• Looking at identity, representation and the self, specifically through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.
• From perspective of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Racism + Post Colonialism)

• ORIENTALISM: Said
• The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism – theory/critical approach by Edward Said.
• Wrote culture and imperialism
• Looked at canon in literature – West – white, male, imperial perspective
• Culture is as important in creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness’.
• How do people allow slavery to happen? authority figure? – complexity
• Through Lit and culture can legitimates – through beliefs and visions – if everyone does it – create environment where it is acceptable
• Lens of empire creates ideas of the world (slavery allowed)
• Dominate cultures can have… 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: xiii
• V. G. Kiernan (American: The New Imperialism) (cit in Said, 1993:350 -‘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’
•  Paul Gilroy puts it, ‘a civilising mission that had to conceal its own systematic brutality in order to be effective and attractive’ (2004:8)

Jacques Lacan – Mirror Stage (First time children see themselves in the mirror – unnerving. Only see what they aren’t not what they are.)

• Socially constructed
• cannot see of know ourselves
• only through exploring the other – what we are not
• Representation of the East as the Other -CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER.
• Theory of the other – people are the living embodiment of being the other.
• Wrote in 1980s

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

• Ideological state apparatus (ISA) – structures full of ideas and beliefs, connected to state/dominate interest.
• Socially constructed
• Interpellation and haling – way in which identity is formed/way you are seen therefore you seen yourself
• The way you are portrayed is the way you begin to see yourself and become – Not free
• Ideas that form you is the society of the ruling class – dominate ideas – ruling class – Marxism – want everyone to thing the same (Slavery and Genocide)
• Trapped in ideological state apparatus (ISA) – herd mentality
• Blackface – racism in art form

Frantz Fanon

• From a French Slave Colony – Interpellation
• The Wretched of the Earth (1961) – writes about treatment/experience
• saw him through lens of empire
• Faced derogatory phrases
• Came up with this 3 point pla:
• 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’.
• Music Video: Through music can see hegemony – nothing is fixed/fluid (Gramsci)- Hegemonic struggle the chance to reclaim …

Syncretism, Double Consciousness & Hybridisation

• These words are mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.
• Paul Gilroy – double conciseness (Think consciously about two things).
• Wrote in 1990s – He was a Black Academic in London.
• Wrote a book called, ‘There a’nt not back in the union jack’.
• ‘Place of racism in comtempory political cultural’.
• Double conciseness – Gilroy developed idea from Dubois
• 1950s – needed cheap labor to rebuild people came from all over the world e.g.India
• Idea of being Black, British/Black-America – seeing themselves as duplicity – see a separation
• Multicultural – multiple cultures
• Hybirdity – many
• Ambiguous – changeable
• Cultural polyvalency – many cultural identities
• Music Videos: Emigrants came over and brought new music (reggae – two tones) – hybirdisation

Black History

• Roman, Tudor
• Slave owners compensated for loss of ‘probity’
• Slaves weren’t freed instantly

Dubois

• Wrote ‘Souls of black folk’, in 1903 – about the effects of racism on identity
• Disabling black people to reach full potential in society and therefore as human beings

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony: struggle for a better society.