The post colonialism slides

1. Post colonialism

2. Brainstorming question
• What happens, how ever when ones idea, once thinking, even once personal
background does not conform?
• What happens when for example the dominated culture consists of white,
Anglo-Saxons males and one is black female?

3. Defining it
• Writers/thinkers/philosopher of postcolonialism including Toni Morrison,
Alice walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many others believe that
individuals view of life of values, and ethics really matter. Not capitalism
who defines the cycle of life of individuals in any state.

4. History of Post colonialism
• The postcolonialism is result of 4 thousand year old colonies of Africa, Asia
between the western world.
• During 19 century great Britain become the imperial country, the colonizer.
• The mid of 19 century the terms like colonialism, colonial interests and British
empire are been mainly used and spread in all over the world.
• The age when the colonizers started justifying their brutal reactions and treatments
towards the colonies.
• The early 20 century, British started loosing its economic, social and ideological
domination known as decolonization.

5. • 1950s is considered the beginning of post colonialism. The age is started
with India’s independence. Many scholars believe that this steps becomes the
first beginning of Post colonialism. When British colonies break and got
independence in shape of Pakistan and India.

6. MAJOR theorists of Post colonial time
• Homi Bhabha: The theory of Homi K. Bhabha is based on the existence of such space where cultural borders open up to each other,
and creation of a new hybrid culture that combines their features and atones their differences.
• Gayatri Spivak: Spivak's academic career was launched after she translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) into English and
wrote its preface. In addition to her work on Derrida, Spivak has authored a number of critical texts and edited numerous collections of essays,
including A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason (1999); Death of a Discipline (2003); and Other Asias (2007). Spivak has given numerous interviews on her
thinking about Postcolonialism and teaching.
• Frantz Fanon: A psychiatrist, Fanon was interested in the emotional effects of racism and colonization on blacks. Fanon considered
himself French, but his experience as a black man in France caused him to rethink his ideas about culture and identity.
• Edward Said: As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the
bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient.
• Aijaz Ahmed: He was the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Humanities’ Department of
Comparative Literature. He was Marxist, communist.
• Sarah Ahmed,
• Talal Asad

7. Key concepts of Post colonialism
• Binaries: Binary oppositions are structurally related to one another, and in colonial discourse there may be a variation of the
one underlying binary – colonizer/colonized – that becomes rearticulated in any particular text in a number of ways, e.g. colonizer :
colonized. white : black. civilized : primitive. advanced : retarded.
• center/ periphery: The periphery in postcolonial literature refers to those that are on the margins of society. Those
people or groups that are side lined and oppressed can be described as the periphery. History, because of the control exerted by those in
the centre over it, usually excludes the stories of those in the periphery.
• Us/Other: Us term is for the dominant one and others are the colonial countries or people.
• marginalization, The term 'Marginality' is generally applied to interpret and analyze socio-cultural, political and
economic spheres, where underprivileged people struggle to gain access to resources, and equal participation in social
life.
• double voiced Ness: two souls, two thoughts exists in one dark body

8. Assumptions
All post colonial critiques believes following things
1. European colonialism did not occur.
2. The British Empire is the Centre of colonialism.
3. The social, political, and economic effects of such colonialization are still
being felt today.

9. Terms
• Third Space,
• liminality,
• hybridity,
• assimilation,
• ecological mimeticism,
• The minoritization of the English language through code-switching
• and code-mixing etc.
• Diaspora: Diaspora refers to people who have been displaced or dispersed from their homelands, and who possess and share a
collective memory and myth, and the nostalgic reminiscence of “home” (“imaginary homelands” to use Rushdie’s term) or an inherited
ideology of “home” becomes a personal identity as well as a collective identity of members of a particular community.

10. Postcolonial theory and the diasporic experience
• Diasporic theorists such as Avtar Brah and Robin Cohen propose the idea of a home as a mythic one, a place of desire in
the diasporic imagination, a place to which there can be no return, despite the possibilities of visiting the place that is seen
as the place of origin.
• Hybridity/ Syncretism: The Schizophrenic state of the migrant as s/he attempts to combine the culture of origin with
that of the host country, without abandoning either is called ‘Hybridity” or “Syncretism”.
• The central theme in postcolonial diasporic literature is the negotiation of two identities — the split consciousness of being
both, yet neither completely; the multiple identities or solidarities; or in extreme cases, reassertion of native cultural identity
as manifest in cultural fundamentalism. Hybridity in postcolonial studies has been influenced by the work of political
theorists like Will Kymlicka who posits a “multicultural citizenship” in the globalised world.
• This leads to the emergence of new identities where the original identity, historical experiences and memories are not
abandoned but is constructively merged with the host culture, to move beyond the “constructed” limits of both, forging
solidarities against essential racial oppression. Cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall have argued for “new ethnicities” that
deny ideas of essential black or essential white identity, proposing a “real heterogeneity of interests and identities.”