Postcolonialism

An overview:

This post is for students (and teachers) who would like some resources – videos, quotes, theorists, key texts, key words etc to help them think about the topic of POSTCOLONIALISM, which may appear in a range of creative, media, culture, communications, English, History and other courses.

Overall, this is a topic that concerns IDENTITY and REPRESENTATION. In other words, 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? You can look at another post that looks at identity, representation and the self. But here it is specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism.

The Shadow of Slavery

Reaction and Reform?

Feminist Critical Thinking

<Feminist<>Female<>Feminine>

As part of our investigation into representation, we have already looked at THE MALE GAZELaura Mulvey as well as John Berger (who wrote the book Ways of Seeing) and of course, Feminist Frequency

To add to this brief introduction, we drew upon Toril Moi’s (1987) crucial set of distinctions between: ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’.

  • Feminist = a political position
  • Female = a matter of biology
  • Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

So in summary, we have already looked at a number of key concepts, ideas, approaches and theories, which can be applied to a range of cultural / media texts. For example, Jean Kilbourne‘s work at the Media Education Foundation looked at visual narrative media / culture, primarily in terms of advertising.