Cultural studies

Postcolonial studies:

Postcolonial refers to a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism: for example, when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many third world writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture. Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the pre-conceptions about their culture.

At first glance postcolonial studies would seem to be matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. However, we must remember that English, as in “English Department” or “English literature”, has been since the age of the British Empire a global language. Britain seemed to foster in its political institution as well as in literature universal ideals for proper living, while at the same time perpetuating the violent   enslavement of Africans and other imperialist cruelties around the World, causing untold misery and destroying millions of lives. Postcolonial literary theorist study the English language within this politicized context especially those writings that developed at the colonial “front”, such as work by Rudyard Kipling , E.M.Foster ,Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid. Earlier figures such as the Empire Writes Back, edited by Bill Ashcroft and other, and The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy have radically remapped cultural criticism.

   Said’s concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the east as constructed by the west. this discourse rather than realistically portraying eastern  “others” constructs them based upon western anxieties and preoccupation Said sharply critiques the western image of the oriental as “irrational,depraved,child-like’different.which has allowed the west to define itself as” rational, virtuous, mature, normal; To describe the Us-and-Them binary social relation with which Western Europe intellectually divided the world into “Occident” and “Orient”, the cultural critic Edward W. Said developed the denotations and connotations of the term Orientalism. That the cultural representations generated with the Us-and-Them binary relation are social constructs, which are mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each other, because each exists on account of and for the other. Notably, “The West” created the cultural concept of “The East”, which allowed the European suppression of the ability of the peoples of the Middle East, of the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia, to express and represent themselves as discrete peoples and cultures. Orientalism thus conflated and reduced the non–Western world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as “The East”. Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the Us-and-Them Orientalist paradigm allowed Europeans scholars to misrepresent the Oriental World as inferior and backward, irrational and wild, whilst misrepresenting Western Europe as superior and progressive, as rational and civil, as the opposite of the Oriental Other. In a review of Saïd's Orientalism, A. Madhavan asserts that "Saïd's passionate thesis in that book, now an 'almost 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."

Frantz Fanon, a French Caribbean Marxist, drew upon his own horrific experiences in French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national retimes that are based on inheritances from the imperial power, warning that class ,no race is a greater factor in worldwide oppression, and that if new nations are built in the molds of their former oppressors, then they will perpetuate the bourgeois inequalities from the past. his book the wretched of the Earth(1961) has been an impart ant inspiration for postcolonial cultural critics and literary critics who seek to understand the decolonizing project of third world writers, especially those interested in African and African American texts.

Homi k Bhabha’s postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality,  ethnicity and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. Bhabha critiques the presumed dichotomies between center and periphery, colonized and colonizer, self and other borrowing from deconstruction the argument that these are false binaries. He  proposes instead a dialogic model of nationalities , ethnicities and identities characterized by what he calls hybridity that is they are some thing new, emerging from a ”Third space” to interrogate the givens of the past. perhaps his most important contribution has been to stress that because it involves an interaction between colonizer and colonized. The old  distinction between “industrialized” and “developing” nations does not hold true today, when so many industrial jobs have been moved overseas from countries like the united state to countries like India and the Philippines.

Homi Bhabha, as a postcolonialist, tries to deal with the in-between categories of cultural differences across race, class, gender and, cultural traditions. Bhabha believes there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance.  This means, "in reality any simple binary opposition between 'colonizers' and 'colonised' or between races is undercut by the fact that there are enormous cultural and racial differences within each of these categories as well as cross- overs".  The terms hybridity and ambivalence are used by Bhabha to explain "the fuzziness and ambiguity of" the construction of an Other.  Indigenous peoples are thrust into identities formed through the dominant culture's political and social ideals.  Indigenous people are slaves to their indifference which is created in language.  The vast number of indigenous cultural groups is herded into generic constructions of identity.  They share certain constructs but at the same time differ in ways which language is incapable or unwilling to recognize.  The indigenous groups are invited into the dominant culture but never become completely immersed into it resulting in the sustaining of authority by the colonizer.

 "Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order" Bhabha believes language creates an internal dissonance through a naturalized reflection of performative cultural articulation.  The method by which the dominant group maintains a Euro-centric sphere of authority is through the manipulation of language.  Bhabha states, through language "resistance is a condition produced by the dominant discourse itself... colonial discourse is not all powerful.  Identity is always in constant flux making no unified self.  The split hybrid colonial subject can exist anywhere in the colonial world.  He is undifferentiated by gender, class or location".  Without the other there is no authority, so through hybridization an Other is formed which the Euro-centric world may rule over.  The indigenous other can not escape the boundaries of colonial discourse.  Postcolonialists believe, "skin colour has become the privileged marker of races which are thought of either 'black' or 'white' but never big-eared' and 'small-eared'.  The fact that only certain physical characteristics are signified to define 'races' in specific circumstances indicates that we are investigating not a given, natural division of the world's population, but the application of historically and culturally specific meanings.

Postcolonial critics accordingly study diasporic texts outside the usual western genres, especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities, immigrants and refugees. Postcolonial literatures from emerging nations by such writers as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie are read alongside European responses to colonialism by writers such as George Orwell and Albert campus. We can see some powerful conflict arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s midnight’s children (1980), for example, which deconstructc from a postcolonial view point the history of modern India.

Among the most important figures in postcolonial feminism is Gayatri chakravorty spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” or sub proletarian woman in the third world- spivak’s subaltern studies reveal between the male- dominated west and the subaltern woman’s voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

Spivak also introduced the terms essentialism and strategic essentialism to describe the social functions of post-colonialism. The term essentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to reviving subaltern voices in ways that might simplify the cultural identity of heterogeneous social groups, and, thereby, create stereotyped representations of the different identities of the people who compose a given social group. The term strategic essentialism denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the praxis of discourse among peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can occasionally be applied — by the so-described people — to facilitate the subaltern’s communication in being heeded, heard, and understood, because a strategic essentialism  is more readily grasped, and accepted, by the popular majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important distinction, between the terms, is that strategic essentialism does not ignore the diversity of identity and ethnicsentialism temporarily minimizes inter-group diversity to pragmatically support the essential group-identity.

Spivak developed and applied Michel Foucault’s term epistemic violence to describe the destruction of non–Western ways of perceiving the world, and the resultant dominance of the Western ways of perceiving the world. Conceptually, epistemic violence specifically relates to women, whereby the “Subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself”, because the colonial power’s destruction of her culture pushed to the social margins her non–Western ways of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world.

As noted in the previous section, globalization has a sustained engagement with and Influence on local cultures. Some critics have argued that we need to address the role Of globalization through the postcolonial lens. Since postcolonial studies is concerned, as the chapter on theories explores, the oppression of non-European races by European ones, Cultural Studies in a globalization age also needs to be conscious of the radicalized nature of globalized/globalizing culture. That is, the theme of race and u equal relations has to be worked into any analysis of global cultures. For instance, we need to ask how Hollywood films circulate globally. Does the fact that audiences maker? How does a Hollywood film appear to poorer nations in these areas of the world? Think of films like Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones and Blood Diamond which explore other cultures how are these conceived by Americans and received by other parts of the world?

What this means is: culture is increasingly mediated by economic factors. Culture has increasingly little to do with traditions or territories. Global economic and media flows determine what aspects of culture are across the world are determined less by local conditions and values than a circulation of global fashion patterns. In India, for instance, in the heavily mediated cultural context of the present, the elite/wealthy members of society can have access to Yves St. Laurent or a Chanel line because these are now available. Cultures and traditions are therefore modified not with the local culture in mind but with global patterns. Their choices are determined by the global economy.

Local cultures are linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence any study of contemporary culture hat to examine the role of a non-local market/money-which requires a postcolonial awareness of the role of racial difference, the colonial relationship between ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ and the exploitative relationship between the two worlds even today.

What does such a link between postcolonial studies/theory mean for cultural Studies in a globalizing age?  This approach makes us ask certain question:

Are local cultural products in any way determined by the possibility of a global market?

Are such cultural products financed by non-local moneys?

How are you such products, rooted in local traditions circulated and marketed globally?

Even though globalization products ‘hybrid’ products and cultural values, the question of economic gain must underwrite our analysis of even these products. Thus wee need to keep in mind that global material goods and products are manufactured in south and south East Asian sweatshops –where employees that are both global and local, and generate profits for ‘First World’ companies. This analysis therefore is firmly rooted in a postcolonial prespecti.Local cultural artifacts are now ‘produced’ keeping a global market in mind. This ‘production’ of local culture is often engaged in a relationship with the first world. The relationship between local cultural is exploited or eroticized by the First World.

As a field of inquiry, post colonialism asks both how unequal relationships of political power are represented in cultural institutions such as literature, art, popular media, and the academy and how these representations work to create, destabilize, or understand the differences between individuals and among social groups. Its critical theories endeavor to come to terms with the legacy of the modern era's racism, primitivism, territorial conquest, sexual exploitation, slavery, and mass violence, as well as the influence of that legacy on the contemporary world.