Postcolonialism Flashcards
Chakrabarty on history
- postcolonial geography must realise within itself its own impossibility given geog is inescapably marked by its location/dev as a western-colonial science
Stoler (2018) Colony Quotes
- “It describes a physical and social location of a specified aggregate population (collective, community), a place, a specified distribution of colonizer and colonized (power relations), distinctions productive of and dependent on a set of trained dispositions (learned orientation towards things), on unequal entitlements to resources and rights, on conquest as dispossession, on dispossession as progress, and not least, on a requisite set of embodied and durable racialized relations”
- “’Colony’ inhabits an ambiguous sort of space in its oscillation between the still neutrality of a common noun and a political concept in waiting, poised to discharge its potentiality”
- “A holding pen that constricts sociality, nourishes suspicion, and further confines the recalcitrant”
- “A colony stands apart and is part of something else”
Pratt (1991) Contact Zones
“Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”
Mackinder (1904) Global conscious
“In Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia there is scarcely a region left for the pegging-out of a claim of ownership, unless as the result of a war between civilized or half-civilized […]
From the present time forth, in the post-Columbian age, we shall again have to deal with a closed political system, and none the less that it will be one of world-wide scope. Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated into a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence”
Said (1989)
“We would not have had empire itself without important philosophical and imaginative processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination and settlement of space”
Bhabha and Comaroff (2002) Postcolonialism
“Both a state of being, defined by its place in the passage of epochal history, and a critical orientation toward the reading of the past, not least its textual traces”
- two phases - decolonisation
- 2nd wave 1989 end CW
Decolonising Knowledge Case Study
Rhodes Must Fall
- South Africa - Rhodes PM Cape Colony - British
- 2015 student movement remove statue at University of Cape Town - calls decolonise university
- sparked protest globe including Oxford Rhodes college
- post-apartheid - most black africans still poverty, unequal
Stoler (2018)
Colony
Jazeel and McFarlane (2010)
The limits of responsibility - postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production
Hall (2002)
“The term post-colonial is not merely descriptive of ‘this’ society rather than ‘that’, or of ‘then’ and ‘now’. It is part of an essentially transnational and transcultural ‘global’ process. And it produces a decentred, diasporic or “global” rewriting of previously nation-centered imperial grand narratives…
It is precisely the false distinction between colonisation as a system of rule, power, and exploitation, and colonisation as a system of knowledge and representation, which is being refused.”
“Political positionalities are not fixed and do not repeat themselves from one historical situation to the next or from one theatre of antagonism to another, ever ‘in place’, in an endless iteration”
Orientalism critique - Vaughan (1994)
“The historical experiences of colonial peoples themselves have no independent existence outside of the texts of Orientalism… At a theoretical level, then, Said appears to have placed himself in the position of denying the possibility of any alternative description of ‘the Orient,’ any alternative forms of knowledge and by extension, any agency on the part of the colonized.”
Orientalism EGs
- Disney films like Aladdin
- Burqa bans/ depictions Muslim women
- ISIS representations
Stoler (1996)
Colonial discourses “conflated, substituted, and collapsed the categories of racial, class and sexual Others strategically and at different times”
Fanon (1967) Black Skin White Masks
- white man understands black man in relation white - ‘other’ inferiority
- fine when body with alike people, problem eg black body enters white world
- discover your difference when engage world esp if world governed by people who other you
- desire to be, not identified enslaved ancestors - body created through white othering discourses
- Black man can’t hide identity - unlike jews, black’s instantly othered on appearance - always defined skin colour first eg. black dr/ uni graduate
- need get rid colour prejudice - superiority complex
- white constructed history of the other
- Despite rich history/ proof black not inferior, still have fit modern white society
Said (1978)
Orientalism
