| 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. | |