Postcolonialism Flashcards
Radcliffe (1992)
Postcolonialism refers to ways of “criticising the discursive and material legacies of colonialism”
McEwan (2009)
The world we live in today has undeniably been shaped by imperialism and colonialism. The postcolonial approach requires us to recognise the connections between the past and the present and different parts of the world. We need to consider these connected in terms of how they shape the contemporary world and how they relate to power.
These power relations are not only economic, but they are deeply cultural- relating to questions about who has the power to write history and represent other people and places. The postcolonial approach is fundamentally challenging the fact that power still largely resides in the Western world.
Postcolonialism attempts to rewrite the hegemonic accounting of time (history) and the spatial distribution of knowledge (power) that constructs the developing world. It also attempts to recover the lost historical and contemporary voices of the marginalised, oppressed and dominated.
The development paradigm attempts to erase the significance of history. BUT, postcolonialism insists upon it. There is a need to recognise how these histories and cultures have been silenced.
Crush (2005)
Development ideas are not produced in a social/institutional/political or literary vacuum.
“They are rather assembled within a vast hierarchical apparatus of knowledge, production and consumption”
Postcolonial approaches examine this power; especially the links between discourses of development and development policies, and between relationships of power and images used to represent the world.
Mohanty (1991)
The myth of the ‘Third World Woman’
Mohanty (1991) argues that western feminists write about ‘third world’ women as a composite, singular construction that is arbitrary and limiting. These women are depicted as victims of masculine control and traditional culture. There is a lack of incorporation of information about historical context and cultural differences.
Consequently, this creates a dynamic in which Western feminism functions as the norm against which the situation in the developing world is evaluated. These women must be allowed to have their own agency and voice within the feminist realm.
“Epistemic violence includes the distortions, stereotyping and generalizing of Third World women’s conditions, as if they were all homogenously belaboured, lacking agency and needing saving”.
Paolini (1997)
Argues postcolonialism in cinema can be understood as a “celebration of the particular camp; the marginal which envisages peoples of the Third World carving out independent identities in a de-Europeanized camp; hybrid space of recovery & autonomy”.
Cinema can be used as a way to destabilize dominant Western discourses and their ethnocentricity. It can give voice to those silenced and marginalized by the colonial process. It allows people to ‘recover’ their history, agency and autonomy AND allows us to decolonize the mind.
Rigg (2007)
Argues that photography can be used to challenge Eurocentric reductions of the global south as a space of problems in which development takes place.
New ‘critical cartographies’ of development have arose, focusing on:
A) Geographies of everyday lives in the Global South
B) How the Global South is shaping, and being shaped by global economic, political and cultural processes
Ngozi (2007)
Half of a Yellow Sun (Ngozi, 2007)
Tells the story of the Nigerian/Biafran war (1967-70) through the eyes of three protaganists: Ugwu, Olanna & Richard.
Richard is English and wants to write an account of the war; running through the novel are snippets of a book being written by one of the characters…
When asked about the authorship of these snippets, Adichie replied: “I wanted a device to anchor the reader who may not necessarily know the basics of Nigerian history. And I wanted to make a strongly-felt political point about who should be writing the stories of Africa…”
Sylvester (2011)
Argues that we should take literature seriously as a form of postcolonial critique…
“We need to grasp, not the choices economists dream up for them in rational choice models. What better way to begin the process of insight into individual…choices than to read about these challenges in novels about postcolonial settings?”
Versi (2000)
The people of Africa are becoming increasingly angry over the ‘blanket slandering’ of their continent. Western press use terms like basket case or hopeless continent. This has drastic consequences to the African people themselves, and their economies- who would want to invest in a hopeless continent?
There are 53 states in Africa- the second largest land mass on earth; Sudan alone is bigger than the whole of Western Europe. You could fit Europe, North America and Latin America and the Middle East into the continent
1) If Europe has problems managing their small nation states, this can only magnified when considering the governance of African states
2) If Europe is still coming to terms with ethnic diversity, imaging the challenges that face leaders in states like Nigeria- which has a larger ethnic diversity than Europe alone
3) If Europe still has economic and unemployment problems after three centuries of colonialism, industrialisation and trade monopolies, how can African countries be expected to have ‘developed’ in similar ways once becoming independent
Driver (1992)
Argues that geographical knowledge was represented as a tool of empire, enabling both the acquisition of territory and the exploitation of resources. This knowledge served a particular purpose; it served the colonial purpose of the state.
“Geographical science lent ideological credibility to ideologies of imperialism and racism, especially through the discourses of environmental determinism… Geography served primarily to ‘legitimate the expansionary power of the fittest”
The vision of modernity has a space- a space located in the colonial encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. The relationship between geography and imperialism has been neglected by historians; it is as though the writings of our ancestors were “so saturated with colonial and imperial themes that to problematize their role is to challenge the very status of the modern discipline”.
Driver makes clear that we need to think more about the way in which geographical knowledge is produced, the forms it takes
[EXAMINES SAID- problem of representation and speaking on behalf of others]
Sidaway (2000)
The term postcolonial is contested and has multiple meanings. Can refer to the condition that succeeds colonial rule but is also used to signify a set of theoretical perspectives.
There is an important sense in which mapping any of the postcolonial is a problematic or contradictory project. Postcolonial approaches wish to invert, expose and transcend knowledges and practices of colonialism BUT, objectification, classification and the urge to map feature strongly in this
Postcolonial approaches are committed to critique, expose, deconstruct, counter and (in some claims) to transcend, the cultural and broader ideological legacies and presences of imperialism. It is also about the possibility and methods of hearing or recovering the experiences of the colonized.
McClintock (1992)
Insists on the need to be careful not to use the term postcolonial as though it described a single condition- she describes postcolonialism as ‘unevenly developed’ globally.
She also points out complications presented by societies which were subject to imperial power but not formal colonies (true for much of China).
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).
Lewis (2014)
Book showing how alternative narratives of development can be seen through literature, events, campaigns or cinema.
Examples: Half a Yellow Sun or the Band Aid concert.
