Key terms of the post colonial study

 Name: - Thakar Aneri R

Roll no: - 1

SEM: - 3

Paper no: - 11 Post colonial literature.

Topic: - Key terms of the post colonial study.

Guided by: - Dr.Dilip Barad

Submitted to: - Department of English,

                           Maharaja Krishanakumar sinji Bhavnagar University

ü Introduction:- In this assignment I am dealing with Key terms of post colonial and for that, first we have to clear the concept of post colonial.

ü What is post colonial literature

ü Postcolonial literature, a category devised to replace and expand upon what was once called Commonwealth Literature. As a label, it thus covers a very wide range of writings from countries that were once colonies or dependencies of the European powers.

I am dealing with some key terms like Anti colonialism, Anti imperialism, Other, Discourse and Hybridity.

ü Anti colonialism

                                “Anti- colonialism is an act of political struggle of colonized people against the specific ideology and practice of colonialism”
Anti colonialism signifies the point at which the various forms of opposition become articulated as a resistence to the operation of colonialism in political, economic and cultural instituation.  . It emphasizes the need to reject colonial power and restore local control. Paradoxically, anti-colonialist movements often expressed themselves in the appropriation and subversion of forms borrowed from the institutions of the colonizer and turned back on them. Thus the struggle was often articulated in terms of a discourse of anti-colonial 'nationalism' in which the form of the modern European nation-state was taken over and employed as a sign of resistance (see nation/nationalism). The sometimes arbitrary arrangements of colonial governance – such as the structures of public administration and forums for local political representation – became the spaces within which a discourse of anti-colonial nationalism was focused and a demand for an independent postcolonial nation-state was formed (see Anderson 1983; Chatterjee 1986, 1993).

Anti-colonialism has taken many forms in different colonial situations; it is sometimes associated with an ideology of racial liberation, as in the case of nineteenth-century West African nationalists such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and James Africanus Horton (ideologies that might be seen as the precursors of twentieth-century movements such as négritude). Conversely, it may accompany a demand for recognition of cultural differences on a broad and diverse front, as in the Indian National Congress which sought to unite a variety of ethnic groups with different religious and racial identities in a single, national independence movement.

In the second half of the twentieth century, anti-colonialism was often articulated in terms of a radical, Marxist discourse of liberation, and in constructions that sought to reconcile the internationalist and anti-elitist demands of Marxism with the nationalist sentiments of the period (National Liberation Fronts), in the work and theory of early national liberationist thinkers such as C.L.R.James, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, (see Fanonism, national liberation). Such anti-colonial, national liberation movements developed the Marxist idea of a revolutionary cadre to explain the crucial role of the European (colonial) educated intelligentsia in the anti-colonial struggle. These movements argued that the peasant/proletarian needed to be led to a practice of liberation – through various stages of local and national affiliation – by a bourgeois élite who would eventually, in Cabral's dramatic formulation, 'commit suicide' by developing a popular and local social practice in which they would be assimilated.

Cabral, in particular, developed this idea of the need to empower and recognize the local as a specific and distinct feature of post-colonial politics in ways that radicalized the more rigid and orthodox practices of post-Stalinist Marxist thought. Unlike later nationalist formulations of the new bourgeois post-independence élites, however, there is here no sentimental or mythologized attachment to an idealized pre-colonial condition. The local is perceived to be fully corrigible and involved in an inevitable process of historical change:

the working masses and in particular the peasants, who are usually illiterate sand have never moved beyond the boundaries of their village or their region, come into contact with other groups and lose those complexes of their own that constricted them in their relationships with other ethnic and social groups. They realize their crucial role in the struggle. They break the bonds of the village universe. They integrate progressively into their country and the world. … The armed liberation struggle implies, therefore, a veritable forced march along the road to cultural progress.

(Cabral, January 1969)

(See also the account offered by Edward Said (1993:264) of the contrastive and more progressive discourse of nationalism employed by these early ant colonialist figures compared with the regressive discourse of some modern post-colonial nationalists.)

Cabral's contribution has received less recognition than that of Fanon, whose political practice was arguably less developed, though his theories of the formation of colonial consciousness were among the most powerful contributions to the creation of an effective anti colonial discourse. Anti-colonialism frequently perceived resistance to be the product of a fixed and definitive relationship in which colonizer and colonized were in absolute and implacable opposition. As such it was less a feature of settler colonies, where a more obvious form of complicity occurred between the colonial power and the settler in, for example, and their suppression of the indigenous peoples. Settler colonies illustrate the power of filiative modes of cultural representation to affect a stronger and more complete hegemony of the colonial culture. In settler colonies, the struggle to articulate the underlying economic and political discriminations of a colonial relationship, that is to move to an awareness of the limited and affiliative connections of the colony and the colonial power, is central to any anti-colonial impulse. In settler colony situations, resistance at the level of cultural practice may occur before the political importance of such resistance is articulated or perceived.

ü Hybridity

                   Hybridity two different definitions

ü Catalysis: the (specifically New World) experience of several ethnic groups interacting and mixing with each other often in a contentious environment that gives way to new forms of identity and experience.

ü Creolization: societies that arise from a mixture of ethnic and racial mixing to form a new material, psychological, and spiritual self-definition.

ü Hybridity is a cross between two separate races or cultures. A hybrid is something that is mixed, and hybridity is simply mixture. As an explicative term, hybridity became a useful tool in forming a fearful discourse of racial mixing that arose toward the end of the 18th Century. Pseudo-scientific models of anatomy and craniometry were used to argue that Africans, Asians, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders were racially inferior to Europeans. The fear ofmiscegenatio that followed responds to the concern that the offspring of racial interbreeding would result in the dilution of the European race. Hybrids were seen as an aberration, worse than the inferior races, a weak and diseased mutation. Hybridity as a concern for racial purity responds clearly to the zeitgeist of colonialism where, despite the backdrop of the humanitarian age of enlightenment, social hierarchy was  

ü Beyond contention as was the position of Europeans at its summit. The social transformations that followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration, and economic liberalization profoundly altered the use and understanding of the term hybridity.

ü Theorists of Hybridity

ü Homi Bhabha

ü Nester Garcia

ü Stuart Hall

ü Gayatri Spivak

ü Paul Gliroy

ü Other:-

ü Other: the social and/or psychological ways in which one group excludes or marginalizes another group. By declaring someone "Other," persons tend to stress what makes them dissimilar from or opposite of another, and this carries over into the way they represent others, especially through stereotypical images.

ü Before the modern world system where the politics  and economy of nation states are relatively interdependent, there existed what is classified as the “system of world empires” up until the 1500s in this world system political and economic affairs of different empires were fragmented and empires “provided for most of their own needs….[spreading] the influence solely through conquest or  the threat of conquest  the maintenance of this unequal relationship wholly depends on the subordination of an “Other” group or peoples, from which  resources can be taken and land can be exploited Other. Othering is “A term, advocated by Edward Said, which refers to the act of emphasizing the perceived weaknesses of marginalized groups as a way of stressing the alleged strength of those in positions of power”.

ü Discourse

ü “ It is a systems of thoughts composed of idea,attitudes,courses of action ,beliefs and practices hat systematically  constructs the subjects and the worlds  of which they speak

                              Michel Foucault

The term, discourse, generally refers to “written or spoken communication or debate. Structuralist theorists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques lacan, argue that all human actions and social formations are related to language and can be understood as systems of related elements. This means that the “…….individual elements of a system only have significance when considered in relation of the structure as a whole, and that structures are to be under stood as self-contained, self-regulated, and self-transforming entities.

                                       “French; social theorist Michel Foucault developed a notion of discourse in his early work, especially the Archaeology of knowledge (1972).

ü Anti-imperialism

ü                     Anti-imperialism is a term that may be applied to movement opposed to any form of colonialism or imperialism. Anti- imperialism includes opposition to wars of conquest, particularly of non-contiguous territory or people with a different language or culture; it also includes people opposing the expansion of a country beyond earlier borders. Examples of anti imperialists include Republican senators of the roman republic, and members of anti-imperialist League that opposed the absorption of the Philippines after the Spanish- American war of 1898.