Definitions of terms for 232
– definitions from Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, Childers and Hentzi’s Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and
Cultural Criticism, Barton and Hudson’s A
Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms, and Ania Young and lectures’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism
A
aboriginal/indigenous peoples – people born to a region
agency – the
ability to act or perform an action. Are individuals free and autonomous or are
they determined by the ways in which their identity has been constructed. If
subjectivity is constructed by ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan) or
discourse (Foucault), then any action is a consequence or response to these
things. Mostly, postcolonial theory purports that although actions are shaped
by these forces, subjects can escape their effects. Recognizing that such forces exist is the
first step toward countermanding them.
allegory –
symbolic narrative. Colonial writers used allegory to suggest reasons for
imperial dominance. Postcolonial writers use allegory to respond to imperial
dominance. In a novel functioning as a national allegory, characters would
represent various factions in the national debate – the colonialist, the
neo-colonialist, the rebel, the nation, etc.
Ngugi’s Grain of Wheat is an
example of a national allegory.
alterity –
the state of being other or different; diversity, otherness. Descartes statement, “I think, therefore I
am” centers human thinking on the self.
The chief question we ask about others is “How can I know them?” The term alterity shifts the focus from
epistemic concerns about the other, the importance of the other in terms of
what can be known about it to the self, to the moral other, who is actually
located in political, cultural and religious contexts. A writer is employing
the concept of alterity when s/he moves from author to character, when we use language
we move between and self and an other, creating a transference across and
between differences of gender, culture, class, race. Alterity implies
transference between a set of others.
Althusser – Important
to postcolonial theory as the theorist who described the creation of
subjectivity as the result of ideology. Ideology is a system of ideas that
explains, or makes sense of, a society. According to Marx, it is the Mechanism
by which unequal social relations are reproduced. The ruling classes not only
rule, they rule as thinkers and producers of ideas so that they determine how
society sees itself. For Althusser, ideology is not just a case of the powerful
imposing their ideas on the weak: subjects are ‘born into’ ideology, they find
subjectivity within the expectations of their parents and their society, and
they endorse it because it provides a sense of identity and security through
structures such as language, social codes and conventions. Ideology is supported by ideological state
apparatuses, such as church, education, police, which interpellate subjects, or
call them forth as subjects, and which provides the conditions by which, and
the contexts in which they obtain subjectivity.
ambivalence –
attraction toward and repulsion from the same object, person or action. The
relationship between colonizer and colonized is ambivalent because the subject
is never simply and completely opposed to the other. Colonized subjects are neither completely
resistant of the colonizer nor completely compliant. Colonizers may be nurturing and exploitative
of the colonized. Colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects; the
presence of ambivalence makes this impossible. Because of ambivalence,
according to Bhabha, the colonial relationship generates the seeds of its own
destruction.
anti-colonialism – The political struggles of colonized peoples against the ideology
and practice of colonialism. One of the paradoxes of anti-colonialism, is that
it often expresses itself in colonial or Western terms – in the establishment
of nation, for example.
apartheid –
an Afrikaans term meaning “separation,” used in
appropriation
– a term used to describe the ways in which postcolonial societies take over
those aspects of imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre,
modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that
may be of use to them in articulating their own social and cultural
identities. Also, the way the dominant
power incorporates as its own the territory or culture that it invades. In
postcolonial theory, the emphasis is on how the dominated can use the tools of
the dominant discourse to resist its political or cultural control.
authentic/authenticity – rejecting colonial influence meant searching for a
pre-colonial way, an indigenous way, something untainted by the colonizer. The
problem, of course, is that cultures are not static and a return to the
authentic or the pre-colonial implies that change has not and should not
happen. A search for authenticity can lead to essentializing the past.
B
binarism – meaning
a pair, two, duality. A binary opposition is the most extreme form of
difference possible: sun/moon, man/woman, birth/death, black/white. Binary
systems of thought suppress ambiguous or interstitial spaces between opposed
categories. Usually one side of the
binary is theorized as positive and the other negative, the binary opposition
confirms dominance. Significant binaries in postcolonial thought include:
center/margin, colonizer/colonized, metropolis/empire, civilized/primitive,
good/evil, beautiful/ugly, human/bestial, teacher/pupil, doctor/patient. The spaces in between the binary terms are
taboo, people crossing the borders between the deep categories of white, good,
beautiful, teacher, doctor, colonizer and black, bad, evil, pupil, patient, colonized
are considered dangerous in hegemonic thought.
Bhabha – See
Young and lectures throughout.
Especially important, though in relation to terms like mimicry,
ambivalence and hybridity.
C
cannibal – eater
of human flesh. The term is important to postcolonial studies because of the
way it was used to distinguish colonizer from colonized. It was the West’s key
representation of primitivism.
capitalism –
An economic
system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or
corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and
reinvestment of profits gained in a free market. Also, see Young
and lectures throughout.
center/margin (periphery) – the establishment of empire depended on a stable
hierarchical relationship in which the colonized existed as the other of the
colonizing culture. The colonial mission was to bring the margin, the other,
into the sphere of influence of the enlightened center. Challenging this binary is at the heart of
postcolonial studies. Moving the center
is at the heart of much postcolonial and anticolonial discourse, as is the task
of breaking down the binary thought that produces this split.
class and postcolonialism – see Young and lectures throughout.
colonialism –
the cultural and economic exploitation that developed with the expansion of
contact zones --
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in
contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism,
slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world
today.
counter-discourse – discourse is a system of statements within which the world can be
known. A counter-discourse is the theory and practice of resistance to the
dominant discourse.
creole/creolization – Creole originally meant a white man born and raised in
a colony, it evolved to indicate a lack of racial purity, a person of mixed
racial heritage. Creolization is the process of intermixing and cultural change
that produces a hybrid society.
D
decolonization –
the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its forms.
Early forms of decolonization didn’t necessarily mean rejection of colonial
values and practices, but rather the practice of them by indigenous peoples.
diaspora – the
voluntary or forcible movement of people from their homelands into new regions.
Colonization was a radically diasporic movement, resulting in massive
migrations of both colonized and colonizer.
Descendents of diasporic movements generated by colonialism have
developed their own distinctive cultures which both preserve and extend and
develop their originary cultures.
discourse /colonial discourse – a system of statements by which the world can be
known; the complex of signs and practices which organizes social existence and
social reproduction. Colonial discourse is a system of statements that can be
made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the
relationship between these two. The hegemonic discourse controls the ways in
which not just the dominant, but also the dominated see themselves. It creates
a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonized because of its clash with
other knowledges about the world. It hinges on the notion of race, class and
gender at the center of hegemonic discourse. Colonial discourse privileges the
colonizer, erasing statements about exploitation of natives and their lands,
about the power accruing to the colonized as a result of that exploitation.
Rather, it tends to focus on the primitive nature of the colonized and the duty
of the colonizer to advance civilization through trade, education, missionary
work.
E
ethnicity – refers
to the fusion of many traits that belong to the nature of any ethnic group:
shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, behaviors, experiences, consciousness of
kind, memories, loyalties. Whereas the concept of race was established to
control the other, ethnicity is generally thought of in positive terms, as
empowering.
Euro-centrism – the conscious or unconscious process by which Europe and European
cultural assumptions are constructed as, or assumed to be, the normal, the
natural, or the universal. The standard Mercator map of the world is one
example.
exotic/exoticism – something stimulating or excitingly different, something with which the
usual can be spiced. Native peoples were exhibited in
F
feminism and postcolonialism – See Young and lectures.
Fanon – see Young
and lectures throughout, but especially important in terms of resistance
movements and the psychology of colonialism.
Foucault – Foucault’s
work is pertinent to postcolonial theory because of his discussion of the ways
that discourse produces a subject dependent on the rules of the system of
knowledge that produces it. Discourse is
wider and more varied that Althusser’s ideology or Lacan’s language. Subjects
are constructed by the circulation of certain systems of knowledge. Within any
historical period, various discourses compete for control of subjectivity, but
these discourses are always a function of the power of those who control the
discourse to determine power and truth. See Young and lectures for more.
G
globalization – process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by
economic and cultural forces that operate world-wide; the process of the world
becoming a single place. The importance of globalization to postcolonial
studies comes from its demonstration of the structure of world power relations
which stands firm in the twenty-first century as a legacy of Western
imperialism. Also, the ways in which local communities engage the forces of
globalization bear some resemblance to the ways in which colonized societies
have engaged and appropriated the forces of imperial dominance. While
globalization is transcultural, it has a history embedded in imperialism, in
the structure of the world system, and in the origins of a global economy within
the ideology of imperial rhetoric.
“going native” – indicates the colonizers fear of contamination by absorption into
native life and customs. The threat is particularly associated with the
temptation posed by inter-racial sex, where sexual liaisons with native people
were supposed to result in a contamination of the colonizers pure stock and
this their degeneracy and demise as a vigorous and civilized race.
grand narrative or master narrative – an organizing story that a philosophy of history
tells that provides a framework in relation to which all historical events can
be understood. Thus, to take a familiar
example, history is, for Marxism, the story of the continual replacement of one
mode of production by another and the resulting conflicts between social
classes, culminating in socialist revolution. Other grand narratives are the
story of Christianity, the concept of patriarchal rule, the idea of humanism.
The concept of the master narrative has become an object of frequent attacks by
postmodernist critics who see it as a remnant of 19th century
thinking and subject to is idealizing tendencies.
H
hegemony -- domination by consent. Hegemony is the power
of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the
interests of all. Domination is not
exerted by force, nor by active persuasion, but by a more subtle and inclusive
power over the economy, over state apparatuses such as education and the media,
by which the ruling class’s interest is presented as the common interest and
thus comes to be taken for granted.
hybridity – creation
of transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. Homi
Bhabha uses the term to discuss the space in between the colonized and the
colonizer where cultural identity emerges. For Bhabha, hybridity is an
empowering concept which fosters resistance. Hybridity has often been used in
postcolonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural exchange, but this
definition tends to neglect the imbalance and inequality of the power relations
is references.
I
ideology – a
system of ideas that explains, or makes sense of, a society, and according to
Marx, is the Mechanism by which unequal social relations are reproduced. The
ruling classes not only rule, they rule as thinkers and producers of ideas so
that they determine how society sees itself. For Althusser, ideology is not
just a case of the powerful imposing their ideas on the weak: subjects are
‘born into’ ideology, they find subjectivity within the expectations of their
parents and their society, and they endorse it because it provides a sense of
identity and security through structures such as language, social codes and
conventions. Ideology is upported by
ideological state apparatuses, such as church, education, police, which
interpellate subjects, or call them forth as subjects, and which provides the
conditions by which, and the contexts in which they obtain subjectivity.
imperialism – the
formation of empire; the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating
center ruling a distant territory. The acquisition of an empire.
interpellation – For Althusser, the word interpellation refers to the central operation
by which ideology assigns to the individual human being an identity as subject.
To interpellate means, among other things, to interrupt or break in upon
someone with a formal address or series of questions. The process of
interpellation is a moment of recognition which determines how you respond to
certain situations. When a police man
hails you with the call “Hey, you there!”, the moment you turn round to
acknowledge that you are the object of his attention, you have been
interpellated in a certain way. When you
turn around, you acknowledge your identity as a subject.
L
liminality –
threshold, in-between state. In postcolonial theory it is useful for describing
the space in which cultural change may occur, the transcultural space in which
strategies for personal of communal self-hood may be elaborated, a region in
which there is a continual process of movement and interchange between
different states. Liminality and hybridity go hand in hand. It is this in-between
space, stage, site, that opens of the possibility of cultural hybridity that
entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy. Postmodernism,
postcolonialism and postfeminism are all liminal theories, spaces of
contestation and change. Liminality does
not imply a break with the past or a bonding with the future, but instead
revels in discontinuities, inequalities, minorities.
M
Manichaeism – adapted
from the Manichaean heresy of the third century AD which propounded a dualistic
theology, according to which Satan was co-eternal with God. Matter was evil,
God was spirit, and therefore could not become matter; Christ could not have
been born as matter. At the heart is the idea that two realms of spirit and
matter can never connect, which implies an extreme form of binary
structure. In postcolonial theory, Manichaeism
is a term for the binary structure of imperial ideology. It implies that the
colonizer has no energy or inclination to spend in understanding the worthless
other. There is no grey space.
marginality – being
on the margin, marginal. Rather than defining a geographic location, marginal
indicates a positionality that is best defined in terms of the limitations of
the subject’s access to power. Both
those in the center and those in the margin, however, can work to marginalize
the other.
Marxism – the
continual replacement of one mode of production by another and the resulting
conflicts between social classes, culminating in socialist revolution. See Young
and lectures.
mestizo -- means the mixing of races. Differs from creole in so far as its usage
reflects the older, large-scale Spanish and Portuguese settlement of their
South American and Meso-American possessions. Recently, both mestizo and creole
have moved from negative terms to positive ones that imply powerful synergistic
cultural forms, the places where the most energized aspects of new cultures
reside.
mimicry – when
colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to mimic the colonizer, by
adopting the colonizers habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the
result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather the result is a
blurred copy of the colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because
mimicry is never far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it
mimics. Mimicry, therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial
dominance, an uncertainty in its control of the behavior of the colonized. Homi
Bhabha claims that mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial
discourse, almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of
its own destruction. “Almost the same, but not quite.”
miscegenation – sexual union of different races, which has always haunted European
colonizers.
N
nation – not
entirely ‘natural’ entities. The
instability of the nation is the inevitable consequence of its nature as a
social construction. The myth of nationhood, masked by ideology, perpetuates
nationalism. The term nation can refer to the nation-state, a political entity,
and to the ‘natio’ – a local community, domicile, family, condition of
belonging.
nationalism – a
trend of thought in which specific identifies are employed to create exclusive
and homogenous conceptions of national traditions. Such signifiers of
homogeneity always fail to represent the diversity of the actual national
community for which they purport to speak, and, in practice, usually represent
and consolidate the interests of the dominant power groups within any national
formation. The confusion of the idea of ‘natio’ with the practice and power of
the nation-state makes nationalism one of the most powerful forces in
contemporary society. It also makes it
an extremely contentious site, on which ideas of self-determination and
freedom, of identity and unity collide with ideas of suppression and force, of
domination and exclusion.
national allegory – Fredric Jameson claimed that all third-world cultural productions have
in common the tendency to be allegorical, in particular to be national
allegories, because the private experience is not split from the public
sphere. Therefore, the story of the
private individual destiny, is always an allegory of the embattled structure of
the public culture and society.
nativism – the
desire to return to indigenous practices and cultural forms as they existed in
pre-colonial society.
Negritude – Cesaire, Senghor – a theory of the distinctiveness of African personality
and culture, developed after WWII by African and
neo-colonialism – the emerging from of control of the colonies by the colonizers after
nationalist independence movements. In particular, it has been used to refer to
the new elites brought in to power after independence, who were trained and
educated by colonialist powers, who were unrepresentative of the people, and
acted as unwitting or even willing agents for the former colonial rulers. It is
also used to refer to the ways the
O
Orientalism –
the term was popularized by Edward Said’s Orientalism,
in which he examines the process by which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to
be, constructed in European thinking. He discusses Orientalism as the corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over
it. Orientalist discourse is more valuable as a sign of the power exerted by
the West over the Orient than a ‘true’ discourse about the Orient.
Other/other – In
the theoretical work of Jacques Lacan, the other with a small “o” designates
the other who resembles the self, that which the child sees in the mirror, that
through which it becomes aware of itself as a separate being. In postcolonial
theory, it can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by
imperialistic discourse, identified by their difference from the centre that
become the focus of anticipated mastery by the imperial ego. The Other with a capital “O” is the symbolic
Other, a transcendent or absolute pole of address. It can be the mother whose separation from the
subject locates her as the first focus of desire, it can refer to the father
whose Otherness locates the subject in the symbolic order, it can refer to the
unconscious self because the unconscious is structured like a language that is
separate from the language of the subject. This other/Other can be compared to
the imperial center, imperial discourse, or the empire itself in two ways:
first, it provides the terms in which the colonized subject gains a sense of
identity as somehow ‘other,’ dependent; and secondly, it becomes the absolute
pole of address, the ideological framework in which the colonized subject may
come to understand the world.
othering – the
process by which imperial discourse creates its ‘others’. The process by which
the colonized becomes the excluded or mastered subject created by the discourse
of power.
P
postcolonialism – deals with the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies. It
includes the study and analysis of European territorial conquests, the various
institutions of European colonialisms, the discursive operations of empire, the
subtleties of subject construction in colonial discourse and the resistance of
those subjects, and, most importantly perhaps, the differing responses to such
incursions and their contemporary colonial legacies in both pre and post
independence nations and communities. See Young and lectures throughout.
postmodernism – a chain of connected subjects that help to delineate postmodern theory
are the following: indeterminacy (the growth of relativism, the notion that the
truth is subject to time, place and context), fragmentation (inability to
understand or appreciate any process, idea, system, or institution as a unified
or coherent whole), decanonization (loss of faith in cultural and political
authority), selflessness (loss of faith in the idea that an individual exists
in a way that is knowable and stable; what one thinks about one’s self is an
illusion or misunderstanding that one believes in order to avoid fears of
nothingness or chaos), the unrepresentable (extends the modernist notion that
the mysteries of life cannot be described or named but only suggested),
hybridization (tendency of postmodern writings to violate the notion of
discrete genres, they reject the notion of boundaries between high and low
culture), carnivalization (suggests postmodern tendency to revel in absurdity,
travesty, grotesquerie and parody), and participation (because of the
indeterminacy of the text, the reader must create meaning, perform meaning,
thereby revising the text into reflections of one’s own needs or concerns).
psychoanalysis and postcolonialism – See Young and lectures, especially in relationship to
Fanon, Freud, Foucault and Lacan
R
race and postcolonialism – See Young and lectures, throughout.
S
savage/civilized -- Westerners understand themselves as poised between the ‘civilized’ and
the ‘savage’, or as clinging to a veneer of civilization over a savage abyss.
The Western conception of ‘self’ is thus forged within the dialectic of these
terms.
Spivak – see
subaltern. See Young and lectures.
subaltern – meaning
of inferior rank. Adopted by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those groups in
society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes – peasants, workers,
women, ethnic minorities . . . Postcolonial scholars, in particular the
Subaltern Studies group of historians, work to promote a systematic discussion
of subaltern themes. One common theme in
discussion of the subaltern is the notion of resistance to elite
domination. Gayatri Spivak asked one of
the most central and controversial questions of the Subaltern Studies group,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her
conclusion is that, since the there is no subject in postmodern thought, no one
can speak, but especially silent are those who are oppressed by hegemonic
discourse. It isn’t that people don’t speak up, but that no act of dissent or
resistance occurs on behalf of an essential subaltern subject entirely separate
from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual
categories with which the subaltern voice speaks. See Young and lectures.
subject/subjectivity – How much are we in control of our actions and
thoughts? Descartes and liberal humanism
contended that human beings construct and control their own behaviors. Freud
and Marx challenged this idea, contending that our actions and reactions are
shaped by unconscious or political and economic forces beyond our control.
Contemporary theorists posit that very little of who we are is a result of our
own subjectivity, but rather, that we are shaped by ideology, discourse or
language. Ideology is a system of ideas that explains, or makes sense of, a
society, and according to Marx is the mechanism by which unequal social
relations are reproduced. The ruling classes not only rule, they rule as
thinkers and producers of ideas so that they determine how society sees itself.
For Althusser, ideology is not just a case of the powerful imposing their ideas
on the weak: subjects are ‘born into’ ideology, they find subjectivity within
the expectations of their parents and their society, and they endorse it
because it provides a sense of identity and security through structures such as
language, social codes and conventions.
Ideology is supported by ideological state apparatuses, such as church,
education, police, which interpellate subjects, or call them forth as subjects,
and which provides the conditions by which, and the contexts in which they
obtain subjectivity. The subject is the individual’s self consciousness as
constructed by those institutions. See Foucault, above, for another idea of how
the subject is constructed. Also, see
our text for Lacanian concepts of subject and subjectivity developed through
language.
T
textuality –
to refer to any object’s textuality is to imply that the object has coherence
and a degree of autonomy and stability, such that it may be “read.” Textuality
is a property assigned to objects by those producing or analyzing them. Some
analysts have regarded self-sufficiency or autonomy as characteristic of
textuality, but for poststructuralists texts are woven out of other texts;
thus, texutality implies intertextuality. One of the problems of textualizing
history, for example, is that it is essentialized or simplified to such a
degree that it loses its connection to “reality.” Discussions of history as text tend to render
it theoretical and “miss” the real contexts and complications of the topics
under discussion.
transculturation – refers to the reciprocal influences of modes of representation and
cultural practices of various kinds in colonies and metropoles, and is thus a
‘phenomenon of the contact zone.’ It is used to describe how subordinated or
marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a
dominant or metropolitan culture. While subordinate peoples do not usually
control what emanates FROM the dominant culture, they do determine to varying
extents what gets ABSORBED into their own and what it gets used for.