Orientalism-

• Edward Said, the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism
• the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism
• 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.‘
• POSTCOLONIALISM operates a series of signs maintaining the European-Atlantic power over the Orient by creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘. (Said, 1978:238)
• ‘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’

THE ORIENT AS THE ‘OTHER’

• The recognition of the ‘Other’ is mainly attributed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
•  A good way to develop an understanding of this term is in his exploration of the mirror stage of child development, whereby, as we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.

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
• Ideological state apparatus (ISA)
• we are socially constructed and what socially constructs us is ‘despite its diversity and contradictions . . . the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’,

Frantz Fanon

• Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases such as ‘dirty Nigger!’ or ‘look, a Negro!’ 
• as an early critical thinker of postcolonialism, 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. 
• 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’.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

• ‘from America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light
•  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.
•  hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT.

Commons letter To The Free

• Q1:How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?
• Q2: Can you apply Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action to this music video?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

Ghost Town by The Specials 

• Q1: Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?
• Q2: How does this text apply to Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

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.
• As Barry notes the stress on ‘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 polyvalency’.
•  Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.