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Summary Post Colonialism

The document discusses several postcolonial theorists and their ideas. It covers Edward Said and his work on Orientalism. It also discusses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her questions about authorship and positionality. Homi K. Bhabha is mentioned for his interest in social marginality and use of poststructuralist concepts. The document also covers concepts like hybridity from theorists like Stuart Hall and the distinction between race and ethnicity.

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Aldodi Ginando
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133 views2 pages

Summary Post Colonialism

The document discusses several postcolonial theorists and their ideas. It covers Edward Said and his work on Orientalism. It also discusses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her questions about authorship and positionality. Homi K. Bhabha is mentioned for his interest in social marginality and use of poststructuralist concepts. The document also covers concepts like hybridity from theorists like Stuart Hall and the distinction between race and ethnicity.

Uploaded by

Aldodi Ginando
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Name : Riyandi Darmawan

Student Number : 13020117130057

SUMMARY

POSTCOLONIALIST THEORIES
The appearance of postcolonial criticism has therefore overlapped with the debates on postmodernism,
though it brings, too, an awareness of power relations between Western and ‘Third World’ cultures
which the more playful and parodic, or aestheticizing postmodernism has neglected or been slow to
develop.

Jacques Derrida has described Western metaphysics as ‘the white mythology which reassembles and
reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his
own logos, that is, the mythos of this idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call
Reason’, and the methods of deconstruction have proved a major inspiration for postcolonial critics.

But this is to commit non- Western cultures (as it commits women) to a form of subjectivity and a
(repressed) narrative of individual and national self-legitimation characterizing Western liberal-
humanism.

EDWARD SAID
This then raises the crucial issue for postcolonialism of the position of the critic; the question, as Said
puts it in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ (1986), of ‘how knowledge that is non-dominative and
noncoercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations,
the positions and the strategies of power’.

Said’s own Orientalism has been criticized in this respect – not always fairly – for its under-theorized
and unproblematic appeal to humanist values (see Childs and Williams, 1996: 115–18); but while the
stronger echoes of deconstruction in Said’s later writing help to answer this charge, deconstruction The
title essay of the early The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), for example, explored the
‘worldliness’ of texts.
Here, Said rejects the view that speech is in the world and texts are removed from the world, possessing
only a nebulous existence in the minds of critics.

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK


The question of position concerns, more broadly, the efficacy of the critical intellectual as a public
figure – a question as relevant to Edward Said, This is to read Marx through Derrida perhaps, but
together with her opposition to liberal/individual feminism and her decisive anti-sexism, it offers a
purchase on questions of capitalist power and patriarchy which extends the deconstruction of privileged
Western intellectual subject positions.

She first raises questions about authorship, by way of Barthes and Derrida, and in two sections of the
body of the essay, posits: first a ‘reading of the novel’ – as ‘after all a novel’ as if the crisis that
followed its publication had not happened; and second, assembles a selective dossier of different
readerships so as to investigate the ‘cultural politics’ of how it was indeed read in the months following
publication.

HOMI K. BHABHA
Bhabha’s primary interest is in the ‘experience of social marginality’ as it emerges in noncanonical
cultural forms or is produced and legitimized within canonical cultural forms.
Homi Bhabha’s mode of postcolonial criticism also deploys a specifically poststructuralist repertoire
(Foucault, Derrida, Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis) for his explorations of colonial discourse.
For Bhabha, the ‘rich text’ of the civilizing mission is remarkably split, fissured and flawed.

RACE AND ETHNICITY


Literary theory and criticism have taken their lead here from cultural studies, though the boundaries
between these areas are symptomatically blurred.
To this end it has developed concepts also deployed in postcolonial theory: one such is the concept of
hybridity used by the British sociologist of culture, Stuart Hall (1990).Hybridity is an enabling
metaphor which assists theorization of the ‘black experience’ as a ‘diaspora experience’ (both in
Britain and the Caribbean)and brings to the fore the doubleness or double-voiced structures which he
sees as constitutive of this experience.

Hall’s redefinition of ethnic identity and his account of a ‘diaspora aesthetic’ and ‘diasporic
intellectual’ have been accompanied by related work in other areas of cultural studies (bell hooks,
1991; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994; Brah, 1996; Bromley, 2000) which sometimes include, but do not
prioritize, literature alongside a range of other cultural representations, notably film and music.

Hall has always seen cultural studies as an interventionist practice and the important essays ‘Minimal
Selves’ (1988) and ‘New Ethnicities’ (1996) introduce the notion of a provisional, politicized ethnic
identity (comparable to Spivak’s concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ – see below, p. 235) to combat at
once the free-floating, politically quietist implications of more textualist conceptions of difference, and
the conventional, reactionary nationalist associations of the concept of ethnicity.

Hall’s analysis of black diasporic cultural and aesthetic practices utilizes the concept-metaphor
‘hybridity’ both to signify the complexity of the ‘presence/ absence of Africa’ (‘nowhere to be found in
its pure, pristine state’ but ‘alwaysalready fused, syncretised, with other cultural elements’) and to
highlight the ‘dialogue of power and resistance, of refusal and recognition’, with and against the
dominance of European cultures.

Often this work is keen, first of all, to distinguish between the concepts of race and ethnicity and to
deconstruct the assumptions in the use of both terms of a fixed, naturally given, or unified national
identity.

In proposing a black feminist aesthetic, it also importantly exposes and critiques the silencing of the
black lesbian writer in both black male and white feminist criticism.

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