Colonialism

Orientalism

the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism – Edward Said
the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience – Edward Said
creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness – Edward Said
we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not
we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.

Ideological state apparatus (ISA)
ISA describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity.
the notion of ‘Interpellation’
the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology.

The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism.
mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared – Fanon
Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others
a flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand – Said
exercised through a whole set of institutions . . . the place where encounters between private individuals occur – Ibid

we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.
It is possible to see why we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.
The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity
‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.‘

‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light‘ – FRANTZ Fanon
the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.
The second, is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued