From Universalism to Intercultural Approaches

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From Universalism to Intercultural Approaches

• Post-colonial History
• Lecture, 28.11.2005

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European History and Colonialism

• Colonialism can not be confined merely to the
  economic realm.
• In places like Africa and India, European
  colonial rule also meant teaching the indigenous
  people about the superiority of Western
  practices through setting up systems of police
  and courts and legislatures following European
  laws, through through sending missionaries to
  convert natives to Christianity and establishing
  churches and seminaries, and through setting up
  schools to teach European customs, European
  history, and the European languages to children
  and adults, in order to make them more like
  European citizens.

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Post-colonial Viewpoints

• Starting point Western cultural standards were
  upheld and all other notions of culture, history,
  of art or literature or philosophy, were
  denounced as inferior and subordinated to Western
  standards.
• Postcolonial theory takes on the politics of the
  study of Western history and culture from the
  perspective of those who were colonized by it.

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Postcolonial Theory

• Postcolonial designates the time after colonial
  rule, which is mostly in the mid- to late-
  twentieth century this was the era when most of
  the European colonies, such as India, fought for
  their independence from the European Empires, and
  became separate nations (decolonization).
• Postcolonial theories begin to arise in the 1960s
  as thinkers from the former colonies began to
  create their own forms of knowledge, their own
  discourses, to counter the discourses of
  colonialism
• The postcolonial discourses articulated the
  experience of the colonized, rather than the
  colonizer, giving whats called the
  subaltern--the subordinated non-white,
  non-Western subject of colonial rule--a voice.
• Postcolonial theorists examine how Western
  cultures, the colonizers, created the colonial
  subject, the subaltern, through various
  discursive practices, and examine also how
  subaltern cultures both participated in and
  worked to resist colonization, through various
  overt or covert, direct or subversive, means.

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Orientalism

• Edward Said argues, the West (or Occident)
  PRODUCED the non-white, non-Western cultures and
  peoples as inferior through a variety of
  discourses (texts, descriptions) which stated the
  terms of their existence as inferior.
• Source E Said, Orientalism.

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Orientalism II

• Said claims the West develops a sense of identity
  only through its divergence and juxtaposition to
  the East.
• The East is not only a myth but also a sign of
  European-Atlantic power over the Orient.  There
  is an inherent relationship between power and
  knowledge.

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Yellow Peril - An Example for Orientalism

• Yellow Peril - A supposed threat to the West
  posed by Japan and China. The phrase arose in the
  late nineteenth century, at a time when Japanese
  and Chinese immigration to America was meeting
  resistance and when Japan was growing as a
  military power

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Power and Knowledge

• Maps, territories and borders
• Literature Images of the Orient (China)
• Movies Popular film is an example of Western
  corporate authority over the East.
• Race as Western construct.
• Identities National and Ethnic

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Conclusion

• Postcolonial history deals with the history of
  people who cant be identified as belonging to
  one specific nation. This approach is interested
  in minorities, migrants, and outsiders.
• It challenges us to think about how we might
  organize our universities, and our systems of
  knowledge, so that we dont reproduce the
  narratives of nationhood and thus silence the
  voices which are excluded from those narratives.