Postcolonialism is about where does our identity come from? How is our identity formed? How do we understand our own identity and how is our identity represented in the local, national and global media? 

The slave trade; started in the mid 1400’s as Americans needed workers for the agricultural industry so Africans were sold over to by their own kings. They were brought over by ship and deprived of any legal rights and slave owner had complete power over the blacks. Importation of people ended in the 1800’s but enslavement continued.

postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim

Edward Said

Showed how the West painted a picture of the East

Orientalism is 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: xiii

‘the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge (cruelty, sensuality, decadence, lazine)’

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‘.

Jacques Lacan- The “other”

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 in media, 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.

The West uses the East / the Orient / the ‘Other’, to identify and construct itself. 

REPRESENTATIONS of – the East /the Orient / the ‘Other’ – are CONSTRUCTED through the lens of WESTERN COLONIAL POWER.