Postcolonialism: Beyond Empire, Global Power Dynamics in the Modern Era

By Fouad Sabry

Unlock the Power of "Postcolonialism" in Political Science

"Postcolonialism" is a crucial addition to the "Political Science" series, critically examining the lasting impacts of colonialism-This book is not just about history; it's about understanding how past events shape current global politics, culture, and identity-Whether you're a professional, student, or simply curious, this book offers valuable insights, ensuring a deeper understanding of how colonial legacies continue to affect the world.

Chapters Overview:

1-Postcolonialism-Introduction to postcolonialism, highlighting its influence on modern geopolitics.

2-Cultural Imperialism-Explore ongoing cultural dominance in global interactions and societal expressions.

3-Imperialism-Analyze the historical roots and enduring impacts of imperialism on international relations.

4-Postcolonial Literature-Literature as a critique and resistance to colonial legacies.

5-The Wretched of the Earth-Frantz Fanon's examination of colonialism’s psychological effects.

6-Colonial Mentality-Insights into the lingering mindset from colonial rule in postcolonial societies.

7-Postcolonial Feminism-Intersection of gender and postcolonial theory, focusing on women's experiences.

8-Homi K-Bhabha-Contributions of Bhabha, focusing on hybridity and ambivalence in postcolonial studies.

9-Critical Theory Works-Essential readings in postcolonial and critical theory.

10-Subaltern Studies-Perspectives of marginalized groups historically silenced in mainstream narratives.

11-Robert J-C-Young-Study of Young's critiques of cultural and political hegemony in postcolonial thought.

12-Subaltern (Postcolonialism)-Exploration of the subaltern’s resistance to dominant power structures.

13-Orientalism-Edward Said’s critique of Western representations of the East.

14-Hybridity-The blending of cultures from colonial encounters and its impact on power dynamics.

15-Inversion in Postcolonial Theory-How postcolonial theory challenges traditional narratives and norms.

16-Postcolonial International Relations-Reexamining international relations through a postcolonial lens.

17-The Empire Writes Back-Postcolonial literature as a form of narrative resistance.

18-Decoloniality-Efforts to disentangle modern knowledge from colonial legacies.

19-Decolonising the Mind-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s ideas on cultural decolonization and reclaiming identities.

20-Chandra Talpade Mohanty-Critical feminist perspectives in postcolonial discourse.

21-Decolonization of Knowledge-Movement to challenge the dominance of Western perspectives in academia.

This book provides the tools to critically analyze and understand the world in a way that could fundamentally change your perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Sep 2, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political, and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, with an emphasis on the consequences of human domination and exploitation of colonized people and their territories. In the 1960s, researchers from formerly colonized nations began writing on the lasting consequences of colonialism, producing a critical theory examination of the history, culture, literature, and rhetoric of (mostly European) imperial authority.

As an epistemology (i.e., the study of knowledge, its nature, and verifiability), an ethics (moral philosophy), and a political science (i.e., in its concern with the affairs of the citizenry), the field of postcolonialism addresses the issues that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives from their experience of colonialism:

the creation of cultural information about the colonized by the colonizers; and

How Western cultural knowledge was used to enslave a non-European population into a colony of the European mother nation, which, after the first invasion, was accomplished via the cultural identities of colonizer and colonized..

Postcolonialism seeks to undermine the assumptions (intellectual and linguistic, social and economic) that colonialists use to perceive, understand, and know the globe. Postcolonial theory offers intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and to develop cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society, and economics, so balancing the colonist-colonial subject binary power dynamic.

Postcolonialism includes a diverse array of perspectives, and theorists may not necessarily agree on a standard set of concepts. Based on the premise that colonial rulers are unreliable narrators, anthropological research may attempt to get a better knowledge of colonial life from the perspective of the colonized people. Postcolonialism investigates, at a deeper level, the social and political power ties that maintain colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as the social, political, and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This method may overlap with modern history studies, and it may also take examples from anthropology, historiography, political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Postcolonial studies subfields investigate the consequences of colonial control on feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian philosophy.

Colonialism was described as the expansion of civilisation, which intellectually justified the Western world's self-assumed racial and cultural superiority over the non-Western world.

This concept was espoused by Ernest Renan in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), Imperial guardianship was believed to effect the intellectual and moral reformation of the colored peoples of the world's less developed nations.

That such a divinely ordained was, Natural harmony among the world's human races would be attainable, due to the fact that everyone is granted a cultural identity, a social location, economic significance inside an imperial colony.

Thus:

Regeneration of weaker or degenerate races by superior races is part of humanity's divine plan. Governing the populace is our calling. Pour this all-consuming effort onto nations, such as China, who are begging for foreign invasion. Turn the adventurers who disrupt European culture into a ver sacrum, a horde like to that of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and each man will play his proper function. Nature has created a race of workers, the Chinese race, with great manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in exchange for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be content; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be well; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race.... Let each person fulfill his destiny, and everything will be fine.

— La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), by Ernest Renan

From the mid- to late-nineteenth century, racialist group-identity language served as the cultural common currency to explain geopolitical struggle between the European and American empires and to safeguard their overextended economies. Especially during the colonization of the Far East and the late-19th-century scramble for Africa, the depiction of a homogenous European identity used to justify colonialism. Thus, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany constructed conceptions of national superiority that justified colonialism on the grounds that it brought civilization to uneducated peoples. Notably, la mission civilisatrice, the self-proclaimed 'civilizing mission' of the French Empire, posited that some races and cultures have a higher purpose in life, whereby the more powerful, more developed, and more civilized races have the right to colonize other peoples in the name of the noble concept of civilization and its economic benefits.

According to postcolonial theory, decolonized individuals establish a postcolonial identity based on cultural interactions between diverse identities (cultural, national, and ethnic, as well as gender and class-based) that are ascribed differing degrees of social authority by the colonial society. In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyzes the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the colonizer; how such cultural resistance complicated the establishment of a colonial society; how the colonizers developed their postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the 'us-and-them' binary social relation in order to view the non-Western world.

Consider, as an example, how the neocolonial language of global homogeneity sometimes involves the relegation of decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their nations to a nonexistent region, such as the Third World. Frequently, the phrase the third World is overinclusive, since it refers to enormous physical regions including many continents and oceans, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Instead of offering a clear or comprehensive picture of the region it purports to allude to, it obliterates the differences and identities of the people it purports to represent. A postcolonial criticism of this phrase would examine its self-justifying use, the discourse it appears in, and the philosophical and political roles the language may serve. Postcolonial criticisms of homogenous categories such as Arabs, First World, Christendom, and Ummah often try to demonstrate that such terminology does not accurately reflect the ostensibly designated groups. Often, this phrase fails to accurately explain the many peoples, cultures, and geographies that comprise them. For accurate descriptions of the world's people, places, and objects, nuanced and precise terminology is required. By putting everyone under the Third World notion, it overlooks the reasons why certain areas or nations are deemed Third World and who is accountable.

As a word in current history, postcolonialism is sometimes used to indicate the era immediately after the withdrawal of imperial powers from colonial territory. Such a use of the word is seen problematic, since the immediate, historical, and political period is not included in the categories of critical identity-discourse, which deals with overinclusive terms of cultural representation that are supplanted by postcolonial critique. As such, the labels postcolonial and postcolonialism describe features of the topic that show the decolonized world is an intellectual realm of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and of liminalities.

Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins define the denotational functions in Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (1996), including:

According to a too-rigid etymology, post-colonialism is usually misinterpreted as a temporal notion, indicating the period after the end of colonialism, is the period after the democratically designated date of independence when a nation breaks free from another state's rule.

Not a naïve teleological sequence, that supplants colonialism, Post-colonialism consists of, rather, a commitment with, and opposition to, colonialism's discourses, power structures, and societal stratifications.

A postcolonialist theory must, then, react to more than the simple chronology of post-independence building, extending beyond the discursive experience of imperialism.

Post-colonialism is also used to refer to the Mother Country's neocolonial control of the decolonized country, which is characterized by the legalistic continuation of the economic, cultural, and linguistic power relationships that governed the colonial politics of knowledge (i.e. the generation, production, and distribution of knowledge) regarding the colonized peoples of the non-Western world. It operates as a non-interchangeable name that binds the sovereign nation to its former colonizer, robbing countries of their independence decades after they have established their own identities.

Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and philosopher, examines and medically portrays the devastating nature of colonialism in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Its sociocultural effects—the imposition of a subjugating colonial identity—are detrimental to the mental health of colonized indigenous peoples. Fanon says that the intellectual core of colonialism is the deliberate denial of all human qualities to the colonized population. The colonist achieves this dehumanization by physical and mental brutality in order to instill a submissive mindset in the locals.

Fanon argues that indigenous peoples must fiercely fight colonial oppression.

E. San Juan, Jr. considers the cultural critic Edward Said to be the founder and inspired patron-saint of postcolonial theory and discourse owing to his interpretation of the philosophy of orientalism in his 1978 book, Orientalism.

Notably, the West invented the cultural notion of the East, which, according to Said, let the Europeans to prevent the peoples of the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and Asia in general from expressing and representing themselves as distinct peoples and civilizations. Thus, Orientalism confused and reduced the non-Western globe to the cultural homogeneity known as the East. Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the us-and-them orientalist paradigm permitted European scholars to portray the Oriental World as inferior and backward, irrational and wild, in contrast to a Western Europe that was superior and progressive, rational and civil—the polar opposite of the Oriental Other.

A. Madhavan (1993) writes in his review of Said's Orientalism (1978) that Said's passionate thesis in that book, now a nearly canonical study, represented Orientalism as a style of thought based on the antinomy of East and West in their world-views, and also as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient. Conceptually, the power-knowledge binary relationship is fundamental for identifying and comprehending colonialism in general and European colonialism in particular. Hence, To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, they viewed them as either silent shadows to be animated and brought to life by the orientalist, or as a sort of cultural and international proletariat useful for the orientalist's grander interpretive activity.

— Orientalism (1978), p.

208.

Critics of the homogenous Occident–Orient binary social relationship, however, argue that Orientalism has limited descriptive power and practical applicability, and instead claim that there are varieties of Orientalism that apply to Africa and Latin America. In order to foster the construction of the cohesive, collective European cultural identity signified by the phrase The West, the European West adopted Orientalism as a homogenous form of The Other, according to the answer.

Using this outlined binary logic, the West often unconsciously builds the Orient as its alter ego. Therefore, portrayals of the Orient by Westerners lack land-based tangible characteristics. This ingenious or imaginative interpretation attributes feminine traits to the Orient and exploits the fantasies inherent in the alter ego of the West. It should be realized that this process elicits originality, which encompasses a whole area and discourse.

Said emphasizes the formation of philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyrical poetry on page 6 of Orientalism. Consequently, a whole industry exploits the Orient for its own subjective ends, while lacking a local and personal grasp of the region. Such enterprises ultimately become institutionalized and serve as a resource for explicit Orientalism or a collection of false knowledge about the Orient.

Empire's ideology made nuanced use of reason and used science and history to further its goals; it was seldom a crude kind of nationalism.

— Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient (1994),p.6

Today, these subjective academic disciplines synthesize the political resources and think tanks that are so prevalent in the West.

Orientalism is self-sustaining to the degree that it is acceptable in everyday conversation, causing individuals to reveal their dormant thoughts, impulsive, or not fully conscious of its own self.: 49–52

In defining the Postcolonial meaning of the word subaltern, the philosopher and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak warned against attaching a connotation that was too wide. She contends:

... subaltern is not only a posh synonym for oppressed, The Other, or someone who is not receiving a portion of the pie Everything that has limited or no access to cultural imperialism is subaltern, or a place of difference, in postcolonial terminology. Who would argue that they are the only oppressed? Working class members are oppressed. It is not subordinate... Many individuals want subaltern status. They are the least engaging and most perilous. I mean, they don't need the term subaltern because they are a discriminated-against minority on a university campus. They should examine the discrimination's mechanisms. They are a part of the hegemonic discourse, want a piece of the pie, and are not permitted to talk; therefore, let them speak and use the hegemonic discourse. They should not be referred to as subaltern.

Spivak also coined the words essentialism and strategic essentialism to explain the social roles of postcolonialism.

Essentialism refers to the perceptual dangers inherent in reviving subaltern voices in ways that may (over)simplify the cultural identity of heterogeneous social groups and, as a result, create stereotypical representations of the various identities of the individuals who comprise a given social group. Strategic essentialism, on the other hand, refers to a transient, essential group identity used in the practice of dialogue between peoples. In addition, strategic essentialism (a fixed and established subaltern identity) is more readily grasped and accepted by the popular majority in the course of intergroup discourse, so essentialism can sometimes be used to facilitate the subaltern's communication in being heeded, heard, and comprehended. Strategic essentialism does not neglect the variety of identities (cultural and ethnic) inside a social group, but in its practical purpose, it temporarily lowers inter-group variation to pragmatically maintain the essential group