Assignment; key terms in post colonialism

Prepared By; Dildar Ahmed

Presented To; Mam Mutahira

M.A. English 3rd Semester NCBA&E Gujrat

Colonialism

• The imperialist expansion of Europe into rest of the world during the last four hundred years in
which a dominant imperium or centre carried on a relationship of control and influence over its
margins or colonies. This relationship tended to extend to social, pedagogical, economic,
political and broadly culturally exchanges often with a hierarchical European settler class and
local, educated elite class forming layers between the European “Mother” nation and various
indigenous peoples who were controlled.

• Such a system carried within inherent nations of racial infereority and exotic otherness.

Post-Colonialism

• It is broadly a study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies.

• It is concerned with both how European conquered and controlled “third World” cultures and
how these groups have since responded to and resisted those encroachments.

• Post colonialism as both a body of theory and a study of political and cultural change, has gone
and continues to go through three stages:

• An initial awareness of social, psychological and cultural inferiority enforced by being in.

• A colonized state, the struggle for ethnic, cultural and political anatomy

• A growing awareness of cultural overlap and hybridity.

Ambivalence

• The ambiguous way in which colonizer and colonized regard one another.

• The colonizer often regards the colonized as both inferior yet exotically other, while the
colonized regards the colonizer as both enviable yet corrupt.

• In context of hybridity, this often produces a mix sense of blessing and curse.
 • Assignment; key terms in post colonialism
• Prepared By; Nazira Arshad
• Presented To; Mam Mutahira
• M.A. English 3rd Semester NCBA&E Gujrat

Exoticism
• The process by which a cultural practice is made
stimulating and exciting in its difference from the
colonizer's normal perspectives.
• Ironically as European groups educated local, indigenous
cultures, schoolchildren often began to see their native life
ways, plants and animals exotic and European
counterparts as normal or typical.
Hegemony
• The power of ruling class to conceive other classes that
their interests are the interest of all, often not only
through means of economic and political control but more
subtly through the control of education and media.
Assignment; key terms in post colonialism

• Prepared By; Hira Irfan

• Presented To; Mam Mutahira

• M.A. English 3rd Semester NCBA&E Gujrat

Hybridity

• New transcultural forms that arise from cross cultural exchange.

• It can be social, political, linguistic, religious etc.

• It is not necessarily a peaceful mixture, for it can be continuous

and disruptive in its experience.

• it explores effects of people being produced by more than 1

culture • i.e people as the products of globalization, an ever
integrating world system of politics, economics, culture & identity

Catalysis

• The (specifically new world ) experience of several ethnic groups

interacting and mixing with each other often in contentous
environment that gives way to new forms of identity and
experience.
 Assignment; key terms in post colonialism

• Prepared By; Ayesha Zuree

• Presented To; Mam Mutahira
• M.A. English 3rd Semester NCBA&E Gujrat

Diaspora

• The voluntary or enforced migration of people from their native homeland.

• Diaspora literature is often concerned with questions of maintaining or

altering identity, language and culture while in an another culture or
identity.

• The word Diaspora derives from the Greek word meaning “to disperse”.
Diaspora is simply the displacement of a community/culture into another
geographical and cultural region. Robin Cohen defines: Diaspora as
“communities living together in one country who acknowledge that the old
country – a nation often buried deep in language, religion custom or
folklore- always has some claim on their loyalty and emotion … a member’s
adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of
an inescapable link with their pass migration history and a sense of co-
ethnicity with others of similar background” Diaspora

Essentialism

• The essence of some thing in context of race, ethnicity or culture

essentialism suggests the practice of various groups deciding what is and
isn’t a particular identity.

• As a practice, essentialism tends to overlook differences within groups

often to maintain the status.

• Essentialism claims can be used by a colonizing power but also by the

colonized as a way of resisting what is claimed about them.
 Assignment; key terms in post colonialism

• Prepared By; Syed Jawad Shah

• Presented To; Mam Mutahira

• M.A. English 4 rd Semester NCBA&E Gujrat

Alterity

• It is a state of being other or different, the political, religious, cultural or linguistic other .

• It is the study of ways in which one group makes themselves different from others.

• According to Spivak, it is imperative for one to uncover the histories and inherent historical
behaviors in order to exercise an individual right to authentic experience, identity and reality.
Within the concept of socially constructed histories one "must take into account the dangerous
fragility and tenacity of these concept-metaphors.

• Spivak recalls her personal history: "As a postcolonial, I am concerned with the appropriation of
'alternative history' or 'histories'. I am not a historian by training. I cannot claim disciplinary
expertise in remaking history in the sense of rewriting it. But I can be used as an example of how
historical narratives are negotiated. The parents of my parents' grandparents' grandparents
were made over, not always without their consent, by the political, fiscal and educational
intervention of British imperialism, and now I am independent. Thus I am, in the strictest sense,
a postcolonial.

• Spivak uses four "master words" to identify the modes of being that create alterity:
"Nationalism, Internationalism, Secularism and Culturalism."Furthermore, tools for developing
alternative histories include: "gender, race, ethnicity, class”.

Colonial education

• The process by which a colonizing power assimilates either a subaltern native elite or a larger
population to its way of thinking and seeing the world.

Ethnicity

• A fusion of traits that belong to group shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, behaviours,
experiences, memories and loyalties.

• it is often deeply related to a person’s identity.

• Postcolonial and subaltern studies question the knowledge claims made by area studies by
criticizing their representational strategies of colonialism and the postcolonial situation. They
pose a challenge for international relations as a discipline by questioning the knowledge–power
nexus. They assert that the presumably “scientific” accounts of the non-West carry the
ideological baggage of colonialism. What is needed therefore is to account first for the historical
representation of the non-West in Western scientific discourse and produce a critique of this
knowledge system as a legitimating and administrative discourse in the service of colonialism.