WEEK FOURTEEN: POSTCOLONIALISM

 Gayatri Spivak’s article, “Who Claims Alterity?” originated for a symposium and discusses class being the most abstract concept in writing of history in comparison with race and gender. She is not a historian by training and identities being a postcolonial feminist Marxist (p.1093).  She lists the four main legitimizing codes for colonization by imperialists as nationalism, internationalism, secularism, and culturalism (pg.1093).

            Frans Fanon in, “On National Culture,” shows the stand point of cultured individuals of colonized races and their demand for a national culture and the affirmation of such represents a special battlefield (pg.711).  The passion for a national culture is shared with an attempt to move away from Western culture that conforms them so they can connect with their roots. The claim of a national culture would help rehabilitate the nation and is a justification for hope and a future of the national culture.

            Edward Said in “Orientalism,” proposes that orient is mostly a European invention (pg.87).  The Orient was one of the deepest and most recurring images of “the Other” and it helped define the West as its contrasting image, idea and personality. The term is less preferred these days  as it is too vague and refers to colonialism but is still used in academia (pg. 88). Orientalism is a considerable dimension in the modern political-intellectual culture as it has less to do with the Orient as it does with the world as a whole (pg. 91).

            Okwui Enwezor’s “The Black Box,” is extracted from an essay that argues post-colonial conditions and implications it has on the avant-garde (pg. 519). The avant-garde is no longer in the realm of art but in culture and politics. Postcolonialism was a double move consisting of decolonization which was liberation from within, and to exceed the borders of the formally colonized and lay claim to the modern world through media, communication or images. It was considered postmodern’s saving grace but should be considered away from postmodern (pg.521).

            Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” describes how humans have been thought in antisocial and postcolonial writing. The science of climate change forefronts the idea of human being’s geological activity.

            The group project of “Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies” gives a sort of manual for understanding the lingo and the terminology found in postcolonial studies. The important words are bolded and then related and defined in the context of colonial studies as well as their places in literature, the society of colonial studies, and in other aspects of academia and the social world as a whole for easier understanding. 

Key Concepts of PostColonialism Studies

• Alterity- state of being different. used as alternative to otherness. move away from term otherness, referred to as a subjective person to philosiphical questions, not being considered another person. another person who has another person and society.
• preferred term because other suggests a controversial term frmo the enlightenment that isnt socially accepted anymore. 
• accounts for social and political conditions
• Ambilivalence
• simulutaneas attraction and repulsion of an object
• homi k bhaba
• colonized exist in nature of attraction and repulsion of colonizer    
• unwelcome because it creates mimicry and mockery of colonizer
• you change what they are trying to teach you. goes both ways
• Micegenation
• fear of black man and white woman, carrying a contaminated child
• fear of inter-racial mingling
• Globalization
• process of individualized and communities influenced by things world wide. process of the world becoming a single place
• 3 camps
• 1 sees good thing, access to tech, services, health care, poor people get held
• 2, rejects globalization, form of domination by first world over third world. see it as a way to jusify hegemony
• 3, more neutral, tries to critically engage and analyze the process of globalization
• glocablization and imperialization, 113, demonstrates transumation of imperialization
• transcultural, also the new imperialism as well
• US, like the new imperialistic power after WWII, in control of money and a lot of culture, impose our culture on everyone else
• Fiji, buying land which have the largest water source and thus the natives no longer have access to water and they cant do buy it. 
• Hybridity
• going native aspect
• used instead of cross cultural exchange, removes the white washnes
• creation of new transcultural forms in colonization
• two species coming together to form a third that has traits of both
• going native negativity, racial roots of it, influence of term in imperial discourse, such hybrids without constant up keep could revert back to primitive stock
• afraid of the purity, contamination, of whiteness,
• seeing meaning as product rather than intrinsic to objects, etc
• Metropolis
• usually not city, center, mother of colony, urban area usually
• Mimicry
• you mimic a colonizer, way of doing htings, you cant fully do it because it becomes a mockery in a way
• mocking: just almost like a disrespectful appropriation

ARTICLES

• Black Box
• culture and politics, avant garde no longer in art
• degree to which globalization is in spaciality, cumulative affects, mediations of temporality. abolish great distances, but uneven
• pg.21 a double move
• decolonialization, liberation from within
• ghandi, martin luther king
• making empires former other visible, language, communication, everyday. 
• distinquish pomo is different that poco
• pomo- michael graves, historical past, take it out of a colonialist, modernist claims for truth, formal move, de-hierarchicalize. focus on the past
• poco- subverse this. present and a future. not to be found in art, maybe art history or criticism, found in politics, history of avant garde in grand narratives
• avant garde was foreground until it gets mainstream
• avant garde in the arts is mainstream. hegemonic. grand narrative
• we have the frontier, 
• World Trade Center
• reactions greatly different
• some wanted to attack, some wanted to hurt them.  
• all politics, more educated women are, less radicalism. 
•    
• Binaryism
• 9/11 metaphor what is at stake in experimental politics, 
• ground zero, metaphor, where do we locate it, what is its context, 
• military response shows the weakness of the capital system
• we came after them like they wanted to 
• empowered them even more
• call to action for art to respond but how to happen have no idea
• Postcolonial studies and climate change
• clarifies why we keep doing things to ourselves
• subjectivity
• page 5, human in homi bhaba
• norm of the WASP is full civic participation and idea and everything is based against this norm
• thrive or survive?
• thriving is participating. having art is about thriving. if you are dying of thirst you dont have art. 
• the stateless, illegal immigrants, those seeking asylum, these are the new colonists. 
• they are screwed because of how the state exercising control
• but sometimes captialism depends on them
• work for nothing, be sexually harrashed and cant report, etc
• mississippi chicken (film) shows conditions which stuff is produced
• we stand on the threshold on which borders will become frontiers again
• page 9.
• spurred on 2007 report on climate change
• HUmans in the Anthroprocene
• global climate affect need for people to move, become colonists, etc, immigrants 
• humans affect on their environment
• who is the 'we' in the collective project
• nature vs culture
• human is natural force and is nature
• humans are part of the natural history of the planet due to our effect on the planet
• pg 11
• global warming
• picture of human, social scientists we have always imagined
• humans act like geological force, liken humans as nonhumans but with agency
• think of the two figures of the humans simultaneously. human and nonhuman
• gaia theory, planet living, not floating biosphere
• tests on daisys, etc very convincing
• doesn't bring this up but talk about it in class: (life is a social construction, life does not exist) (all connected via media)
• cant experience ourselves as geographical movement, we are collectively affecting but it is like stopping a tornado, you cant imagine after a few generations, and before
• we are ontologically here. subject object nautre. we are the subject and the object is nature and thus we feel we can treat it badly
• Wicked Problem        
• 1973 climate change is not a one event problem. cannot be fixed
• we all  have our own personal right system and we execute them on a daily basis. effected by our social positions
• someone across the world will never buy a car, they have no need, they are worried about their three cows that are their livelihood
• humans exist in two different modes
• some who have justice, but know they wont have much of an impact
• we collectively are indifferent or neutral. run up against our own limits. we see what needs to be done but we cant get together as a group to fix it, or cant care enough
• we have a mode that is just as blind. people recycle and walk but we turn on the air conditioning that counteracts what we do. 
• groupthink? mass crowd control?
• climate change is all about politics
• postcolonial condition is a political condition
• profound human condition
• last 65 million years of human condition have been fine but in the last 300 years are have messed up and hurt the planet
• Orientalism, Edward Said
• orient almost european condition, romance, themes, landscapes, etc, aesthetic catagory almost
• liek race, very materially real, form of power.
• academic discipline in academia, how we dont use it as often
• as an apistomology, a way of thought, 
• east versus west
• the east is what the west measures itself. like that, it is a very real place. drastic. christianity versus buddhism. 
• power is the most insidious, the way the East gets the Other. 
• scientist, scholar, missionary, was in or thought about orient because he could think about it with little interest from the orient. 
• orientalism is more a symbol of power over the people by europe, etc
• a distribution of geopolitical context
• way to understand, control, manipulate what is in your own world
• these categories, same more about whiteness that blackness, 
• more about The Occident than the Orient
• less to do with the orient that it does with our world
• orientalism is a cultural and political fact. 
• Spivak, Who Claims Alterity?
• she was critical of early post colonial works
• she is feminist marxist.
• the subject is not some random other, she identifies being indian born
• the othered subject can be othered in such ways
• the woman has a worse subject as other. the othered woman is even worse. 
• lets look at gender and class and how they inflect this position and thought
• institutionalized education, where you can make people listen
• captive audience at least, may not exactly believe this point though
• michelle wallace quote