Postcolonialism

 It is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

Postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’; questioning the notion of a recognised and overarching canon of important cultural texts – book, poems, plays, films etc – much of which is institutionalised into academic syllabi.

The Shadow of Slavery:

Behind many cultures and imbedded family wealth, many white family’s might’ve had an association with slave trading. The movement for black lives is a movement to look back on the past and to improve on it in a way.

ORIENTALISM:

The Link between culture, imperial power & colonialism

(Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xiii)

Simply, It is an idea and association based from the east, it aggradations cultural differences and can demonize it. It basically shows the east to be not as pure and superior as the west and undermines their differences. Thereby demoting or disregarding cultural, social, regional, and nations’ differences in experience and outlook (Barry, 2017: 194).

Postcolonial critical thought emerged as a distinct category in the 1990’s, with an aim to undermine the universalist claims 

The West painting pictures of the East.

‘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 (American: The New Imperialism) (cit in Said, 1993:350)

Overall, 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). Or as 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: The other

We cannot discover ourselves and how we are because we cannot see ourselves, we can only look in a mirror and and apprehend a reflection of ourselves. It is useless to find out who we are, finding our identity, instead it’s easier to know who we are not. A human gains self-consciousness the first time they look in a mirror and realise it is themselves. (The mirror phase)

You are always measuring who you are and who you want to be. A search for identity, by looking at the mirror, or by looking at someone else, the other… Whatever you’re doing, it is a search to find out who you are, your whole life.

We never know who we are, we only know what were not and what the other is.