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)
ORIENTALISM:
The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism Edward Said Culture and Imperialism – Orientalism (1978) alongside Culture and Imperialism (1993) are key texts written by the respected academic Edward Said
“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism” – Edward Said
‘the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge (cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness, and so on). At the same time, and paradoxically, the East is seen as a fascinating realm of the exotic, the mystical, and the seductive.’ (Barry, 2017:195)
‘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.” G. Kiernan
the recognition of the ‘Other’ is mainly attributed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
JACQUES LACAN = 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’
Society gives you an identity without you realizing it. society is structured to keep you in your place. Socially constructed by the ruling ideology. (ideas of the ideal class)
Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society.
Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon– is a black man living in France, articulating the way he was constructed as ‘other’ specifically through the way he was hailed, called, perceived and understood. How people saw him through the lens of Empire – racial stereotyping, derogatory abuse – as acceptable social interaction
Fanon presents three phases of action –
- 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
suggests that power relations can be understood as a hegemonic struggle through culture. Concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others.
hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT – postcolonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire
Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation
mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.
Paul Gilroy British academic 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
His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, how can you be black and British.
‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’. Barry notes the stress on ‘cross-cultural’ interactions is indeed a characteristic of postcolonial criticism.
Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’ ‘2 things put together’, or ‘unstable’.