Postcolonialism Flashcards
(41 cards)
What are the two forms of postcolonialism?
- Temporal - historical claim
- Ideological - theoretical approach
What is the difference between Imperalism and Colonialism?
- Imperialism is the phenomenon that originates in metropolis
- Colonalism is what happens in the colonies as a consquence of imperial domination
Loomba, 1998
What are contact zones?
- Spaces of colonial encounters
- Difference bounded up within these spaces
- “Come into contact with each other and establish on going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and conflict” (Pratt, 1992)
- Akin to the ‘frontier’ from a European expansionist perspective
- Threshold of civilized society – do not have much knowledge
- Subjects’ identities constituted in and by their relations to each other
What are the two major claims to postcolonialism?
- There is nothing essential to culture
- Knowledge connect with operations of power
What are the claims around knowledge in postcolonial theory?
- Knowledge about ‘Others’ and other places circulated in Europe
- Consolidates certain ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’
What are the claims about culture in postcolonial studies?
- ‘Cultures’ of colonizer/colonized transformed through colonial encounter
- Production of alterity
- Implication: nothing essential about ‘culture’
- Invented, produced and historically constituted
- ‘Culture’ as a project of control
- Sets up categories of (convenient) opposition
- Introduces power dynamism
- Superiority
What were the major developments post WWII?
- US hegemony replaces European powers
- Power defined through abstract geography of the world market rather than territory
- Technological transformations of concepts of space
What is critical history of geography?
Sensitive to the various ways in which geographical knowledge has been implicated in relationships of power
Driver, 1992
How did visual representations play a role in shaping imaginative geographies?
- Exhibitions of colonial booty –> constructing symbolic geography that reinforced distance between subjects and consumers of these images
- Photographs claimed to represent the world as it really was: each person, each race, in their own place
Driver, 1992
What does Said’s memoir ‘Out of Place’ capture?
- Captures the interplay between a sense of place and a sense of self
- Neither are fixed or bounded
Blunt and McEwan, 2002
What do Ashcroft et al. (1998) critically remark about contact zones?
- Every contact zone is different and each post-colonial occasions needs to be precisely located and analysed for its specific interplay
- Shows that geography should lie at the hear of postcolonial critiques
Ashcroft et al., 1998
What two binaries are cast in postcolonial theory?
- Temporal binary between colonial past and postcolonial present
- Spatial binary between colonial centres and postcolonial margins
- Two way relationship between metropolis and colony (Loomba, 1998)
- Error to dismiss postcolonial critique on the grounds of itself being Western –> impact of non-European thought on European thought as itself European (Young, 2016)
What does Chakrabarty (2000) argue in his book?
- Argues that discipline of history was rooted in idea of human progress
- Overriding theme was to show how societies had either developed, or failed to develop, in a ‘modern’ direction
- Led to development of particularly writings by colonial rules in colonised regions
- “Why can we [Third World historians] not return the gaze?” (p. 29)
What false distinction does Postcolonalism look to dispell?
False distinction between colonisation as ‘a system of rule, power and exploitation’ and ‘a system of knowledge and representation’
Hall, 1995
What did Marx say about representation?
“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”
What is a discourse?
A series of representation and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible
What is Spviak’s premise around the subaltern?
Human subjects are not fixed essences; identities and subjectivities are shifting
What are Spivak’s two concerns about giving the subaltern a voice?
- Cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people through categorization as ‘subaltern’
- Dependence upon western intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak themselves
What were the effects of British outlawing sati?
- • British outlawing of sati - Hindu practice of burning a widow on her husband’s pyre
- Might have saved some lives and given women a voice of free choice but also served to secure British power and underscore difference between British ‘civilization and Indian ‘barbarism’
What are the critiques of postcolonalism?
- Seeking ‘whole truth’ for a postcolonial geography reproduces the epistemological drive of the colonial project itself
- Creating rational, universal knowledge about world as one of the quests of colonialism
- Should aim instead to open layers of questions about what is taken for granted in western geographical narratives
- Mistaken for this narratives to be self-contained, universal and eternal truths
- McNeece (1995): ‘To become aware of what it means to confront difference, to look again at what we think we know’
How does Jazeel (2014) alternatively conceptualize subalternity as?
Reimagined as a word to evoke spatialities obstructed by the Euro-American power
What is Jazeel’s appeal for postcolonial geographies?
Continute to dwell in the domain of representation
Jazeel (2014)
What is Haldrup et al. (2006) banal orientalism?
- Banal orientalism event in European context through everyday routine way of talking and acting in life
- Language force people to think in ‘us’ – ‘them’ dichotomies – a habit that enables internal orientalization to be (re)produced
- Material items are inscribed with symbols that are regularly negotiated in a European context
- The prohibition of scarves in different countries (France and Denmark) are (re)producing symbols of belonging
What does banal orientalism equip people with?
Equips people with an identity and ideological consciousness and internalises them within the them of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘homeland’ and the world at large
Hadrup et al. (2006)
