Post Colonial Studies

The world has been affected by 19th Century European imperialism.

Postcolonial analysis makes clear the nature and impact of inherited power relations and their continuing effects.

The structures of power established by the colonizing process remain pervasive, though often hidden in cultural relations throughout the world.

Read the following concepts and think how the can be applied to our reading of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

· Abrogation: rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of what is correct or standard.
· Appropriation: the process of English adaptation. The way in which post-colonial societies take over aspects of imperial culture.
· Ambivalence: adapted into post-colonial discourse by Homi Bhabha. Describes a complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterises the relationship between colonizers and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent because the colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer. There is an empty imitation of English manners.
· Binarism: De Saussure claimed that signs have meanings not by a simple reference to real objects but by their opposition to other signs. Colonizer-colonized, white-black, civilized-primitive or savage, advanced-retarded, good-evil, beautiful-ugly, human-bestial, teacher-student, doctor-patient.
· Cannibal: eater of human flesh.
· Centre vs margin or periphery: imperial Europe became defined as the centre, everything outside is margin or periphery of culture.
· Colonial desire: sexualized discourse of rape, penetration and impregnation. Transgressive sexuality: obsession with the idea of the hybrid, interracial sex.
· Colonial discourse: instrument of power. Coined by Edward Said who analysed Foucault’s discourse. System by which a dominant group in society constitutes the field of truth by imposing specific knowledge disciplines and values upon dominated groups.
· Colonialism: exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years
· Ethnicety: human variation in terms of culture, tradition, language social patterns and ancestry.
· Eurocentrism: conscious or unconscious process by which Europe and European cultural assumptios are constructed or assumed to be the normal natural or universal
· Exotic/exoticism: alien, introduced from abroad.
· Going native: colonizers’ fear of contamination by absorption into native life and customs. Construction of native culture as primitive or degenerate.
· Hegemony: coined by Antonio Gramsci (1930’s) when investigating why the ruling class was so successful in promoting their interests in society. It stands for the dominance of one state within a confederation. The power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all. This domination does not occur by force, or persuasion but a more subtle and inclusive power over economy, or status apparatus like education and media. Consent is achieved by the interpellation of the colonized subject by imperial discourse so that the Eurocentric values, assumptions and beliefs and attitudes are accepted.
· Hybridity: creation of new transcultural forms within the contanct zone produced by colonization
· Imperialism: practice, theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory. Said differenciates it from colonisation which is the implanting of settlements on a distant territory. The term imperialism for the purpose of acquiring colonies for economic, strategic and political advantage did not emerge until 1880. Used to describe the government of Napoleon III.
· Metonymic gap: cultural formed when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language or concepts, allusions or references that may be unknown to the reader.
· Mimicry: when colonial discourse encourages colonized subject to ‘mimic’ the colonizer, by adopting the colonizer’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values. Reproduction of those traits.
· Native: the indigenous inhabitants of colonies. Pejorative sense: inferior to the colonial settlers.
· Neo-colonialism: coined by president of Independent Ghana Kwame Nkrumah (1965) to refer to countries such as USA who continue to play decisive role through international monetary bodies, through fixing prices on world markets, multinational corporations, etc.
· Orientalism: (Said) the process by which orient is constructed by European thinking. Relationship between Orient and Occident: relation of power, domination, various degrees of complex hegemony.
· The other: anyone who is separated from one’s self. The existence of others is crucial in defining what is “normal” and in locating one’s place in the world. (Sartre: Being and nothingness, Freudian analysis of formation of subjectivity, Lacan: other –the other who resembles the self, Other: symbolic other in whose gaze the subject gains identity)
· Othering: Spivak coined this concept as the process by which imperial discourse creates its “others”, the excluded or mastered subject created by the discourse of power.
· Race: Classification of human beings into physically, biologically and genetically distinct groups, transmitted through the blood. Pure and mixed race distinctions.
· Subaltern: of inferior rank (term adopted by Gramsci to refer to groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of ruling classes). Peasant, workers, among others.
· Ideology is perpetuated according to Althusser, by ideological apparatuses such as church, education, police which interpellate subjects.

McRae, J. & Carter, R. (1997). Post-Colonial Studies, Key Concepts. London: Routledge.