KEY CONCEPT EXPLANATIONS

Ambivalence (Roco y scar)

The concept Ambivalence implies talk about Homi Bhabha at the same time.
Homi Bhabha (1949): He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and the
first to use the term ambivalence.

When he refers to Ambivalence, he is talking about the relation characterized by the mixture of the rejection
and interest between the colonial force and colonized subject. We are going to talk about the term
Ambivalence, which implies talking about Homi Bhabha at the same time.
In Bhabhas theory, ambivalence disrupts the crucial authority of colonial domination because it bothers the
simple relationship between colonizers and colonized. There exists an unbalance between wanting the
colonized to adopt the colonizers customs, beliefs, etc. and being able to impose them. Moreover, mimicry is
never very far from mockery.
Moving on to the hybridity, this concept is strongly related with the term Ambivalence. The impossibility of
both parts achieving their individual interests leads to the colonized adaptation of a part of what the colonizer
tries to impose.
As said, ambivalence is the bi-lateral relation of the colonized and the colonizer, and a good example of this
would be when in 1792 the British Empire sent an elite member of the East India Company so as to impose
the Christian religion upon India. Here we see that the Empire wanted to have India, but not as it was, because
if the Indian population didnt assimilate their customs, beliefs and ideals, it would be difficult to govern them
as they wanted to. The colonized force, in change, wanted to be independent while taking advantage of all the
advances the Empire could give them. Here we see that both forces want some aspect of the other, but while
rejecting all other aspects. Ambivalence is exactly this type of relation. In the end, a hybridization took place
where the Christianization process failed, but the Indians did adopt certain Christian doctrines and values.
To conclude, in all process of colonialization, necessarily there needs to take place an ambivalent relation
where mimicry and hybridization define the resulting culture after the colonialization, and this process has its
cause in the interest that each force has to improve themselves but while the colonized evade their
enslavement and the colonizer tries to force their culture and ideologies.

Anti-colonialism (Yara y Sergio)

It is the concept which tries to avoid the unit between colonized people in a politic, cultural and economic
point of a nation. It explains the feeling what take people to refuse the control and the power of the
colonialism. Moreover, tries to destroy the forms of the colonizer and go back to them. So, the fight of an
equal nation was remplaced as an icon of resistence. Anti-colonialism took many forms in different ways, for
exampe, as a way to make posible a racial liberation and in that way, people can join with people from another
nation without forget their roots. In the middle of the 20th century a marxism idea was introduced in the
concept to give sense about what freedom is in two concepts: spiritual and phisical. Anti-colonialism watch
the attempt to reach that the colonized and the colonizer dont make a relationship and dont fix their
differents. Basically, anti-colonialism is based on understand the struggle for a mental, phisical, and racial
liberation.
1947: Partition of India
*An early symptom of the weakness of the empire

*They crushed the attempt of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to force them to 'quit India'
in 1942.
*Britain had promised to give India full independence once the war was over.
*By the time that the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in India, Congress and its leader
Jawaharlal Nehru had begun to accept that unless they agreed to partition, they risked a descent into chaos and
communal war before power could be transferred from British into Indian hands.
*Britain was now overshadowed by the United States and Soviet Union, its domestic economy had been
seriously weakened and the Labour government had embarked on a huge and expensive programme of social
reform.
*Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. All became independent between 1961 and 1963.
*In the 21st century, old imperial links still survive, particularly those based on language and law, which may
assume growing importance in a globalized world.
Even the Commonwealth, bruised and battered in the 1960s and 1970s, has retained a surprising utility as a
dense global network of informal connections, valued by its numerous small states.
So, thats an overview of the main features of the concept but which were its real repercussions? The stimulus
was the nationalist feeling that grew in colonized people. One of the most important cases of anti-colonialism
was India, because of its influence on other countries that became independent after it. Mahatma Gandhi and
the Indian National Congress tried to liberate the nation from the arms of the first great power, but they
crushed the attempt. However, Britain lost gradually its power due to its participation in the Second World
War and it was impossible to maintain the control over India. Therefore, the colonized country threatened
Britain it would be a war if they didnt transferred the power to Indian hands in a peaceful way.
Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika became independent between 1961 and 1963. The British Empire continued
its incredible reduction. Lets take a look at this gift that shows us the evidence.
However, Britain still maintains the contact with past colonies through informal connections thanks to the
organization known as Commonwealth, although this time nations participate in it freely.

Apartheid (Eduardo y Regina)

An Afrikaans term meaning "separation", used in South Africa for the policy initiated by the Nationalist
Government after 1948. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and 1936 by the Land Acts which restricted the
amount of land available to black farmers to 13 per cent. But in 1948 the Apartheid laws were enacted, where
all people were registered by racial group, codified racial segregation in public facilities and suburbs or
ghettoes and illegalized white-black marriages.
The policy of segregation extended to every aspect of society, with separate sections in public transport,
public seats, beaches and many other facilities.
The term apartheid became commonly used outside the South African situation to designate a variety of
situations in which racial discrimination was institutionalized by law.

Appropriation (Nadezhda y Melania)

There are 2 points of view:
It is the way in which post-colonial societies take over -the languages, form of writing, film, theatrethe imperial culture to create their own identity.

Also to describe the strategy by which the dominant imperial power incorpore, as its own, the territory
or culture surveys and invades.

In fact, post-colonial theory gives importance on the ways in which the dominated or colonized culture can
use the tools of the discourse to make resistence against the political o cultural control.
Writers (examples)
Raja Rao (Indian)- writed in English
Chinua Achebe (Nigerian)- writed in English
James Baldwin (African American)- language that bear the burden of their experience
Ngogi wa Thiongo (Kenya)- writes in Gikuyu
The most potent appropriations are the domains of language and textuality (and its discursive forms). For
example, an Indian writer like Raja Rao or a Nigerian one such as Chinua Achebe write in English in order to
reach the widest possible audience (and not because they considered their mother tongue inappropriate).
Nevertheless, Chinua Achebe (and others) needed to transform English to, as he says, quoting James Baldwin
(an African American writer), make it bear the burden of their experience. This has become one of the most
famous declarations of the power of appropriation in post-colonial discourse.
However, there were writers like Ngugi wa Thiongo (from Kenya) that renounced the language of the
colonizer to write their works in mother tongue (in his case, Gikuyu). He argues that the introduced English
only reaches the educated elite, so that wider audience is just outside the country. His decision of
renouncing English maybe has succeeded because of his reputation as a writer in English.

Cartography (Carmen y Laura)

It is based on the creation of maps. Maps and Mapping are dominant practices of colonial and post-colonial
cultures.
The process of discovery is reinforced by the construction of maps, whose existence is a means of textualizing
the spatial reality of the other, naming or, in almost all cases, renaming spaces in a symbolic and literal act of
mastery and control. In all cases the lands so colonized are literally reinscribed, written over, as the names and
languages of the indigenes are replaced by new names and corrupted into new and europeanised forms by the
cartographer and explorer.
Maps also inscribe their ideology in numerous ways other tha place-names. Blank spaces invite other cultural
superscriptions, such as the elaborately drawn monsters and sub-human wild-names (savages) of most early
maps. Similarly the so-called cannibals of the Indies appear frequently on maps of the interior of Africa.
The prior Knowledge of the land that this dramatizes, and which cannot be wholly silenced in the written
accounts of these explorations, is ignored, and literally silenced by the act of mapping, since the indigenous
people have no voice or even presence that can be heard in the new discourse of scientific measurement and
written texts that cartography implies.
In effect, the European map created what has remained the contemporary geographical world reality.
Although ethnography has frequently borne the brunt of anti-colonial attacks as being the principal intellectual
discourse of colonization.

Centre/margin (periphery) (Victoria y Marina)

The binary of centre-periphery is a fundamental concept of colonial discourse, which is explained as a system
that has organized the colonial and postcolonial world.

The colonizing centre is home to science, order and modernity, while the colonized periphery harbors
superstition, chaos, and backwarness, there live the savage colonized who had some opposite concepts.
Following this logic, the colonizing center must control these negative aspects of the periphery in order to
protect them from itself.
Based in geographical and spatial concepts, the dichtonomy might seem to carry the supposed impartiality of
topography, that is why cartography experts constructed maps to represent not the fixity of territories but the
fixity of power.
The colonized subject who travels to the colonizing centre for education or work, matter how long main
remain in the centre, he must eventually return to the periphery.

Colonial Desire (Brenda y Miguel)

Term employed by Robert Young in 1995. Makes reference to the attraction between the colonizer and the
colonized; the colonizers, even though they feel repulsed by the colonizeds culture, are attracted to them for
sexual reasons and interest for the unknown and their territories. The colonized ones, on the other hand,
despise the colonizers, but are attracted to their culture and ways of living; they are also sexually attracted to
the colonizers, since they are different (white).
The colonizers used their colonial power to exploit the colonized and underestimate them and their culture, to
master them and exploit them.
The traffic of commerce and sexuality were intertwined. The ideas of hybridity (creating people from mixing
races) and interracial sex were really famous.
In the Colonial Discourse, Edward Said examined the ways in which colonial discourse operated as an
instrument of power. Thus, the granting of limited independence to white settler cultures caused trouble in the
Crown and this ended up with the decision that they couldnt have their own systems of justice or governance.
The indigenous people were not granted any form of citizenship.
After the granting of federal status, this discriminatory attitude did not change, it recieved support from the
ex-colonial powers and the newly emergin power of America, even after the Second World War.
The racial discrimination, reached its peak in the African Apartheid.

Decolonisation (Marcos y Alexander)

The action of changing from colonial to independent status. Its when a nation establishes and maintains its
domination over dependent territories. Its the process of revealing and dismantling colonialist power in all its
forms. This process of resistance was conducted in terms or institution appropriation from the colonizing
culture. This occurred not only in the settler colonies, but even in colonies of occupation.
The term refers particularly to the dismantlement, in the years after World War II, of the colonial empires
established prior to World War I throughout the world. However, decolonization not only refers to the
complete "removal of the domination of non-indigenous forces" within the geographical space and different
institutions of the colonized, but it also refers to the "decolonizing of the mind" from the colonizer's ideas that
made the colonized seem inferior.
In all those colonies which have been imposed another culture, suppressed or denigrated with the colonialist
practice, the process of resisting or demolishing these iniquities was much more active. The name of neo-

colonialism to refer to the new forces of global control operating by the elite class was coined by the Ghanaian
as Independence.
Decolonisation of British India:
The campaigns of civil diisobedience led by Gandhi in India during the interwar years had exasperated Great
Britain. India, a poor country but one with a large population, intended to play a role on the world stage by
making itself the primary advocate of neutralist anti-colonialism. However, at the end of the Second World
War the British Government did not have the means to face a new colonial war. It eventually decided to grant
independence to the Indian subcontinent in August 1947, but the period was marked by violent clashes
between the Hindu and Muslim communities.
While Gandhi and Nehru, the main leaders of the Congress Party, advocated Indian unity, the Muslim League,
directed by Ali Jinnah, called for the creation of an independent Muslim state. The violence between the two
sides escalated and degenerated into a civil war. In February 1947, the British decided to evacuate the country,
and on 15 August 1947 it was partitioned into two independent states: India, with a Hindu majority, and
Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. The Republic of India was proclaimed in January 1950, once the
constitution had been drawn up, but it remained a member of the British Commonwealth.
In 1948, two other British possessions, Burma and Ceylon, were granted independence, but Malaya had to
wait until 1957 before it achieved the same status.

Diaspora (Fran y Filip)

Diaspora means the spreading of people from one original country to other countries.
The English diaspora consists of English people and their descendants who emigrated from England This
started at the middle of the 19th century when many people of England realised that they could have better
lifes if they emigrate to other sites like United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland,
Wales and to a lesser extent, South Africa, South America (most notably in Argentina and Chile), and
continental Europe. (Anglosphere)
The result of this was the development, principally in the Americas but also in other places like Africa of an
economy based on slavery
After that many countries started to commercialize with slaves.

Dislocation (Sara y Marco)

When you dont feel at home. When you feel you dont belong to the place you are living. It is a displacement
as a result of imperial occupation and the experiences related to this event. It also affects those who as a result
of colonialism has been located in a new localization, because of hegemonic practices.
Dislocation is a feature of all the invaded colonies where the natives are not killed but expelled from their
territory. Sometimes they are not exactly dislocated: Sometimes they are not killed or moved from their
country but stay in their country with the culture, values and practices of the colonizing country. So they are
not expelled from their country, they stay there under some kind of slavery, they adopt their religion, culture,
values and even language. As a summary, we can say that cultural dislocation si swhen people live their lives
on someone elses terms other thant their own.
A term for both the occasion of displacement that occurs as a result of imperial occupation and the
experiences associated with this event. The term is used to describe the experience of those who have
willingly moved from the imperial Home to the colonial margin, but it affects all those who, as a result of
colonialism, have been placed in a location that, because of hegemonic practces, needs, in a sense, to be
reinvented in language, in narrative and in myth.

Ecological imperialism (Alejandro Ramos y Alejandro Peraza)

Is a term that makes reference to the changes suffered by the natural ecosystems that have been colonized.
These changes can be of many types, but mainly biological. The term makes reference to the changes in
animals and plants of the region but also to biological changes such as diseases or nutritional habits.
This term was introduced by Alfred W. Crosby to make reference to the ways in which environments had
been changed during the colonization.
Crosby states that the success of the European imperialism is due to the unconscious introduction of diseases
that weakened the indigenous population facilitating the conquest of their lands.
The conquerors introduced their crops and their livestock. In this and many other ways, the conquerors
destroyed little by little the environments. The introduction of crops and livestocks altered the entire ecology
of the invaded lands and changed the flora and fauna. With the change of the environment, the indigenous
peoples are in disadvantage, because they cultures sometimes depend on the flora and fauna that has been
devastated.
Examples:
Flora and Fauna:
After the conquest, came he destruction of flora and fauna, such as cutting down trees for getting wood for
constructions like builds, houses and ships.
Another example is the new plantations such as weat and barley.
And the annihilation of fauna.
Diseases:
We have always thought that American natives had been brutally annihilated by spanish army, but actually
what killed them were diseases that the coquerors brought thoughtless.
A common flu could kill a native person because it was something never saw in this country.
Another example of diseases is smallpox.

Exotic/ Exotism (Mara Rodrguez y Emma)

At the begging, the Word exotic mean alien, introduced for abroad, not indigenous. But then the meaning
included an exotic or foreign territory. During the 19th Century the exotic was related to the European
travels because the people brought back exotic minerals, plants and animals for private collections and
museum.
Sometimes peoples of other cultures were brought back to the main cities as popular entertainment, and in
some cases, the European exhibited them-selves. For example Eliza Fraser who lives among Australian
aborigines.
Another author Renata Wasserman exhibited Indians in cages. This Indians were Isolated from their
geographical and cultural context, and for the metropolis they were something exotic, and this meant the
plenitude of the empire.
When the English language extended to the colonial land the exotic term change a little. For example for the
schoolchildren in the Caribbean and Queenslands some trees like the oak or yew were describe as exotic by
the English text they read.

Feminism and post-colonialism (Wahba y Miguel)

Firstly, Colonized countries have been profoundly affected by the exploitative, racist nature of this
interrelation which was and remains economic, political and cultural. As an example we could highlight texts

of feminist theory and those of post-colonialism discussing similarities between writing the body in
feminism and writing place in post colonialism, similarities between the strategies of bisexuality and
cultural syncreticity.
Moreover, in the 1980, many feminist, like Mohanty, critics that feminism, was therefore charged with failing
to account for or deal adequately with the experiences of third world women. In this respect , the issues
concerning gender face similar problems to those concerned with class.
To end, we could emphasize Sander (connections between race and gender as a consequence of imperial
expansion) which shows how the representations of the African in nineteenth- century European art, medicine
and literature, reinforced the construction of the sexualized female body.
The presence of male or female, black servents was regularly included in paintings, plays and operas as a sign
of illicit sexual activity.
By the nineteenth century, the sexuality of the black, both male and female, becomes an icon for deviant
sexuality in general. Furthermore, the relationship between the sexuality white woman enters a new dimension
when contemporary scientific discourse concerning the nature of black female sexuality is examined.
As critics like whitlock have argued, they were perceived reductively not as sexual but as reproductive
subjects, as literal wombs of empire whose function was limited to the population of the new colonies with
white settlers.

Hegemony (Itziar y Mara Moreno)

Hegemony is a term that has been used to designate the control of one state over another, generally without
the consent of the dominated state. The Marxist Antonio Gramsci investigated this term. Basically this
involves the way in which the ruling class makes their interest look like everyones interests. This domination
is not imposed by the force or even the power of persuasion, but by a subtler control over the economy or
other state matters as education or social media.
This term describes how the colonized people who were enough in number to stop the domination, didnt even
try because their desire of self-determination had been supressed by the hegemonic notion of the great good,
in terms of social order, stability and advancement, being at the same time these terms stablished by the
colonizers. The colonized considered themselves as peripheral according to the Euro-centric values.
An example of hegemonic control was given by Gauri Viswanathan shows how literature can be used as a
way to exercise a sociopolitical control. This control was maintained by the British Government over India.
Since they wanted to impose the values of the Western civilization to the Indians without offending their
sensibility, they made use of literature as a vehicle of hegemonic control. The authorities influenced the
literature, removing bad aspects as the classes and race oppression.
The Englishman was the perfect image of human values. This hegemonic control was truly an effective one
because the English values were disseminated in the spiritual values, cultural assumptions, social
discriminations, racial prejudices and humanistic values; leaving these more or less intact.
An example of hegemonic domination was the situation of the EE.UU. after the Second World War, and their
cities and factories had not been destroyed. USA didnt had an economic recession, and finally there was a
population growth.
The hegemony of the United States is supported by three powers:
- Economic power. Is the first global economic power.

Military power. It has the most powerful army, with capacity to act anywhere in the planet.
Cultural. The United States has created a whole industry (cinema, music, fast food or clothes).

Countries as France, the UK, Italy, the Soviet Union and later Nazi Germany tried to spread their influence or
conquer territory but none achieved the status of a global hegemonic power. Only the US and Japan expanded
their influences, the US to Latin America and Japan to East Asia, both after the Second World War.

Hybridity (Alba e Irene)

Hybridity is one of the most widely employed terms in post-colonial theory because it includes a lot of forms
like linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc. This term is commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural
forms produced by colonization.
Inside the linguistic we can talk about the pidgin and creole languages, which appear with the mixture of two
cultures. This term was also used by mikhail bakhtin to suggest the transfiguring power of multivocal
language situations.
Hybridity has also been used to mean simply cross-cultural exchange.
There are a lot of examples of hybridity, but probably the most important one would be all of the plantations
masters bastards. Slave women were often raped by their masters and forces to see how their babies were
abandoned or how they grew up to be slaves too.

Liminality (Joan y Carolina)

It has its roots in the term limen which means threshold, a common word used by psycologhists in order to
make allusion to the threshold between the sensate and the subliminal. However, in post-colonial studies the
liminal has its relevance in its usefulness for describing the in-between space, in which cultural change
happens. Following this line, the colonized subject may dwell in the liminal space between colonial discourse
and the assumption of a nwe non colonial identity. However, such identification is not about a simple
movement from one identity to another, it is a constant process of movement and interchange from one
identity to another, it is a continual process of engagement, that is contestation and appropriation.

Mimicry (Guacimara y David)

An increasingly important term in post-colonial theory, because it has come to describe the
ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. When colonial discourse encourages the colonized
subject to ''mimic'' the colonized, by adopting the colonizer's cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and
values, the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a ''burred copy'' of the
colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can
appear to parody whatever it mimics.
Mimicry has often been an overt goal of imperial policy. For instance, Lord Macaulay's 1835 Minute
to Parliament derided Oriental learning, and advocated the reproduction of English art and learning in India
(Most strategically through the teaching of English literature). However, the method by which this mimicry
was to be achieved indicated the under-lying weakness of imperialism. For Macaulay suggested that the riches
of European learning, should be imparted by 'a class of interpreters between us and a million whom we govern
- a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, opinion, in moral and in intellect'
(Macaulay, 1835).
The term mimicry has been crucial in Homi Bhabha's view of the ambivalence of colonial discourse.
For him, the consequence of suggestions like Macaulay's is that mimicry is the process by which the colonized
subject is reproduced as 'almost the same, but not quite' (bhabha, 1994;86). The copying of the colonizing

culture, behaviour, manners and values by the colonized contains both mockery and a certain 'menace', 'so that
mimicry is at once resemblance and menace' (86).
Mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse, almost as though colonial
authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction. The line of decent of the 'mimic man' that
emerges in Macaulay's writing, claims Bhabha, can be traced through the work of Kipling, Foster, Orwell and
Naipaul, and is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is ,emphatically, not to be
English.
Mimicry can be both ambivalent and multi-layered. In his novel, The Mimic Men, V.S. Naipaul opens
with a very subtle description of the complexity of mimicry when he describes his landlord.
The narrator not only copies the habits of the landlord, but mimics the guilt of a post-war Europe
concerning the Jews, a guilt that is embedded also in a cultural familiarity with the implications of the name
'Shylock' (The Jew who demanded repayment of a pound of flesh in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice).

Negritude (Fernando y Cristina)

The concept of negritude was coined by African Francophone writers before and after the Second World
War.
This group of writers came from the French colonies to study in French universities and influenced by
movement such as Harlem Renaissance. Those writers tried to develop a theory for black people and try to
create a concept of African Theory.
The negritudinist critics claimed that African culture and the literatures that they produced had specific
concerns and they also had their own personality. So it could not be studied or considered as only as an
offspring of white literature.
Negritude and the work it developed took as its territory not only Africa by the whole diasporic African
culture.
This movement reflected the values of the civilization of the African world and it is considered the earliest
and the most important movement in establishing an awareness of Africas claim of cultural distinctiveness.
The negritude movement was quite peculiar because they attempted to extend perception of the Negro as
having a distinctive personality in all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and physical.
Example: Lopold Sdar Senghor
He was a Senegalese poet and politician. Leopold Sdar was the first African elected as a member of the
Frech Academy and, for two decades, served as the first president of the recently born country of Senegal.
Furthermore, we are talking about the most important figure in cultural history of the African continent in the
second part of the last century. For Leopold Sedar, negritud is not racism against white people nor populism.
Is, simply, a set of values of the civilization of Back World. And not values of the past, but an authentic
culture.
The influence of him and his philosophy is essencial to understand African culture sice 1960's to nowadays.
Leopold Sedar, through their pacific fight and their introduction of a new style of African writing ,helped not
only Senegal but also many other countries to emancipate from the French colonists. The movement of
negritude was one of the first literary and political movements that allowed black students in France to express
themselves and to fight for their countries independence.

During his reign as President, he was known for his pacifism and his dedication to peasants. Leopold Sedar
Senghor was very interested in arts and literature, African and European, and for that reason he created the
first festival of Black arts.
During that festival he invited artists from all Africa and the Caribbean and he also invited European artists.
This is just an example of how in Senegal it is important to respect others for what they are and not mistreat
them for their difference.

Neo-colonialism (Lidia y Juan)

Literally means new colonialism. Its the geopolitical practice that uses mercantilism, empresarial
globalization and cultural imperialism to influence a country in which a group of landholders that actually
speak the language, establish a system to lead the population and expropriate all the lands and natural
resources they have.
This explanation isnt clear at all and its actually misleading and contradictory sometimes. However, neocolonialism is referred to the practises of economic domination that are currently happening over countries on
process of development nor old colonies.
What are the differences between colonialism and neo-colonialism, then?
-Its not drilled by any politic or military authority, but by big business companies, of course, all of them
supported by the government of the actual country.
-Its not practised in all the territory, just in some key economic points of the place, like mines or plantations.
-Its not an exclusive term befitting of the big empires as England or Rome. Currently, countries from the
southern hemisphere are also practising neo-colonialism with their own population, as it happens, for
example, in Brazil or in Bolivia.

Palimpsest (Daniel Luis y Brbara)

Originally the term for a parchment on which several inscriptions had been made after earlier ones had been
erased. Despiting such erasures, there are always traces of previous inscriptions that have been overwritten.
The ter mis valuable because it illustrates the ways in which pre-colonial culture as well as the experience of
colonization are continuing aspects of a post-colonial societys developing cultural identity. (Even with the
layering effect of history, erasing what has gone before, all present experience contains inerdicable traces
of the past, which remain part of the constitution of the present)
Example: Paul Carter demonstrates how empty uncolonized space becomes place through the process of
textuality. In short, empty space becomes place through language, in the process of being written and named.