But it is not limited within those approaches. Anti-Oppressive social work is a practice represents the theories and approaches of social justice. Yet another post theory, postcolonialism is focused on interrogating and responding to the legacies of European colonization Healy, , p. Relationship between Postmodernism and Post colonialism Words 5 Pages.
Postmodernism has been described as a new version of Western cultural imperialism. Discuss the relationship between postmodernism and 'postcolonialism'. Postmodern theory been applauded as liberating, even democratising, in its rejection of absolutism and in its refusal to accept the dictates of hierarchy and certainty. It calls for the abandonment of the modernist qualities of objective truth, centralized knowledge, totalising explanations and determinacy.
Rather, postmodern theory advocates for the relatively of truth, indeterminacy and pluralism. Roger Berger also notices that a relationship exists between the two when he says:. At the same time, postcolonialism is simultaneously or variously a geographical site, an existential condition, a political reality, a textual practice, and the emergent or dominant global culture or counter-culture. In this passage, Berger mentions that postmodernism and postcolonialism converge in some respective purposes.
First, both are a "textual practice. Also, both explore the idea of authority or as Berger says, a "dominant global culture," and perhaps this is why there is yet no definite "boundary" drawn between the two movements. However, Richards does attempt to draw a clearer line between the two with respect to the idea of authority. He says that postcolonial writers attempt to "unmask European authority" while postmodernists attempt to unmask authority in general. So it seems that both movements investigate the ideas of "control" in different settings.
One theory of postmodernism stipulates that language is one vehicle by which authority obtains control. And since postcolonial novels explore the implications of European authority on "postcolonials," wasn"t it inevitable that postcolonial writers would have been faced with the problem of how language can be manipulated for the purpose of European control.
Tiffin recognizes that colonizers use language to control the colonized. Perhaps Tiffin's idea that "language and power operate in the world" together also implies that "power" remains in power by its ability to control public and private language. This citationality comes back to the law, to intention or teleology, as an accident, a kind of contingency, the contingency of its own founding in the general iterability of signs.
The possibility of disengagement, citational graft, and even empty or mechanical repetition, which demonstrably characterizes all iterable marks, is the very condition of experience and the condition for the intentional statements too.
This is not, the argument goes, an irritation or impropriety that accidentally attaches itself to proper usage.
Rather, as can easily be shown, without it any future utterance, any future addressee and any future at all, would be impossible. In postcolonialism, then, the performative utterance takes on a specific and crucial significance.
He writes:. It is one of the ironic signs of our times that then Introduction to The Real Me? Postmodernism and the Question of Identity should be written by an Anglicized post-colonial migrant who happens to be a slightly Frenchified literary critic. His point is actually quite complex. Postcolonialism logically precedes postmodernism the moment a colonizer set foot on other lands.
In this sense the performative is revealed as ground paradoxically but actually and it is this that makes postcolonialism effective. Self-Reflexivity or Auto- Referentiality. In postcolonialism the hybrid is explicitly focused upon, performed, inscribed in its performance. Repetitions of the Same. Now we have a further reason for failing to construct that paradigm of good and bad postmodernism. The knowing, educated, sophisticated irony about who and what and where we are would be in danger of simply repeating the traditional form of colonial superiority unless it could assume a solidarity with all those other forms of alienated, oppressed, marginalized community and those radically different modes of relation as they emerge performatively under the growing determinations of global capital.
Here postcolonialism must also participate in the general ethical affirmation of repetition and difference, sampling, citing, quoting and simulating existence with no origin or with origin already in representation, with no identity but what emerges out of repetition and difference history as repetition, origin as difference.
The awkward consequence here is that something of the colonial past would need to be acknowledged as condition, as possibility, as remains of the postcolonial and postmodern present, as we face the blindness of a future destination without end. Perhaps it is this blindness to the future that now and always structures our sense of self, of the present, and that hinders our understanding, even now, of a past that must also be comprehended according to the blindness it had then towards its future—not the future that here and now looks back, but that future that remains yet to come, for all time.
Who knows? The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London , Bhabha , Homi. The emancipation of women has achieved immeasurable success, and minorities have been able to defend, demonstrate, and maintain their cultural differences. In the future we will have to occupy ourselves more intensively with social topics.
Postmodernism is associated much more strongly than modernism with the discourses of feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism. Postcolonialism created a climate in which these discourses were able to unfold. How strongly postmodern thinking influenced the multicultural discourse is especially evident in Charles Taylor's study Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.
This acknowledgment of cultural difference is at the center of Charles Taylor's contemplations on multiculturalism and its politics. The unencumbered life of minorities is not possible without recognition.
Taylor states that laws in Western democracies, while seemingly the same for all citizens, are directed at the needs of majorities, not minorities.
Thus nations, purportedly blind to cultural difference, can evolve as societies that propound a particularism that easily turns into discrimination. In order to avoid a situation in which the language of one negotiator overcomes that of the other, one cannot rely on either one of the legal languages but must develop a new legal language that can be understood by both. In order to accomplish this, one must look for commonalities in both languages.
According to Lyotard, in postmodern societies one must discern what is not yet codified instead of simply reiterating what has already been stated in one of the languages. The theory of multiculturalism has essentially been developed in the U. The diversity of this theory is exemplified by the divergent studies of, for example, the Americans Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, the Canadian Charles Taylor, and the Australian Stephen Castle.
What these theories share is that they replace the older cultural identity paradigms such as specific national identity or the so-called "melting pot" with models that propagate the acceptance of the diversity and hybridity of varying, even contrasting cultures.
Feminism and multiculturalism are emancipation discourses typical of the West. The theory and practice of postcolonialism, however, has its roots in the so-called Third World, that is to say, in the former colonies as well as in South Africa. In a modified way, postcolonialism continues the anticolonial discourse of earlier decades; one must mention here the works of Frantz Fanon. It is significant for the postmodern concept of Western countries that the postcolonial theory was developed above all by academics from colonial countries who are teaching today at leading universities of the West, particularly North America, like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
It is no coincidence that the discourses of multiculturalism and postcolonialism overlap and strengthen each other, as is especially the case with Homi Bhabha. During the study of the works on the postcolonial discourse, two prominent aspects emerge: a descriptive concept of postcolonialism and a programmatic concept. The descriptive aspect deals with the examination of the relationships between the formerly or presently colonizing and colonized countries; the programmatic concept, however, marks the political goals, goals that have to do with the overcoming of old and new colonial structures, racial bias and cultural prejudice, as well as overcoming the imbalance of power between the "First" and "Third World" or "North" and "South.
The theory of postcolonialism is focused on working out the intellectual means by which one can descriptively enable the understanding of early as well as recent colonial dependencies and programmatically deconstruct these inequalities in the sense of decolonization. The operative aspect, whose foremost proponent is Radhakrishanan, intends to achieve that state which is marked by the prefix "post," that is, it is lastly a matter of presenting the future relationship of the so-called "Third World" to the so-called "First World" on a new basis, in the true sense of the word post-colonial.
The postcolonial view is thus at once detached and visionary: it wishes to recognize factual colonial conditions in order to change them through decolonization. Since the 60s, the postmodern concept has been expanded continuously; it has attracted an increasing number of disciplinary discourses and has thus been able to develop into a cultural periodization concept.
In contrast, the postcolonial view continues to be confined essentially to its usage in the humanities. The theoreticians and historians of this discourse are largely professors of literature or philosophy. In the meantime, the discourse has achieved international acclaim within literary scholarship, and there is hardly a country in the "First" or the "Third World" where academics of the most diverse backgrounds have not contributed their share to the theory and practice, method and goal of the postcolonial discourse.
An internet search in the "World Catalog" for bibliographical material yields under the term postcolonial a list of several hundred book publications for the English-language sector alone. A look at the abbreviated comments quickly reveals that the contributions are in general of a literary nature, dealing with aspects of literature from all continents. Since literary scholarship has tendentiously developed into an interdisciplinary cultural field during the past few decades, there are a number of studies that touch strongly on historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, and ecological areas but are rarely written by representatives of these very fields.
Since it is impossible to gain a complete overview of what has been written on postcolonialism, one is thankful for collections and readers that provide at least an impression of the variety and internationality of the literature dealing with postcolonial aspects.
The discussion initially centered on works of authors from former colonial countries of countries of the so-called "Third World.
The application of postcolonial theory has since been expanded considerably. First, those authors from the past who thematized colonialism are examined from a postcolonial viewpoint, and second, contemporary literary documents written in the vein of the postcolonial project are analyzed.
More recently there are also tendencies to read the literature of minorities and foreigners in a postcolonial light, which at times brings forth interesting fusions of the multicultural and the postcolonial discourse.
The focal point of the postcolonially oriented literary research, however, continues to be, on the one hand, the confrontation with the literature of the colonial era and, on the other hand, the discussion of the European and non-European literature that deals with the neo-colonial or post-colonial relationships between the "Third "World" and the "First. Although it seems impossible to work through all the contributions on postcolonialism, the books of Edward Said deserve to be mentioned, as they are cited in many contributions.
With his book Orientalism , Said set postcolonial literary research in motion. He stressed that this work as well as his book Culture and Imperialism were intended to provide comparative literature with new impulses, new tasks, and new fields of interest. With the counterpoint method Said wishes to confront the literature and history of the colonizing states with the culture of the formerly colonized countries, thus raising the level of awareness for the spectrum of interrelationships between the two worlds.
In this process he is concerned with the profiling of two rival perspectives, two irreconcilable historical approaches, two discrepant experiences: those of the European metropolis and those of the so-called colonial periphery.
He calls to mind that monolithic-autonomous cultures existed neither in the colonies nor in Europe, but that the civilizations of the colonists and of the colonized have for centuries influenced each other. Said compares the interplay of the divergent perspectives to the counterpoint method of classical European music, in which different themes are played out against each other and where each theme is accorded a period of its own.
At this time of increasing globalization, it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate kind of literary analysis. In a manner similar to the American theory of New Historicism influenced by Foucault, Said is interested in the power aspects of related discourses, in his case the discourses of colonialism and imperialism. He demonstrates how the literary, historical, social, and ideological variants of these discourses rely on each other, thus determining cultural production.
For example, when Said interprets Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in his work Culture and Imperialism , he is able to document how the novel's passing mention of British Antigua signaled the dependence of the English upper middle class on the colonies: the world of the Bertrams in Austen's book is founded on their overseas plantations, which are worked by slaves. However, Said is interested not only in the colonialist and imperialist literature from Defoe to Kipling, but also in the literature of opposition that was written during the waves of emancipation in the colonized nations during the 20th century.
In the latter part of Culture and Imperialism he addresses not the imperialism of the past but rather the neo-colonialism of the present and the discussion of the North-South relationship. Like other representatives of postcolonialism, he is not only a historian, but also a critic of the times. Said acknowledges his exile existence and sees in it the fact that one may live in the West - he teaches in New York -while at the same time belonging to the "other side. Like Homi Bhabha, he stresses the non-monolithic condition of the cultures, their flowing into each other, their hybrid nature.
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