Postcolonialism

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Postcolonialism
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postcolonialism

• 1) critical interrogation of the
  entanglement of academic disciplines including
  anthropology, geography, archaeology and
  literature in colonialism

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• 2) Rethinking history not in terms of stages, nor
  in terms of the progressive expansion of the west

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• Modernity has always been associated with a
  certain place. In many ways, the modern is just a
  synonym for the West (or in more recent writings,
  the North). Modernization continues to be
  commonly understood as a process begun and
  finished in Europe, from where it has been
  exported across ever-expanding regions of the
  non-West. The destiny of those regions has been
  to mimic, never quite successfully, the history
  already performed by the West. To become modern,
  it is still said, or today to become postmodern,
  is to act like the West, Timothy Mitchell,
  Questions of Modernity, p.1

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• 3) Not a romanticism of the non-west
• This would be problematic
• Epistemologically
• Historically
• Politically

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Turkey

• 1) denial of Armenian genocide
• 2) human rights record
• 3) invasion of cyprus
• 4) non-Chistian

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• despite the violent physical and symbolic
  erasure of most of the Greek, Armenian,
  Syriac-Christian, and Jewish presence, the
  territory of Turkey that remained was still quite
  cosmopolitan. The early nationalists had to make
  monoculturalist sense out of a country that was
  composed of speakers of Kurdish, Laz, Arabic,
  Azeri, Serbo-Croation, Ladino, Armenian, Greek
  and Turkish and of people with ancestral roots in
  Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, the
  Aegean Islands, Anatolia, the Caucasus, Central
  Asia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.
  A singular imagined community had to be
  composed from the results of war, deportation,
  diaspora, and immigration. Now composed of
  Muslims, secular Turkey could not count on a
  singular category of belonging. The early
  nationalists hoped that Muslim heirs of the
  empire, diverse as they were, would become
  assimilated as Turkish Yael Navaro-Yashin,
  Faces of the State, Princeton 2002, p.65

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Interrogating the orientalisation of Turkey

• 1) Turkey a copy of a European nation-state?
• 2) The construction of Anatolia
• 3) Occidentalism

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Egypt

• There are many different ways to describe the
  nature of the market economy, yet every
  description carries a common assumption. It is
  variously said to be based on principles of
  self-interest, profit-making ..Different
  accounts of the economy may highlight or ignore
  different features. But every attempt to describe
  the capitalist economy inevitably attempts to
  capture what distinguishes the market system from
  the non-market, or the capitalist mode of
  production from the non-capitalist. The
  distinction gives capitalism its identity
  Mitchell, The Rule of Experts, p.244-245

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• 1) Conceiving of the Egyptian economy as a
  unified totality
• 2) Its formation as an object of government
• 3) Distinguishing market capitalism from the
  non-market economy