orientalism: the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism
“Edward Said“:‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’
“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”
‘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’
Orient means the east
Suleri: The mode is characterised by ‘the desire to contain the intangibilities of the East within a western lucidity, but this gesture of appropriation only partially conceals the obsessive fear.
the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness
Said: 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‘
universalist claims
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”
we are Socially constructed and what socially constructs us is ‘despite its diversity and contradictions
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.
‘the category of the subject is the category constitutive of all ideology’
‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.
the way in which society calls/addresses / hails you is interpellation, which is the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology.
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‘ (McLeod 2000:20) when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases such as ‘dirty Nigger!
The Wretched of the Earth the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism
- 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
Alhussser drew part of his inspiration from Gramsci’ (Althusser, 2016: xxiv) the way in which class relations and the subject is ‘exercised through a whole set of institutions . . . the place where encounters between private individuals occur.’
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.
Said, notes how ‘consent is gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native people and territories’
this form of cultural leadership is a process of (cultural) negotiation where consent is gained through persuasion, inculcation and acceptance. Where dominant ideas, attitudes and beliefs (= ideology) are slowly, subtly woven into our very being, so that they become ‘common sense’, a ‘normal’, ‘sensible’, obvious’ way of comprehending and acting in the world.
way of reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness through image, sound, word, text, which in terms of postcolonialism, 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.’ (Said) In other words, ‘being a white man was, therefore, an idea and a reality
hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT. As such, it is not total domination (not totalitarianism or explicit propoganda) but a continual exchange of power, through ideas. In this sense, postcolonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire
Paul Gilroy double consciousness
“Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack” — A proposal for a new flag for the UK and other socially engaged artwork by Gil Mualem-Doron
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.’
postcolonial criticism the aim to understand and reconcile individual and national identity. Gilroy highlights Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood speech’ full of the ‘terrifying prospect of a wholesale reversal of the proper ordering of colonial power intensified by feelings of resentment, rejection, and fear at the prospect of open interaction with others.’
‘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’. 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’.