PostcolonialismIntroduction, key arguments, key thinkers

Ellen Impgaard Schou

Danijela Nandi

Contemporary Social Theory

What is postcolonialism?

Viral meme after (fake) news about dolphins swimming again in Venetian channel (may 2020)

● a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another (with the motivation to civilize)

● an act of political and economic domination involving the control of a country and its people by settlers from a foreign power

● The colonized people are “something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual.” (Edward Said)

Postcolonialism: out with the old, in with the aftermath

Motivation:● Critique of imperialism and its consequences● Critique of homogenous concepts (e.g. third world)● Question the tradition of Enlightenment (e.g. Eurocentric views of

civilizational superiority)● (Re)approach the subject(s) in the new light (give subject the

voice and activeness)● Understand the self as influenced by colonial heritage

Natalie Zemon Davis, DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

“Postcolonial scholars were turning the history of expansion and empire upside down. It was not enough to describe the policies of the conquering or imperial nations; the actions of their governors, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries; their treatment of and attitudes toward conquered or colonized peoples. The peoples themselves had to be given voice and agency, reacting to Europeans, suffering, resisting, exchanging knowledge and objects, sometimes intimate with Europeans, often ignoring them and going on with their lives.”

Subject: “the what” of postcolonialism

● eurocentrism vs multiplicity of possibilities (for modernism)

● (cultural) identity of the colonizer and colonized: social, political and cultural narratives

● how does the non-European world write its own history?

Who is who in postcolonial theory?

● Frantz Fanon (the concept colonial violence, revolution as the only way out) ● Edward Said (concept of “the other”, orientalism)● Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (concept of subaltern and postcolonial reason)● Homi K. Bhabha (concept of complicit postcolonialism)● Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and many more

Frantz Fanon

❖ A radical thinker! ❖ Born: 1925 ❖ Famous philosopher of anti-colonial revolution ❖ One of the founding fathers of postcolonialism ❖ Books: “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), “The Wretched of the earth”

(1961)❖ The colonized person, experience of the world and construction of

race

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.579

Orientalism: what is Orient & who says so?

Edward Said (1935-2003)

Maria Todorova, IMAGINING THE BALKANS (book recommendation)She reflects on Said’s work, differentiating that the central challenge in the perspective of the Balkan was not only the Western prism it was looked at through, but also the idea that it is static - ideas applied to describe and understand the Balkans didn’t change over a long course of time. Unlike Orient, Balkan was not the subject of comparative studies - terms used to describe it (for example “savage”) were implicitly exclusive for this territory. Not a subject of postcolonialism per se, remained in limbo.

Often considered founder of postcolonial studies

Introduces (opposed) concepts of Orient - Occident

It’s not just about the perspective, it’s about prejudice

To essentialize “the other“

For curious: review of Said’s biography in New Yorker magazine, reflecting his personal demons, intellectual heritage and burden here

The subaltern: are all those oppressed the Other?

Gayatri Spivak (1942-)

Subaltern are those oppressed by cultural imperialism

(Strategic) essentialism: (self)reducing for the purpose of assigning an essence / achieving specific goals

She wants to give subaltern voice, but not by speaking in the name of, rather interprets available material

“Can the subaltern speak?”, interpreting the ritual of sati

Film recommendation: Deepa Mehta’s Water as well as her other films. Same goes for Mira Nair and her beautiful portrayal of (postcolonial) identities and how they meet and influence one another.

Influences / intellectual framework

Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’.

Said’s definition of orientalism: A mode of discourse for representing ‘the Other’ - with supporting images, vocab, etc.

Derrida’s notion of ‘deconstruction’.

Postcolonialism focuses on the role of texts, literary and otherwise in the colonial enterprise. It examines how these texts constructs the colonizers (Masculine) as superior and colonized (effeminate) as inferior.

Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’.

You can’t buy curry in India!

Postcolonial theory deals also with influences on the dominant culture

Said: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self”

McLennan on Bhabha” “...(he) refuses to picture the subjective and imaginary relations between colonizer and colonized as a simple, undialectical one in which the rule and mind-set of the one either wholly reconstructs that of the other in its own image, or by contrast unleashes a ‘pure’ form of resistance and oppositional consciousness.”

Why is postcolonialism relevant (today)?

Prefix post has been and still is a subject of great dispute - one of them asking if post means colonialism is over?

Amerika by Rammstein, video on YouTube

SourcesDAVIS, Natalie Zemon. „Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World.“ History and Theory 50 (May 2011), s. 188–202.

Fanon, Frantz, Homi K. Bhabha, og Ziauddin Sardar. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Pluto Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kbdk/detail.action?docID=3386656.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.579

Kohn, Margaret and Kavita Reddy, "Colonialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/

Ambesange, Praveen V. “Postcolonialism: Edward Said & Gayatri Spivak.” Research Journal of Recent Sciences Vol. 5(8), 47-50, August (2016). URL

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-reorientations-of-edward-said

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism

https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1001

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0069.xml