Concerns IDENTITY and REPRESENTATION
Narrative of white supremacy created during slavery – 40,000 to 435,000 slaves in Alabama
ORIENTALISM
Edward Said
‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’ (1997:3) – culture sets normative values
‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism‘ Culture and Imperialism – The Orient (Asia) can’t tell their own stories and so only the white experience can be told about.
‘The East is seen as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive.’ (Barry, 2017:195) – portray aspects that Westerners do not want for themselves such as cruelty and sensuality.
‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘. (Said, 1978:238)
The Orient could not represent themselves – fixed narrative
Jacques Lacan – Theory of the ‘Other’
Mirror stage – can’t see ourselves as a whole and use a reflection to understand who we are/ are not
The West tries to work out the ‘Other’ (East) but also the East are tries to work out the West – duality
Louis Althusser – ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’
Ideological state apparatus (ISA) is a concept where societal structures such as education and cultures but also family, religion are used to make people believe something by the state.
We are socially constructed by ‘the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’,’ (2014:245).
‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.
Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ (McLeod 2000:20)
In the chapter ‘On National Culture’ (pp;168-178) Fanon presents three phases of action ‘which traces the work of native writers’:
- 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) – reclaim past
- Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’ – erode colonialist ideology
- Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’
Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony
How culture is not fixed and how culture changes with ideas and actions such as N.W.A disobeying police orders to play their music.
Power relations = hegemonic struggle through culture.
Paul Gilroy (W.E.B. Dubois) – Double Consciousness
Multiple identities (hybridisation) such as being black and British etc.