Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism is the critical academic inspect of a cultural, political as well as economic legacy of colonialism together with imperialism, focusing on the affect of human dominance and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of commonly European imperial power.

Postcolonialism encompasses a wide mark of approaches, and theoreticians may non always agree on a common species of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may seek to defining a better apprehension of colonial life—based on the given that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators—from the constituent of image of the colonized people. On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of contemporary history, and may also make examples from anthropology, historiography, political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies inspect the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian thought.

At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism i.e., postcolonial studies loosely represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain view and methods.

Purpose and basic concepts

As an epistemology i.e., a study of knowledge, its nature, and verifiability, ethics moral philosophy, and as a political science i.e., in its concern with affairs of the citizenry, the field of postcolonialism addresses the matters that cost the postcolonial identity of a decolonized people, which derives from:

Postcolonialism is aimed at disempowering such theories intellectual and linguistic, social and economic by means of which colonialists "perceive," "understand," and "know" the world. Postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for ]

Colonialism was reported as "the extension of civilization," which ideologically justified the self-ascribed racial and cultural superiority of the Western world over the non-Western world. This concept was espoused by Ernest Renan in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale 1871, whereby imperial stewardship was thought to impact the intellectual and moral reformation of the coloured peoples of the lesser cultures of the world. That such(a) a divinely established, natural harmony among the human races of the world would be possible, because programs has an assigned cultural identity, a social place, and an economic role within an imperial colony. Thus:

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races, by the superior races is part of the providential design of things for humanity.... Regere imperio populos is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries, which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. reorient the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his adjusting role. Nature has present a race of workers, the Chinese race, who pretend wonderful manual dexterity, and near no sense of honour; govern them with justice, levying from them, in proceeds for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and any will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race.... let each do what he is made for, and any will be well.

From the mid- to the late-nineteenth century, such racialist group-identity language was the cultural common-currency justifying geopolitical competition amongst the European and American empires and meant to protect their over-extended economies. particularly in the colonization of the Far East and in the late-nineteenth century Scramble for Africa, the description of a homogeneous European identity justified colonization. Hence, Belgium and Britain, and France and Germany proffered theories of national superiority that justified colonialism as delivering the light of civilization to unenlightened peoples. Notably, la mission civilisatrice, the self-ascribed 'civilizing mission' of the French Empire, proposed that some races and cultures have a higher intention in life, whereby the more powerful, more developed, and more civilized races have the modification to colonize other peoples, in good to the noble idea of "civilization" and its economic benefits.

Postcolonial theory holds that decolonized people creation a postcolonial identity that is based on cultural interactions between different identities cultural, national, and ethnic as living as gender and a collection of things sharing a common attaches based which are assigned varying degrees of social power 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 description to view the non-Western world as inhabited by 'the other'.

As an example, consider how neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity often includes the relegating of decolonized peoples, their cultures, and their countries, to an imaginary place, such as "the Third World." Oftentimes the term "the third World" is over-inclusive: it indicated vaguely to large geographic areas comprising several continents and seas, i.e. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Rather than providing a clear or prepare description of the area it supposedly target too, it instead erases distinctions and identities of the groups it claims to represent. A postcolonial critique of this term would analyze the self-justifying ownership of such a term, the discourse it occurs within, as alive as the philosophical and political functions the Linguistic communication may have. Postcolonial critiques of homogeneous concepts such as the "Arabs," the "First World," "Christendom," and the "Ummah", often goal to show how such language actually does not equal the groups supposedly identified. Such terminology often fails to adequately describe the heterogeneous peoples, cultures, and geography that make them up. Accurate descriptions of the world's peoples, places, and things require nuanced and accurate terms.

As a term in contemporary history, postcolonialism occasionally is applied, temporally, to denote the immediate time after the period during which imperial powers retreated from their colonial territories. Such is believed to be a problematic a formal request to be considered for a position or to be enables to do or have something. of the term, as the immediate, historical, political time is not included in the categories of critical identity-discourse, which deals with over-inclusive terms of cultural representation, which are abrogated and replaced by postcolonial criticism. As such, the terms postcolonial and postcolonialism denote aspects of the subject matter that indicate that the decolonized world is an intellectual space "of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridity, and of liminalities." As in near critical theory-based research, the lack of clarity in the definition of the subject matter coupled with an open claim to normativity allows criticism of postcolonial discourse problematic, reasserting its dogmatic or ideological status.

In Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics 1996, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins clarify the denotational functions, among which:

The term post-colonialism—according to a too-rigid etymology—is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naïve teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post-colonialism is, rather, an engagement with, and contestation of, colonialism's discourses, energy to direct or determine structures, and social hierarchies... A theory of post-colonialism must, then,to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism.

The term post-colonialism is also applied to denote the Mother Country's neocolonial control of the decolonized country, affected by the legalistic continuation of the economic, cultural, and linguistic power relationships that controlled the colonial politics of cognition i.e., the generation, production, and distribution of cognition about the colonized peoples of the non-Western world. The cultural and religious assumptions of colonialist logical system cover active practices in sophisticated society and are the basis of the Mother Country's neocolonial attitude towards her former colonial subjects—an economical consultation of labour and raw materials.