Orientalism
The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism
‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism‘
EDWARD SAID
- eastern (orient) people couldn’t represent themselves (so represented from the west eg white people)
creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘
‘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
JAQUES LACAN
- the other, we don’t ever see ourselves only reflections
- The Other, a mirror by which a reflection of the self can be measured out and examined.
- first time a baby sees itself in a mirror
- mirror stage
- forms identity (who we are)
Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’
- ideological 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.
FRANTZ FANON
- 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’
ANTONIO GRAMSCI – Hegemony
- how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others
- (hegemonic struggle) a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT
- ‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light
- people can reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity
- hegemony = leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others.
PAUL GILROY
- Double Consciousness ( ‘cultural polyvalency’ )
- There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (cultural politics of race and nation, 1987)