Ethnic and Post-Colonial Studies

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Ethnic and Post-Colonial Studies
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Ethnic and Post-Colonial Studies

• Authors in previous study blocks have critiqued
  stable, fixed notions of identity, identity as a
  state, preferring to inscribe subjectivity within
  a fluid, variable, culturally determined and
  ongoing process.
• In this section the emphasis shifts, however,
  from gender or sexuality to ethnicity, race and
  the post-colonial subject.

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• Stuart Hall has noted a revisioning or splitting
  of the term ethnicity, between the dominant
  notion which connects it to nation and race and
  a recognition that we all speak from a
  particular place, out of a particular history,
  out of a particular experience, a particular
  culture We are all, in this sense, ethnically
  located.

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• Halls linkage of particularity to commonality
  (we all speak from a particular place, etc.)
  enfolds ethnicities such as Englishness which
  have traditionally survived by marginalizing,
  dispossessing, displacing and forgetting other
  ethnicities.

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• The totalizing project of Englishness in colonies
  under British imperial rule, and its questioning
  by intellectuals and critics of the second half
  of the 20th century, lie at the heart of what has
  come to be known as post-colonial criticism.

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• Within a poststructuralist environment and
  drawing on its methodology, post-colonial critics
  analyze the repercussions of European cultural
  and territorial expansion from its beginnings to
  the present day.
• They examine the mutually reinforcing enterprise
  of colonialism and the cultures of the
  colonizers, as well as the interaction between
  colonizers and colonized.

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• Post-colonial aims at recovering the marginalized
  excluded or otherwise silenced voices of colonial
  or subaltern voices.
• Finally, post-colonial studies explore and
  theorize identity as determined by colonial and
  post-colonial experience, national affiliation
  and a globalised world.

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• The field emerged in the second half of the 20th
  century after WW II, when the colonial enterprise
  started breaking down and European colonial
  powers such as France and England granted
  independence to many of its colonies.

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• Internal colonial situations such as those
  suffered by African Americans in the United
  States and the black majority in South Africa
  faced significant and mounting challenges to
  racist practices and abuse.
• Colonial hegemony had been enforced by the
  imposition of the colonizers language and
  cultures, and attention in the post-colonial
  studies turned to the role of literature which,
• as Michael Ryan notes, came to be seen as a
  privileged site for understanding the social
  structures, cultural codes, and psychological
  tropes of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic
  understanding and misunderstanding.

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• Race and ethnicity interest us for the ways in
  which they are represented, mediated or otherwise
  signify through literary texts. Ryan reminds us
  that culturally constructed racial or ethnic
  identities bear a specific relationship to
  literature. Much of the most influential
  post-colonial criticism has been generated by
  authors who were born in formerly colonized
  nations

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• The Nigerian author and critic Chinua Achebes
  essay An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads
  Heart of Darkness is a foundational text of
  post-colonial criticism.
• It exposes the racism that lies at the heart of
  Heart of Darkness, a racism in which Western
  culture is given the privileged status of
  Conrads text in Western canon.
• Palestinian-born American critic Edward Saids
  Orientalism is one of the foremost landmarks
  credited with having laid the groundwork for the
  field.

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Said

• Interacting with the emerging poststructuralist
  theory, he was one of Michel Foucaults most
  distinguished disciples, drawing on his studies
  of discourse and power, or discourse as power, to
  elucidate the function of cultural
  representations on the construction and
  maintenance of First / Third World relations.

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• Said takes on the challenge of the post-colonial,
  to elucidate how knowledge that is non-dominative
  and non-coercive can be produced in a setting
  that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the
  considerations, the positions and the strategies
  of power (Orientalism Reconsidered). He put into
  circulation the term the other to describe the
  enduring stereotypes and thinking about the
  Orient generated by European imperialism.

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• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha,
  (Spivak is Bengali, Bhabha is Indian), have
  driven post-colonial criticism further down the
  route of imaginative interaction between theory
  and politics, analytical discourse and the
  anti-imperialist cause.

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• Said and Spivak explore the structures of
  imperial domination and their material impact on
  the lives of the colonized subject construed as
  the Other or the Subaltern.
• Bhabha engages with deconstructive practice in
  order to critique certain violent hierarchies
  the West and the Orient, the center and the
  periphery, the empire and the colonized, the
  oppressor and the oppressed, and the self and the
  other.

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• Dismantling these binaries that conceptualize
  national cultures as stable, fixed and monologic,
  Bhabha argues that nationalities, ethnicities,
  and identities are dialogic, indeterminate, and
  characterized by hybridity

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Postcolonial Studies and Race and Ethnicity
Studies

• Postcolonial studies examines the global impact
  of European colonialism, from its beginnings in
  the 15th up to the present.
• Its aims are to describe the mechanisms of
  colonial power, to recover excluded or
  marginalized subaltern voices, and to theorize
  the complexities of colonial and postcolonial
  identity, national belonging, and globalization.

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• One major issue concerns the nature of
  representation.
• Following Edward Saids Orientalism, postcolonial
  critics have examined the ways in which Western
  representations of third world countries serve
  the political interests of their makers.
• Postcolonial critics problematize objective
  perception, pointing out the unbalanced power
  relations that typically shape the production of
  knowledge.

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• The West has constructed the third world as an
  Other.
• Such ideological projections typically become the
  negative terms of binary oppositions in which the
  positive terms are normative representations of
  the West.

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• These damaging stereotypes circulate through
  anthropological, historical, and literary texts,
  as well as mass media such as newspapers,
  television, and cinemas.
• A related line of inquiry in postcolonial theory
  studies how institutions of Western education
  function in the spread of imperialism.

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• Historical documents such as Thomas Babington
  Macaulays Minute on Indian Education show that
  education, including the study of English
  literature and the English language, plays a
  strategic part in ruling over colonized peoples.
• As it inculcates Western Eurocentric values,
  literary education supports a kind of cultural
  colonization, creating a class of colonial
  subjects often burdened by a double consciousness
  and by divided loyalties.

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• It helps Western colonizers rule by consent
  rather than by violence.