Paul Gilroy – ‘No Black in the Union Jack’
Jacques Lacan – Theory of ‘The Other’ (a living embodyment of being the other – postcolonial). The orient as ‘The Other’. The mirror phase – doesn’t necessarily look as we feel – refers to double concious, we use a reflection to understand who we are/ who we want to be or who we are not.
Most of the time words can’t accurately justify how we actually feel or who we actually are.
Edward Said – ‘The orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience as .. one of its deepeat and most recurring images of the Other’
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
Orientalism 1978 – ‘Colonial narrative’. Shows how the West paints a picture/ STEREOTYPES the East. What stories are you being told via the media? Objective? rational VS irrational? Orientalism can be used as a lense when watching or reading media in order to decode the narrative in terms of colonialsism or racial stereotyping.
Stuart Hall – 80s – The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that whoever produces the text fills the product with values and messages. The text is then decoded by the audience.
Louis Althusser – ISA’s & the noton of ‘interpellation‘ ISA’s – Ideological State Apparatus. Ideological state apparatuses (ISA), according to Althusser, use methods other than physical violence to achieve the same objectives as RSA. … Instead of expressing and imposing order, through violent repression, ISA disseminate ideologies that reinforce the control of a dominant class.
ISA theory 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.
ISA = constrain and keep individuals where they are, groups/ stereotype though schools, friends, family, sexuality.
Gramsci – Hegemony – A struggle for what is right and wrong (tug of war). Though as you are an individual you can reject ideas or opinions. ‘A chance to reclaim’
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. reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.
- 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’.