Postcolonialism | ||
Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed a body of writing that | Párr. 1 | |
attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western and non- | ||
western people and their worlds are viewed. This means experiencing how differently | ||
things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather than Berlin or Boston, and | ||
5 | understanding why. It means realizing that when western people look at non-western | |
people what they see is often more a mirror image of themselves and their own assumptions | ||
than the reality of what is really there, or of how people outside the west actually feel and | ||
perceive themselves. Postcolonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same | ||
material and cultural well-being. The reality, though, is that the world today is a world of | ||
10 | inequality, and much of the difference falls across the broad division between people of the | |
west and those of the non-west. | ||
This division between the rest and the west was made fairly absolute in the 19th | Párr. 2 | |
century by the expansion of the European empires, as a result of which nine-tenths of the | ||
entire land surface of the globe was controlled by European, or European-derived, powers. | ||
15 | Colonial and imperial rule was legitimized by anthropological theories which increasingly | |
portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior, childlike, or feminine, incapable of | ||
looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly well for millennia) and requiring | ||
the paternal rule of the west for their own best interests (today they are deemed to require | ||
'development'). The basis of such anthropological theories was the concept of race. In | ||
20 | simple terms, the west-non-west relation was thought of in terms of whites versus the non- | |
white races. White culture was regarded as (and remains) the basis for ideas of legitimate | ||
government, law, economics, science, language, music, art, literature - in a word, | ||
civilization. | ||
Throughout the period of colonial rule, colonized people contested this domination | Párr. 3 | |
25 | through many forms of active and passive resistance. It was only towards the end of the | |
19th century, however, that such resistance developed into coherent political movements: | ||
for the peoples of most of the earth, much of the 20th century involved the long struggle | ||
and eventual triumph against colonial rule, often at enormous cost of life and resources. | ||
When national sovereignty had finally been achieved, each state moved from colonial to | ||
30 | autonomous, postcolonial status. However, it is striking that despite decolonization, the | |
major world powers did not change substantially during the course of the 20th century. For | ||
the most part, the same (ex)imperial countries continue to dominate those countries that | ||
they formerly ruled as colonies. The cases of Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq, make it | ||
clear that any country that has the nerve to resist its former imperial masters does so at its | ||
35 | peril. All governments of these countries that have positioned themselves politically against | |
western control have suffered military interventions by the west against them. | ||
For one thing, along with this shift from formal to informal empire, the western | Párr. 4 | |
countries require ever more additional labour power at home, which they fulfil through | ||
immigration. As a result of immigration, the clear division between the west and the rest in | ||
40 | ethnic terms at least no longer operates absolutely. More generally, in terms of broad | |
consensus, the dominance of western culture, on which much of the division between | ||
western and non-western peoples was assumed to rest in colonial times, has been dissolved | ||
into a more generous system of cultural respect and a tolerance for differences. | ||
What is important is that postcolonialism involves first of all the argument that the | Párr. 5 | |
45 | nations of the three non-western continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely in a | |
situation of subordination to Europe and North America, and in a position of economic | ||
inequality. Postcolonialism asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American | ||
peoples to access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their | ||
cultures, cultures that are now intervening in and transforming the societies of the west. | ||
50 | Postcolonial theory involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of | |
knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west. It is concerned with developing | ||
the driving ideas of a political practice morally committed to transforming the conditions of | ||
exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the world's population live out their | ||
daily lives. | ||
55 | Postcolonial theory, so-called, is not in fact a theory in the scientific sense, that is a | Párr. 6 |
coherently elaborated set of principles that can predict the outcome of a given set of | ||
phenomena. It comprises instead a related set of perspectives, which are juxtaposed against | ||
one another, on occasion contradictorily. It involves issues that are often the preoccupation | ||
of other disciplines and activities, particularly to do with the position of women, of | ||
60 | development, of ecology, of social justice, of socialism in its broadest sense. Above all, | |
postcolonialism seeks to intervene, to force its alternative knowledges into the power | ||
structures of the west as well as the non-west. It seeks to change the way people think, the | ||
way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between the different | ||
peoples of the world. For this reason, there is no attempt here to elaborate postcolonialism | Párr. 7 | |
65 | as a single set of ideas, or as a single practice. At one level there is no single entity called | |
'postcolonial theory': postcolonialism, as a term, describes practices and ideas as various as | ||
those within feminism or socialism. Postcolonialism is about a changing world, a world that | ||
has been changed by struggle and which its practitioners intend to change further. | ||
Referencia | ||
Young, Robert J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. |