Poco Week 2

Imperialism

Imperialism: the policy of extending the rule or authority of an empire or nation over foreign countries, or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependencies.

Imperialism refers to political or economic control, either formally or informally. In simple words, colonialism can be thought to be a practice (action) and imperialism as the idea (theory) driving the practice.

Neocolonialism

the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies ("former" occupied states).

Aka: The process by which powerful, rich, developed states use economic, political, or other informal means to exert pressure on poor, less-powerful underdeveloped states.

Homi Bhabha

Hybridity

Bhabha’s use of the term hybridity or "hybridisation", in its dominant form, is claimed to provide a way out of binary thinking, allows the establishment of the subaltern’s agency, and could permit a restructuring and destabilizing of power. This idea describes the emergence of new cultural forms from multiculturalism. It articulates a space of “inbetweeness” that is a reality for many postcolonial subjects. That is, instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, Bhabha shows how its histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations.

Ambivalence

It refers to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an object, person or action (Young161). Bhabha adapts it into colonial discourse to describe the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent because the colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer. Rather than assuming that some colonized subjects are ‘complicit’ and some ‘resistant’, ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject. For Bhabha, ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial domination because it disturbs the simple relationship between colonizer and colonized. Ambivalence is therefore an unwelcome aspect of colonial discourse for the colonizer (Mambrol).

Mimicry

This term has come to describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. When colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to ‘mimic’ the colonizer, by adopting the colonizer’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a ‘blurred copy’ of the colonizer (Mambrol). For Bhabha, the colonized subject is reproduced as “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 122). Mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse, almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction.

Bhabha on the "post"

Bhabha warns that in understanding the “post” as a point that comes “after” colonialism makes the present a space of empowerment, which it is not.

Bhabha describes postcoloniality as “a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’ world and the multinational division of labour” (Bhabha 9).

Bhabha warns that in understanding the “post” as a point that comes “after” colonialism makes the present a space of empowerment, which it is not. The “post” in postcolonial signals a distance from the colonial process.

“‘Beyond’ signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary - the very act of going beyond - are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’ which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced.” (6).

Shohat asks us:

Which perspectives are being advanced in the “post-colonial”? For what purposes? And with what slippages?