference accentuated and shaped to secure space in India for the Raj

Metcalf, 1995

Question 35

According to Stoler what are the characteristics of ‘Europeaness’?

Answer 35

Not a fixed attribute, but can be alerted by environment, class and continent

Stoler, 1995

Question 36

How do the state use racism?

Answer 36

• Used as part of the state’s defence of its own society
• Regulatory mechanisms not only aimed at colonized, but ‘internal enemies’

Stoler, 1995

Question 37

What shift in regard to the state was there in the 19th century?

Answer 37

• Shift from disciple to technology of security
• Operation on European colonials in gendered forms that were class-specific and racially coded
• Management of “how to live”
• “Race fetishism” –> “class fetishism”

Stoler (1995)

Question 38

How did Europeans use representations of the Other to garner control in the colonies and domestically?

Answer 38

• European bourgeois norms developed in contrast to phantom colonized Other
• Garnered moral authority over working-classes using representations taken from colonial context to define them
• Different way European colonial men describe their class –> would say they have ‘power and influence’ over the native populations but not other Europeans

Stoler, 1995

Question 39

How was the idea of the home tied into the colonial project?

Answer 39

• Idea of well-protected European home and attributes of ‘modern white mother’ – bourgeois domesticity to European identities and thus racial orderings to bourgeois rule
• Family as a site of production

Stoler, 1995

Question 40

How were metaphors of race used to create class differences?

Answer 40

• Parallels drawn between British underclass, Irish peasant and primitive Africans
• Assumes ‘class’ and ‘race’ are discrete social categories.

Stoler, 1995

Question 41

How was Europeaness also gender coded?

Answer 41

• A European man could marry an Asian women without losing rank but never true for the opposite gender

Stoler, 1995