Post-colonialism

'''Post-colonialism '''

definition

discussion        “Post-colonialism is a political and philosophical orientation that employs elements of discourse analysis to challenge the underlying myths and assumptions of European colonialism, history and identity. Seminal contributions in the field would include The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon (1963) and Orientalism, by Edward Said (1979[1994]), both of which argued that the power of European colonialism was rooted not only in the physical subjugation of conquered lands and peoples but also in the cultural production of a colonial discourse that denied the agency of subjugated peoples to define themselves and their futures in terms of their own. The power to rule was therefore most insidious when applied through the guise of benevolence, civilization and progress. Gayatri Spivak, for instance, uses Britain’s efforts to abolish the sati (the practice of widow self-immolation) in colonial India to illustrate the ways in which acts of benevolence could be used to legitimate colonial power. By redefining formal codes of gender and the rights of widows, she argues, the abolition of the sati validated the authority of the British to govern and in Spivak’s words, to ‘save’ ‘brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988:297).

Building upon the work of Fanon and Said, writers like Spivak, Ranajit Guha and Homi Bhabha aimed to re-constitute post-colonial histories by documenting ‘subaltern’ narratives about the colonial and post-colonial experience (Peet and Hartwick 1999). In the process, many questioned the normative principles upon which Western academics (or, rather, academics in Western universities) interrogate the non-western world for the purposes of academic scholarship. For instance, Spivak (1988) argues that any effort to let (or to make) the subaltern speak cannot possibly escape the norms and practices of ethnocentrism and inequality that shape the relationship between (primarily) northern researhcers/academics and the ‘Third World Other.’ By privileging the construction of theories whose norms and practices are defined primarily by academics ad researchers in ‘the core,’ social science reinforces a Third World that facilitates the objectification of poverty, marginality, etc. and provides for the core the information, knowledge and data necessary for the construction of knowledge” (Johnson 2009:87).