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 the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands.
The name postcolonialism is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods, and may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism. The ambiguous term colonialism may refer either to a system of government or to an ideology or world view underlying that system—in general postcolonialism represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism. The term postcolonial studies may be preferred for this reason.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, it may seek through anthropological study to build a better understanding of colonial life from the point of view of the colonized people, based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators.
On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with contemporary history and critical theory, and may also draw examples from history, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and human geography.
Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature and Christian thought.
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