Post colonialism
Postcolonialism is a broad theoretical approach that examines the past and present impact of colonialism and racism on social, political, and economic systems. It focuses on the ways particular groups of people because of notions of race or ethnicity have been excluded, marginalized, and represented in ways that devalued or even dehumanized them.
There are a number of major postcolonial theorists who have had a huge impact on the ways key concepts developed as an intellectual discipline: Frantz Fanon, whose groundbreaking work emphasized the effects of colonialism on the psyche; Edward Said, who developed the notion of “Orientalism”; Gayatri Spivak, whose work on the “subaltern” has been enormously influential; and Homi Bhabha, who has emphasized the value of psychoanalytical concepts such as ambivalence and hybridity in the study of colonialism.
More recently, however, the field of postcolonial studies has been characterized by a commitment to unpacking the complex connections between “race,” ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and many other forms of social stratification. These works tend to move beyond an additive model of identity, instead examining the specific ways in which various forms of inequality intersect in particular discourses and in particular historical locales.
In postcolonial studies, colonialism is not conceived simply in terms of military and economic expansion. It has important social, cultural, and religious dimensions as well. For instance, the export of cricket to colonial outposts by the British is a classic example of the way sport can be an element of colonialism.
The effect of colonialism on the human psyche was the subject of a number of books by Fanon. Whether writing about his own experiences growing up in Martinique, examining the effect of racism on the choice of sexual partners by women of color, or discussing the effects of the Algerian war of independence, Fanon consistently emphasized the damaging effects of racism and colonialism on the self-image and psyche of both colonizers and colonized people. However, he did not believe that people of color were destined to experience the same dehumanization as previous generations. As Fanon comments in Black Skin, White Masks (1991, p. 230), “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.”
Postcolonialism (the study of the ways in which past and present societies are influenced by a history of colonialism) is a theoretical approach that is gaining in popularity as a result of the need to theorize cross cultural contact in the context of colonialism and globalization. Although early postcolonial critics, such as Fanon, tended to characterize the power relations as involving colonizers and colonized subjects, later work tended to move away from such simplistic binaries. Such later work has emphasized the importance of studying hybridity, ambivalence, and areas of intense contact such as the borderlands, in order to develop a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to postcolonialism.
The complex ways in which postcolonialism intersects with categories of gender, sexuality, and other forms of social stratification has also been a topic of growing scholarly interest in recent years. Qualitative research in this field tends to emphasize the situatedness of the researcher and the nation state being examined. Overgeneralization beyond the realms of one particular postcolonial context is particularly frowned upon in this area of study.