Selected literary terms

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Post-colonial literature

Selected literary terms

Jayshree Kunchala                                             Guided By : Dr.Dilip Barad                                   Submitted To: M.K.Bhavnagar University

04/10/2014

                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                     Key Concepts

Introduction:

The word colonialism according to oxford dictionary comes from roman ‘Colonia ‘which meant farm or settlement or refereed to romans who settled in other lands about still retained their citizenship. And one another meaning about colonialism a settlement in a new country a body of people who settle in a new locality. New forms colonizers peoples forming a new community subject to or connected with their parent state the community so formed consisting of the original Sattler’s and their descendants and successors as long as the connection parent state is kept up.so it is a only define colonialism and after colonialism comes post colonialism.

We discussed hear selected terms for example.

Anti-colonialism

Colonialism

Diaspora

Euro-centrism

Exile

Globalization

Post-colonialism

 

 

1                     Anti-colonialism

                                             The political struggle of colonized peoples against the specific ideology and practice of colonialism. Anti-colonialism signifies the point at which the various forms of opposition become articulated as a resistance to the operations of colonialism in political, economic and cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to reject colonial power and restore local control. Paradoxically anti-colonialist movement often expressed themselves in the appropriation and subversion of forms borrowed from the institutions of the colonizer and turned back on them. Thus the struggle was often articulated in terms of discourse of anti-colonial ‘nationalism’. In which the forms of the modern European nation state was taken over the employed as a sign of resistance nation and nationalism. A sometimes arbitrary arrangement of colonial governance such as the structure of the public administration and forms for local political representation became the spaces with in which discourse was anti-colonial nationalism was focused and a demand for an independent post-colonial nation state was formed.

                     Anti-colonialism has taken many forms in different colonial situation it is sometime associated with an ideology of racial liberation, as an case of nineteenth century West African nationalist as Edward Wilmot Blaydon and James Africans Horton. Conversely it may accompany a demand for a recognisation of cultural differences on a bride and divers front as in the Indian national congress which sought to unite a variety of ethnic groups with different and religious and racial identities in a single national independent movement. In the second half of the twentieth century anti-colonialism was often articulated in terms of radical Marxist discourse of  liberation and in construction that  sought to reconcile the inter nationalist and anti-elitist demands of maxis am with the nationalist sentiments of the period (national liberation fronts) in the work and theory of early national liberalist thinker  such as.

                        Such as anti-colonial national liberation movement developed Marxist idea of a revolutionary cadre to explain The crucial role of the European (colonial)educated intelligentsia in the anti-colonial struggele.This movement argued that the peasant proletarian needed to be led to a practice of liberation though various stages of local and national affiliation by a bourgeois elite who would eventually in cobras dramatic formulation commit suicide by developing popular and local social practice in which they would be assimilated. Cabral in particular developed this idea of the need to empower and recognize the local as a specific and district feature of post-colonial politics and ways that radicalized the more rigid and orthodox practice of post Stalinist Marxist thought. Unlike later nationalist formulation of the new bourgeois post-independence elites however there is hearer no sentimental or mytholigiesed attachment to an idealized pre-colonial condition. The local is a perceived to be fully corrigible an involved in an inevitable process of historical change.

   “the working masses and in particular the peasant who are usually illiterate and have                                                                                                          never   moved beyond the boundaries of their village or their region came into context                                            with other groups lose those complexes of their own that constricted  them in their relationship with other ethnic and social groups. Realize their curtails role in the struggle they reach the bonds of village universe. They integrate in their country and world …… the armed liberation struggle implies there for veritable forced mooched along the road to cultural process.

                      Cabral contribution has received less recognition than that of fanon whose political practice was arguably less developed though his theory formation of colonial consciousness were amongst most powerful contribution to the creation of an effective anti-colonial discourse.

2. Colonialism

The term colonialism is important in defining the specific form of cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe. Over the last 400 years although the many earlier civilizations had colonies and although they perceived their relations with them to be one of a central imperium relation to a periphery of provincial marginal and barbarian cultures and number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the post renaissance practices of imperialism. Edward said offers the following distinction imperialism means the practice the theory and the attitude of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory.

 Colonialism which is almost always consequences of imperialism is the implantinting of settlements on distant territory. Although Said’s formula which uses imperialism for the ideology force and colonialism. European colonialism in the post renaissance world becomes a sufficiently specialised and historical specific form of especial expansion to justify its current general usage as a distinctive kind of political ideology. The fact that European post renaissance colonial expansion was conterminous with the development of modern capitalist system of economic exchange.

 Meant that the perception of the colonies as a primarily established to provide raw material for the burgeoning  economics of the colonial power’s was greatly strengthened. This was so even for Americans despite independence and the radical shift in their own power and position in the world at large after American industrialization in the late 19^th century. For example the presentations of Americans in such late 19^th century texts as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock home’s stories or shows man and superman. Thus the negative construction was as important a feature of self-representation for settler colonies as for colonies of occupation. Where race and the idea of an alien or decayed civilization where a features of colonial discrimination.  Although Canada have achieved independent federation in 1900 the people of both these settler colonies. By end of 19^th century colonialism had developed into a system of historical categorization in which certain societies and cultures where perceived as increasingly inferior.

Post-Colonialism

Like ‘gender ‘and race the concept of class intersects in important ways with the cultural implications of colonial domination. It is clear that economic control was of significant if not primary importance in imperialism and that economic and social recourses of colonised society’s. consequently class was an important factor in constructing the attitude towards the different groups towards the different groups to ward colonisers and category of colonised (Natives) and increasingly amongst the colonised peoples themselves as they as they began to employ colonial cultural discourse to describe the changing nature of their own societies. However it is less clear to what degree categories like class where able to be  such as employed as descriptors of colonised societies without undergoing profound modification to accommodate their cultural differences from Europe. The first contention to be answered is the notion that the kind of inequity and in justice exclusion and oppression found in post-colonial societies is simply explicable in terms of class.

For example any analyses of ideas in class in society’s such as India in which traditional east divisions replicating economic and social disadvantages from generation to generation. May be over laid by modern post-industrial forces need to take into account the ways in which models of class divided  such group such as worker or capitalist often cross and conflict with the older cast boundaries. Where these identity’s and differences coincide they may rain forces kinds privileges or oppressions that a classic Marxist class analysis would emphasize. Even those settler societies such as Australia that would seem to reproduce the existing class structure of Britain more exactly than any other kind of colony clearly do not so in any unproblematic way. Thus through they may reproduce many aspects of the imperial centre and may even perceive themselves to be fugitively related to it.

Since recent post-colonial theory has tended to concentrate on the issues of race ethnicity and to a lesser extent gender in the colonialist definitions and opposing self-definitions and opposing self-definitions of colonised peoples the importance of class has been down played. The revision is necessary because in the final analysis the means of representation and material practice in post-colonial discourse.

Diaspora

From the Greek meaning ‘to disperse’. Diasporas the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from homelands into new religion is a central historical fast of colonisation colonialism itself was radically  diaspora movement involving the temporary or permanent dispersion and settlement of millions of European over the over the entire world the wide spread effect of these migrations continue on a global scale. Many such settled regions where developed  historically as plantations or agricultural colonies to grow foodstuffs for the metropolitan populations and thus the large scale demand for labour was created as many regions where local population could not supply the need. The result of this was the development principally in the Americas but also in the other places such as south Africa of an economy based on slavery.

 Virtually all the slaves shipped to the plantation colonies in the Americas where taken from west Africa though also saw some slaves sold into British colonies as India Mauritius whist some enslaving of Melanesian and Polynesian peoples also occurred in part of south pacific to serve the sugar cane industry in places like Queensland where is was known colloquially as ‘black birding’.

The descendants of the diaspora movement generated by colonialism have developed their own distinctive culture with both preserve and often extend and developed their origin cultures.

 Creolised versions of their own practices modifying indigenous cultures with which they thus come into context. The development of diaspora culture necessarily questions essentialist models interrogating the ideology of a unified natural cultural norms one that under pins the centre margin model of colonialist discourse it also question that simpler kinds of theories of Nativism which suggest that decolonization can be effected by a recovery or reconstruction of post-colonial societies the most recent and social significant diaspora movements have been those of colonized peoples back to the metropolitan centres. In countries such as Britain and Franz the population now has been substantial minorities of diaspora. For example colonial peoples in recent time the notion of diaspora identity has been adopted by many writers as a positive affirmation of their Hybridity.

Euro-Centricism

The conscious or unconscious process by which Europe and European cultural assumptions are constructed as assumed to be the normal the natural or the universal the first and possibly most important sign of Euro Centricism as Jose Rabasa explain 1993 was the specific projection employed to construct the Mercator at last itself a projection that favoured the European temperate zones in its distribution of size. The map of the world is not merely an objective out line of discovered continent but an ideological and mythological ‘reification’ of space which open up the territories of space which open up the territories of the world domination or appropriation. The world only acquired spatial meaning after different religious had been inscribed by European and this inscriptions apart from locating Europe at the top of the globe or map established an ideological figuration through the accompanying text and illustrations which firmly centralized Europe as the source and arbiter of spatial and cultural meaning.

  By the eighteenth century this conception of a collective ‘Europe’ constructed as a sign of superiority and in opposition to the rest of the word’s cultures and becomes firmly consolidated. Then as now such collective construction existed in a troubled or ambivalent relation with an alternative stress on the nationalism of emerging individual European nation state and their and their particular cultures. European   colonization of the rest of the globe which accelerated in the eighteenth century and reached its apogee in the nineteenth actively promoted or facilitated Euro-centricism through exploration conquest and trade. Imperially displayed of  power both in the metropolitan centres and at the colonial peripheries and assertions of intellectual authority in colonialist institutions such as schools and university’s and through a civil service and the legal codes established European systems and values inherently superior to indigenous ones.                

Edward Said’s Orientalism examines the ways in which Euro-centricism. Not only influences and alters but actually produces other cultures Orientalism is way of coming to terms. With the orients special place in European western style for dominating restoring and having authority over the western style for dominating restoring and having authority over the orient this authority. Is in Said’s views produce of systematic discipline by which European cultures was able to construct and manage the orient during the post enlightenment period.

Exile

The condition of exile involves the idea of separation and distancing from either a literal homeland or Frome a cultural and ethnic origin. Critics such as Andrew Garr (1981) have suggested that a distinction should be done between the idea of exile which implies voluntary constraint and that of expatriates which implies a voluntary act or atate. In a sense only the first generation of free settlers of all many people varied colonial societies could be regarded as expatriates rather than exiles for those born in the colonies defined as a state voluntarily into need to be however term is restricted as gurr suggest refer to those we cannot returns to the place origin even they wish to do exile becomes a characteristic of a number of different colonial condition. For example it helps to account for a tension involved in constructing a distant place home by native born descendent of colonizer.

The degree in tenacity with which such native born colonisers perceive metropolitan colony as a home differs of course between settler invader colonies and colonies of occupation.

 Discourses of race and ethnicity where however in both features that conflicted desire to claim a special state for the colonial wished to claim and insider know ledged but wished to retain racial distinction from the native for example Kipling’s character Kim in  the settler colonies the settler also often wished to preserve a racial distinction from the native form depended natively linkage with the absent homeland. As they formed specific attachment to the new space tension arose that where central to the continued preoccupation with issues of identity settler colony discourses. A classic text illustrating this process was Australian woman writer Henry Handel Richardson whose hero in the fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1917) shuttles two and four between Australia and Europe unable to find a sense of wholly blogging in either space so ambivalent is his identity.

Globalization

Globalization is the process where by individual lives and local communities are affected by a economic and cultural forces that operate worldwide. In effect it is the process of the world becoming a single place Globalism is a function or result of the process of globalisation upon local communities. The term has had meteoritic rise since the mid 1980 until the time words such as international and international relations where preferred. The rice of the word international itself in the eighteenth century indicated the growing importance of territorial states in organizing social relation and is an early consequence of the global perspective of European imperialism. Similarly the rapidly increasing interest in globalization.

 Reflects a changing organizations of worldwide social relation in this century one in which the notion has begun to have decreasing importance as individual and communities gain access to globally disseminated knowledge and culture and are reflected by economic realistic that by pass the boundaries of the state system itself on which the concept of item nationalism and international corporation are based economy the global communication system and world military order.

As a field of study globalization cover such discipline as international relations political geography economics sociology communication study it addresses decreasing agency. Of the notion state in the world political order and the increasing influence of structures movement of corporate capital. Globalization can also be a signifier of travel of national company operation of the world employment.

Conclusion

In all the literary terms and with the help of the examples we know about how terms connected with contemporary time and how it is socially, politically, and literary.so literary terms make their own space in English language and literature.