You can look at another post that looks at identity, representation and the self. But here it is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.
From the perspective of the Atlantic slave trade.
ORIENTALISM:
The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism (Edward Said)
Link between culture, imperial power and colonialism
‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’ (V.G. Kiernan).
THE ORIENT AS THE ‘OTHER’ Jacques Lacan
CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER. So as much as the concept and image of ‘the West’ itself, 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.
Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’
all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject.
Hailed/interpellated: the way you are called and how others view you and how you therefore view yourself.
Hailing the dominant ideas
Frantz Fanon:
The Wretched of the Earth (1961): Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared.
Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.
- 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’.
Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation
mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities. Paul Gilroy
His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency follow this wiki link for more on this point.
‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’(many cultural identities).