Orientalism – The link between culture, imperial power & colonialism

Edward Said – “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”, “creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness”, “In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West”

• The East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge (cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness)
• Often discussed by contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the recognition of the ‘Other’ is mainly attributed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan

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

“All ideology hails or interpolates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject”

• 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
• In other words, the way in which society calls / addresses / hails you is interpolation, which is the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology

Frantz Fanon

• In terms of post-colonialism, we can look at 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‘ 

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

• Gramsci suggests that power relations can be understood as a hegemonic struggle through culture. In other words, 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
• In terms of post colonialism, is ‘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’

Gilroy & Du Bois

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

‘Cross-cultural’ interactions is indeed a characteristic of postcolonial criticism. Often found by foregrounding questions of cultural difference and diversity, as well as by celebrating ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural poly-valency’. A unique position where ‘individuals may simultaneously belong to more than one culture – the coloniser and the colonised’. (2016:198) Even Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.