looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

perspective of the Atlantic salve trade:

orientalism: the power to narrate, or block other narratives from forming or emerging is very important to culture and imperialism = Edward Said

he suggested that culture is important as violence for creating “an accepted grid for filtering through the orient into western consciousness”

black slavery is done through belief, visions

as he came from middle east – he wanted to recognise that the non white doesnt have the power to narrate = dominant cultures ‘(white slave traders)

Orientism – ‘distort your vision’

postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim 

Paul Gilroy puts it, ‘a civilising mission that had to conceal its own systematic brutality in order to be effective and attractive’ 

Jacques Lacan – theory of the orient as the other

• you never know who you are’ = we are socially constructed

• we only know who we are, by exploring the other
• mirror stage – we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not

Louis Althusser – theory of interpellation – ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject

= ideology state apparatus (ISA)

• ‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.
• = hailed or interpellated to look something
• society forms you – the dominant ideas are from the dominant class
• we are trapped in ideological state apparatus and hailed and kept in your place – you just go along with what everyone else says
• BLACKFACE – a cultural history of a racist art form – racist show business

Frantz Fanon – ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared”

came up with a 3 point plan:

1. 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)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

antontio gamschi – hegemony – culture/society changes and shift (nothing is fixed – things move: cuture, power.

use the culture to challenge

media creates things to have the potential to change society, power, in the concept of hegemony:”the last poets” – “niggers are scared of revolution”

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities. – book = “Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack” — A proposal for a new flag for the UK and other socially engaged art work by Gil Mualem – Doron

Britain haas a multi cultural community = workers from India, and other cultures come to work in Britain after the ww2

hybrid identity

ambrigurity = unsure

cultural polyvalency = having many cultural identities

immigrants grow up listening to reggae – living in Britain -becomes aware of rock – two tone expression (merge of two genres of music)

Paul Gilroy (British, black academic = ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’ 

talks about double consciousness = Paul developed from a black American W.E.B Dubois (talks about being a American black ‘split identity’ – thinking about two things – talks about being black and British (double consciousness)

Black History

• Roman, tudor
• slaves were not feed instantly