Postcolonialism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
“For any European during the nineteenth century – and I think one can say this almost without qualification – Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.” -- Edward W. Said, Orientalism pp. 203-4 |
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Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of native people and their lands. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyze the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by examining the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the imperial regime's depictions (social, political, cultural) of the colonizer and of the colonized.
As a genre of contemporary history, post colonialism questions and reinvents the manner in which a culture is being viewed, challenging the narratives expounded during the colonial era. Anthropologically, it records human relations between the colonists and the peoples under colonial rule, seeking to build an understanding of the nature and practice of colonial rule. As a critical theory, it presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and practice of neocolonialism with examples drawn from history, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and human geography. It also examines the effects of colonial rule on the cultural aspects of the colony and its treatment of women, language, literature, Christian thought, and humanity.
Literature of postcolonialism
- Foundation works
- Le Procès de la colonization française (French Colonization on Trial) (1924), by Nguyen Ai Quoc
- Discourse on Colonialism (1950), by Aimé Césaire
- Black Skin, White Masks (1952), by Frantz Fanon
- The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon
- The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965), by Albert Memmi
- Consciencism (1970), by Kwame Nkrumah
- Orientalism (1978), by Edward Said
- Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Postcolonial works of fiction
- Contemporary Authors of Postcolonial Fiction
See also
- Burn! (1969), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
- Cultural cringe
- Critical theory
- Cross-culturalism
- The Dogs of War (1980), directed by John Irvin
- Ethnology
- An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1975), by Chinua Achebe
- Inversion in postcolonial theory
- Linguistic imperialism
- Nation-building
- Postcolonial anarchism
- Postcolonial feminism
- Postcolonial literature
- Postcolonial theology
- Post-Communism
- Subaltern