Jacques Lacan

• Came up with the theory of “the other”
•  A good way to develop an understanding of this term is in his exploration of the 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.
• Lacan proposed that in infancy this first recognition occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror. This was known to Lacan as the “mirror phrase”
• 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.

Edward Said

• Came up with the theory of “Orientalism”
• Orientalism is the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism
• ” the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism ” – (Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993))
• ‘In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.‘ (Said, 1993: xxi).
• Orientalism (1978) alongside Culture and Imperialism (1993) are key texts written by the respected academic Edward Said. 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)

Louis Althusser

• “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject” (Althusser (1971:190))
• Came up with then theory of ISAs (ideological states apparatus)
• ISAs are 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’ (Althusser 214:188)
• 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. 

Antonio 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. In terms of postcolonialism Said, notes how ‘consent is gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native people and territories’ (1993:59).
• 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.
• A way of reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness though 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, 1987:228)
• In other words, ‘being a white man was therefore an idea and a reality.’ (ibid)
• Hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT.
• As such, it is not total domination (not totalitarianism or explicit propaganda) but a continual exchange of power, through ideas. In this sense, 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. Put another way, it is the power of representation, played out in the realm of the cultural and civic, looking to make an affect on the political and economic.

Franz Fanon

• 3 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’.
• “From America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The ‘black world’ will see the light” (Fanon)