Overview

•  Overall, this is a topic that concerns IDENTITY and REPRESENTATION
• But here it is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism

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 Culture and Imperialism, 1993
•  He asked if ‘imperialism was principally economic‘ and looked to answer that question by highlighting ‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’ (1997:3)
• ‘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
• 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).
• Paul Gilroy puts it as, ‘a civilising mission that had to conceal its own systematic brutality in order to be effective and attractive’ (2004:8)

The Orient as the “other”

• In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience [as] . . . One of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’
• Discussed by contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek, the recognition of the ‘Other’ is mainly attributed the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
• Lacan proposed that in infancy this first recognition occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror.
• Applying that theory to culture, communications and media studies, it is possible to see why we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.
• To link this to postcolonialism would be to suggest that the West uses the East / the Orient / the ‘Other’, to identify and construct itself. 
• Essentially, and most crucial for postcolonial critical thinking, it is possible to identify a process whereby REPRESENTATIONS of – the East /the Orient / the ‘Other’ – are CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER. 
• The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

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

• ” all ideology hails or interpolates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject ” – Althusser (1971:190
• 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
• Althusser noted that individuals often believe that they are ‘outside ideology’ and suggested the notion of ‘interpolation‘ as a way to recognise the formation of ideology
• In that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to recruit subjects among individuals.
• 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 postcolonialism, we can look at The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon, which for many (Barry, 2017, McLeod 2000 etc) is a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism. 
• 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
•  what we have in this section of The Wretched of the Earth 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 i.e. interpolated by other ‘subjects’ of France, who clearly saw him through the lens of Empire – racial stereotyping, derogatory abuse – as acceptable social interaction.
• 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. The second, is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past had been devalued. (Barry, 2017:195). 
• ‘On National Culture’ (pp;168-178) Fanon presents three phases of action ‘which traces the work of native writers’:

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’

Hegemony (Gramsci)

• 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, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests.
• However, 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.
• However, hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT.
• Post colonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire – even if the Empire has gone.

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

• Syncretism = the blending of cultures and ideas from different places
• 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 with much 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.’ (2004:111)
• 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 (many meanings)’.
• Even Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.

Theorists Quotes

• 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)
• Barry =  ‘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) 
• Stuart Hall = our cultural identities reflect common historical experiences and shared cultural codes (1997: 22)