Specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism. From the perspective/lense of the Atlantic slave trade.

ORIENTALISM – Edward Said’s theory

Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the West. “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism” Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993. ‘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.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience . . . One of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’. So what is the ‘Other’? – looking at the other in terms of race. For example stereotyping races.

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

Ideolgical State Apparatus – s 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. So, your family and friends etc influence your values.

in other words – He said ISA’s (ideological state apparatus) is what makes us, us, in society. It is a structure that we are in which is full of ideas values and beliefs. These things construct who we are as individuals so that we become a certain person. This could be your friends, school, the government, they all shape our beliefs and make us stuck there.

Hegemonic struggle (Gramsci) is the chance to reclaim. Imagine a tug of war between your own identity and what other people are telling you. Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests. In terms of postcolonialism Said, notes how ‘consent is gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native people and territories’ (1993:59).

Frantz Fanon

In terms of postcolonialism, we can look at a book called The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon, which for many (Barry, 2017, McLeod 2000 etc) is a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism. Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ (McLeod 2000:20) when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases. People in France saw him as a black stereotype and through the lease of empire.

Fanon presents three phases of action/plan ‘which traces the work of native writers’:

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’. 

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.

Paul Gilroy is insistent that ‘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.’ (2004:13) 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.

Jaques Lacan:

Theory: first time a baby looks in a mirror, this moment is called ‘the mirror phase’

This applies to representation, when black people look at tv and film, they don’t see themselves, lack of representation in the media. Television in the 1970’s represented and used ethnic minorities as the joke and often made fun of them saying they were stupid or couldn’t understand english.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience . . . One of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’. So what is the ‘Other’? – looking at the other in terms of race. For example stereotyping races.