Postcolonialism ii.
Successful colonialism depends on a process of “othering” the
I. Colonialism
a. Colonialism is the establishment of a colony in one territory by a political
power from another territory, and the subsequent maintenance, expansion,
and exploitation of that colony.
b. Colonialism involves unequal relationships between the colonial power and
the colony and often between the colonists and the indigenous peoples.
c. The colonialist, while committing these atrocities against the natives and
territories of the colonies, convinces himself that he stands on high moral
grounds.
d. White Man’s Burden
e. Simply put, colonialism is about the dominance of a strong nation over
another weaker one.
II. Postcolonialism
a. What is it all about?
i. Postcolonialism is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains,
and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
ii. Postcolonial literary criticism undermines the universality claims of
literature, identifies colonial sympathies in the canon, and replaces
the colonial metanarratives with counter-narratives of resistance.
iii. Postcolonialism theory is a movement that looks at the ways in
which certain societies dominate others intellectually, focusing
especially on the role of discourse and media in such domination.
iv. Postcolonialism is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in
literary and cultural studies which designates a politics of
transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of colonial
practices.
v. Simply put, postcolonial discourse is a critique of Western
hegemony.
b. What are its assumptions?
i. Colonialism is a powerful, usually destructive historical force that
shapes not only the political futures of the countries involved but
also the identities of colonized and colonizing people.
people colonized. That is, the colonized people are seen as
dramatically different from and less than the colonizers.
iii. Because of this, literature written in colonizing cultures often
distorts the experiences and realities of colonized people.
iv. Colonial writings, arts, legal system, science and other socio-
cultural practices are always racialized and unequal where the
colonizer does the representation and the native is represented.
v. Models of Western thought or of literature have dominated world
culture, marginalizing or excluding non-Western traditions and
forms of cultural life and expression.
c. What are its objectives?
i. With the objective of locating the modes of representation where
Europeans constructed natives in politically prejudiced ways,
postcolonial criticism intends to unveil such literary figures, themes
and representatives that have enforced imperial ideology, colonial
domination and continuing Western hegemony.
ii. It endeavors to probe beneath the obvious and apparently
universal/aesthetic/humanist themes in order to reveal their racial,
gendered, imperial assumptions.
iii. As a genre of contemporary history, postcolonialism questions and
reinvents the manner in which a culture is being viewed,
challenging the narratives expounded during the colonial era.
iv. Postcolonial theory establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern
peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, balancing the
imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the
colonist and the colonial subjects.
III. Theorists & Their Ideas
a. Frantz Fanon
i. 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961
ii. Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher,
revolutionary, and writer
iii. Pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of
decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization
iv. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
 1. Fanon explored the racial difference in colonial and
postcolonial societies
2. He applies psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to
explain the feelings of inadequacy that black people might
experience.
3. He psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is
perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world
that they live in, and studies how they navigate the world
through a performance of White-ness.
4. Assumes
a. That the divided self-perception of the Black
Subject who has lost his native cultural origin, and
embraced the culture of the Mother Country,
produces an inferiority complex in the mind of the
Black Subject, who then will try to appropriate and
imitate the culture of the colonizer.
b. That “a normal Negro child, having grown up in a
normal Negro family, will become abnormal on the
slightest contact of the white world”.
v. The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
1. He wrote about the effects of colonization on the minds of
the colonized, and the efforts by which the colonized to
overthrow the colonizers.
2. He introduces the colonial world as one that is divided into
the colonist and the colonized. These identities are created
by the colonist in order to assert his own superiority.
3. Decolonization is a violent process not only of
overthrowing a colonial government, but of freeing the
colonized from the mindset imposed upon them.
b. Edward Said
i. 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003
ii. Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine
iii. Professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual,
and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies
iv. Coined the term “Orientalism” describing the binary between the
Orient and the Occident
v. “Power and knowledge are inseparable” (following Foucault’s belief)
vi. Attempted to explain how European/Western colonizers looked
upon the “Orient”
vii. What is the Orient?
1. A mystical plane that was stereotyped due to lack of
knowledge and imagination
2. A “lumping” together of Asia
viii. Orientalism (1978)
1. Exposes the Eurocentric universalism which takes for
granted both the superiority of what is Western and the
inferiority of what is not
2. Identifies a European cultural tradition of Orientalism,
which is a particular and long-standing way of identifying
the east as the ‘Other’ and inferior to the west
3. Thesis: proposes the existence of a “subtle and persistent
Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and
their culture”, which originates from Western culture’s long
tradition of false, romanticized images of Asia, in general,
and the Middle East, in particular.
4. Proposed that much Western study of Islamic civilization
was political intellectualism, meant for the self-affirmation
of European identity, rather than objective academic study.
5. Orientalist scholarship implies that the colonial subaltern
(the colonized people) were incapable of thinking, acting,
or speaking for themselves, thus are incapable of writing
their own national histories.
6. The thesis of Orientalism concluded that the West’s
knowledge of the Orient depicts the cultures of the Eastern
world as an irrational, weak, and feminized non-European
Other.
7. Orientalism depends, in all these aspects, on a culturally
constructed distinction between ‘the Occident’ and ‘the
Orient’
 a. “West and East form a binary opposition in which
the two poles define each other, the inferiority that
orientalism attributes to the East simultaneously
serves to construct the West’s superiority.”
c. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
i. 24 February 1942
ii. Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic
iii. “Essentialism” and “Strategic Essentialism”
1. Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of
attributes that are necessary to its identity and function
a. An essentialist is someone who believes people
and things have an innate, unchangeable nature
that is just there and not something that depends
on circumstances.
2. Strategic essentialism refers to a political tactic that
minority groups, nationalities, ethnic groups mobilize on
the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity
to represent themselves. While strong differences may exist
between members of these groups, and amongst
themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is
sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily
“essentialize” themselves and to bring forward their group
identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals often
for equal rights, or to oppose the levelling impact of global
culture.
3. According to her, such ‘essential categories’ are not stable.
iv. “Epistemic violence”
1. To commit ‘epistemic violence’ is to actively obstruct and
undermine non-Western methods or approaches to
knowledge. This imperialist subjugation of non-Western
understanding is a way of constituting the colonial subject
solely as a heterogenous ‘Other’.
2. The dominant Western narrative is ‘palimpsestic’ – that is,
it aims to alter the historical and social native
consciousness; to delete all traces of the original and
overwrite it with something considered more appropriate.
3. Non-Western epistemology is dismissed as inadequate,
‘insufficiently elaborated’ and naïve.
4. “Othering” and “worlding” are thus two sides of the same
type of “epistemic violence” endured by colonials and ex-
colonials.
a. “Othering” – ‘disregarding, essentializing,
denuding the humanity of another culture, people
or geographical region’ (Orientalism)
b. “Worlding” – a term coined by Gayatri Spivak to
describe the way in which colonized space is
brought into the ‘world’, that is, made to exist as
part of a world essentially constructed by
Eurocentrism
v. Can the Subaltern Speak? (1985)
1. In this essay, Spivak raises issues about the voice of the
subaltern in rebellion against the colonizer, and the
authenticity of the voice of the subaltern.
2. She widened the scope of subaltern literature including the
literatures of marginalized women.
3. Though she resists essentialism and criticizes the
assumption that the sovereign subject is the source of
meaning and authority, Spivak stresses here that there is a
need for the moment of strategic essentialism
(simultaneous recognition of the impossibility of any
essentialism and the necessity of some kind of essentialism
for the sake of political action) in order to challenge the evil
designs of colonialism.
4. The answer is NO, because the imperialist oppressors speak
for them.
d. Homi K. Bhabha
i. 1949
ii. Indian postcolonial theorist
iii. Examined the process through which the native is rendered a
marginalized subject with little agency or identity
iv. His ideas of mimicry and hybridity, radically interrogates the
effectiveness of colonialism all the while pointing to its fractures.
v. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse (1984)
1. It is a term used to describe the double articulated state of
affairs in colonial countries whereby the colonial power
desires its subjugated others, namely the indigenous
population of the occupied country, to look or at least act
the same as the occupiers and yet fear that very outcome
because it would dilute their own sense of difference and
superiority.
2. The project of domesticating and civilizing indigenous
populations is founded on ideas of repetition, imitation
and resemblance
3. Teases out the ‘ambivalence’ of a project that produces
colonial subjects which are ‘almost the same, but not quite’
4. Ambivalence – literally means the coexistence of
contradictory feelings or impulses toward the same object
5. Uses the term to account for the difficult situation of the
subaltern subject torn between the material benefits
colonization sometimes brings and the crushing weight of
the loss of national sovereignty
6. The colonized subject mimics the colonizer by adopting the
colonizer’s cultural habits, language, attire, values, etc. In
doing so, he mocks and parodies the colonizer.
7. Occupying also the precarious ‘area between mimicry and
mockery’, the mimic man is therefore iconic both of the
enforcement of colonial authority and its ‘strategic failure’
8. Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial
dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behavior of
the colonized.
vi. The Location of Culture (1994)
1. Bhabha introduces his new concept of hybridity
2. Uses the term to stress the interdependence of colonizer
and the colonized and, to therefore argue that one cannot
claim a purity of racial or national identity
3. All identity, he maintains, is produced in a kind of third
space which is in between the subject and their idealized
other.
4. Hybridity is what happens when a colonized (or post-
colonized) person takes on some of a colonizer’s manners
and habits and develops a “subjectivity” (roughly speaking,
an identity) that blends the colonizer with the colonized.
IV. Postcolonialism in Relation to Media
a. Filmmakers inaccurately portray people, countries, customs, and/or beliefs
for their own benefit, at the expense of said cultural elements.
b. Aladdin (1992)
c. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
d. The Dictator (2012)
V. Summary
a. Postcolonialism is that which questions, overturns and critically refracts
colonial authority.
b. In essence, what postcolonialism, as a movement, does is to expose to both
the colonizer and ex-colonized the falsity or validity of their assumptions.
c. The pioneers of postcolonialism like Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi K.
Bhabha among others, regarded the way in which the west paved its
passage to the orient and the rest of the world as based on unconfounded
truths.
d. They asserted in their discourses that no culture is better or worse than
other cultures and consequently they nullified the logic of the colonialists.
e. Postcolonialism therefore refers to those theories, texts, political strategies
and modes of activism that engage in such questioning that aims to
challenge structural inequalities and bring about social justice.