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0 | How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal? The laniDiage of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues, which has led Benedict Anderson to ask: 'But why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?'8 The nation's claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable if, with Partha Chatterjee, we adopt the postcolonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Englightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.9Such ideological ambivalence nicely supports Gellner's paradoxical point that the historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture. The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism . . . is itself in the least contingent and accidental.10 (My emphasis) The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the 'modem' totalities of the nation - 'homogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the key traits'11 - never pose, the essential question of the representation of the nation as a temporal process. | Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The Location of Culture” pg. 141-142 , Routledge 1994) | why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth? nation's claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable we adopt the postcolonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Englightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past | A) The Affirmatives construction of a “Nation-Space” manifests in distinction to a colonized Other- locking the colonial Other in a violent cycle. | 1,978 | 147 | 993 | 317 | 22 | 159 | 0.069401 | 0.501577 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
1 | Modernization theory provided post-war society in the West, and especially the US, with a temporal and spatial identity, an identity that could only be effectively constructed in a relation of difference with another time and another space. In this sense the will to be modern designated two forms of separation. First, there was a separation or break in time - the contrast between a modern now and a traditional, backward past, so that the societies of the Third World were located in another, previous time and their co-presence in modern time was effectively erased (Fabian 1983). Second, there was a separation in space - a geopolitical distinction made between the modern societies of the West and the 'traditional societies' of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These processes of separation were seen as being accompanied by transformations in science, technology, administration and economy, which were portrayed as opening up the future to limitless advancement and improvement (Adas [ 990, Latour 1993). The second kind of separation which reflected the existence of a geopolitical divide was further accentuated by the emergence of the Cold War, which gave a new kind of conflictual significance to the spatial separation between the modern and traditional spheres of world development. . Sakai (1997), in a discussion of the universal and the particular, Illuminates significant facets of the connection between the modern! non-modern difference and geopolitics. Thus, while we may wish to keep in mind that the modern has always been opposed to its historical precedent, the pre-modern, geopolitically the modern has been contrasted to the non-West, so that a historical condition is translated into a geopolitical one and vice versa. Although the West is particular in itself, it has been constructed as the universal point of reference through which others arc encouraged to recognize themselves as particularities. In the context of post-war modernization theory, the particular universality of the West came to be founded in a process of Americanization, so that as Sakai (1997: 157) puts it, whereas, in the pre-I 940 period the process of modernization had been the approximate equivalent of Europeanization, after the Second World War, modernization theory was deployed in a way that reflected the shifting of the centre of geopolitical gravity from Western Europe to the United States. The emphasis on modernization in the United States can be interpreted as a reflection of a new ethos of national purpose. Emerging at the end of the Second World 'War as the key Western power, there was a sense within the US that its burgeoning power was the result of the combination of its scientific and technological prowess, its military capacity, its democratic and open traditions and its expansive modernity. The US was the world's number one modern nation with a way of life that other less advanced nations would benefit from following and adopting. In its economic, political and cultural spheres, the US was seen as being ahead of other nations, as the nation that could and should offer leadership to the world. Its contemporaneity, rationality, innovation, dynamism, opportunity, mobility and freedom - in a nutshell, its modern being - was a beacon to the world. But there was another factor which helps to explain the focus on modernization in the context of West/non-West encounters. The term 'modernization' would, according to Walt Rostow, leading economist and deputy national security advisor, replace colonialism and create a 'new post-colonial relationship between the northern and southern halves of the Free World' in which a 'new partnership among free men- rich and poor alike' would emerge (quoted in Latham 2000: 16). Modernization would be conceptualized as a benevolent and universal process, a process based on a certain reading of Western and especially US experience, an experience in which US imperialism was erased, and this process would be framed as being necessary for the modernization and development of non-Western societies, especially relevant in a period in which many of these societies, in particular Africa and Asia, were undergoing a process of rapid decolonization. The term 'modernization' had a positive, progressive, and seductive orientation- to be against modernization would be tantamount to being irrational, backward, and retrogressive. | Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, 62-3) | Modernization theory provided post-war society in the West, and especially the US, with a temporal and spatial identity, an identity that could only be effectively constructed in a relation of difference with another time and another space. These processes of separation were seen as being accompanied by transformations in science, technology, administration and economy, which were portrayed as opening up the future to limitless advancement and improvement | Use of the term modernization is a blanket to cover colonization | 4,400 | 65 | 459 | 689 | 11 | 67 | 0.015965 | 0.097242 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
2 | As we have seen in the previous chapter, the emergence of the United States as a global power went together with a projection of notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order that posited a subordinate place for the societies of the non-West. The powers of expansion and intervention, both internally in the territorial constitution of the United States itself, and in a broader transnational mission of Empire, were intimately rooted in a vision of the United States as a driving force of Western civilization, diffusing its values to the presumed benefit of other non-Western societies (Cumings 1999). However, while US-modeled notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order continued to be transmitted in the period after the Second World War, and remained part of the Americanizing mission, other concepts came to receive greater emphasis. From the 1950s onward notions of 'modernization' and 'development' came to be more closely associated with the portrayal of West/non-West encounters, whereas representations of civilization and order, although still present, as noted above in the Dulles quotation, became less prominent - they were no longer the master signifiers they had been before 1940. At the same time, democracy and order were resituated in a discursive context organized around the new signifiers of modernization and development. This does not mean, of course, (hat these terms had never been deployed before the Second World War, but rather that their visibility and discursive weight came to assume greater predominance in the post-War period. The post-War origins of the 'discourse of development' have been dealt with in considerable detail by Escobar (1995), while Patterson (1997) has traced the links between notions of Western civilization and modernization. Also, recent contributions (for example, Baber 2001 and Blaney & Inayatullah 2002) have revisited modernization theory in relation to Cold War politics and the conceptualization of international relations. What therefore still needs to be examined; or more precisely, what constitutes my own perspective? First, in analyzing the continuing intersections between geopolitical power and the cultural representations of other, non-Western societies, and particularly Latin America in the example of this study, it is important to keep in mind that the notion of modernization - or more specifically modernization theory - came to be closely associated with the nature and direction of US interventions in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a specificity about this intersection which contrasts with earlier and later periods and needs to be understood in its geopolitical and historical context. It not only provides another important example of the interwoven nature of power, politics and representation but also illustrates the changing dynamic of US power as it impacted on the Third World. Second, from a post-colonial perspective, and in the specific setting of this chapter, there are two analytical elements that can be usefully signaled: a) The power to intervene was certainly not unaffected by the societies in which that invasive power was projected, since, as was noted in the previous chapter, resistances and oppositions US hegemony altered the subsequent modalities of intervention, and this was particularly the case with respect to both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Vietnam War, set as they were in a broader context of accelerating geopolitical turbulence. b) The geopolitics of intervention situated as it was in a Cold War context had an inside and an outside, since the Cold War had its chilling effect on domestic politics in the United States itself, and the phenomenon of 'containment culture' was a reflection of the interweaving of international and national concerns. Third, modernization as an idea, and its association in the 1950s and 1960s with Americanization, was not new (Ceasar 1997: 168), and nor was it to disappear after the 1970s-. As will be further shown in the next chapter, there are connections between neo-liberalism and modernization theory, as well as significant and often neglected differences. Furthermore, the term 'modernization' is frequently invoked today as if it had no history, and so in my own discussion an important objective is to highlight the historical specificity of the modernization idea in the Cold War era as ·part of a counter-geopolitics of memory. In this chapter, I shall argue that the Occidental, and predominantly US enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the 'developing world' was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a legitimation for a whole series of incursions and penetrations that sought to -subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In the process it also put into place a vision of the West, and especially of the United States, which in some important aspects was re-asserted in later neo-liberal delineations of modern development, as well as in subsequent writings on globalization. | Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 57-58) | , the emergence of the United States as a global power went together with a projection of notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order that posited a subordinate place for the societies of the non-West. The powers of expansion and intervention, both internally in the territorial constitution of the United States itself, and in a broader transnational mission of Empire, were intimately rooted in a vision of the United States as a driving force of Western civilization, diffusing its values to the presumed benefit of other non-Western societies while US-modeled notions of civilization, progress, democracy and order continued to be transmitted in the period after the Second World War, and remained part of the Americanizing mission, other concepts came to receive greater emphasis. From the 1950s onward notions of 'modernization' and 'development' came to be more closely associated with the portrayal of West/non-West encounters, whereas representations of civilization and order, although still present became less prominent democracy and order were resituated in a discursive context organized around the new signifiers of modernization and development. the notion of modernization - or more specifically modernization theory - came to be closely associated with the nature and direction of US interventions in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s It illustrates the changing dynamic of US power as it impacted on the Third World. The power to intervene was certainly not unaffected by the societies in which that invasive power was projected, resistances and oppositions US hegemony altered the subsequent modalities of intervention there are connections between neo-liberalism and modernization theory, as well as significant and often neglected differences the term 'modernization' is frequently invoked today as if it had no history, that the Occidental, and predominantly US enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the 'developing world' was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a legitimation for a whole series of incursions and penetrations that sought to -subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In the process it also put into place a vision of the West, and especially of the United States, | The projection of power portrayed of the US gave them an entitled sense of superiority. The American ideas of “modernization” are all really outgrowths of what we believed to be progress. | 5,047 | 187 | 2,273 | 784 | 31 | 348 | 0.039541 | 0.443878 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
3 | Frederick Jackson Turner (1962: 37-8), in his 1893 essay on the frontier in American history, argued that the process of settlement and colonization brought to life intellectual traits of profound importance-the emergence of a 'dominant individualism', a 'masterful grasp of material things', a 'practical, inventive turn of mind', a 'restless, nervous energy', which all reflected the specificity of the American intellect. Moreover, he did not limit his thesis to the internal territory of the United States, noting three years after his seminal paper that for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. For Turner, the demands for a 'vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the movement will continue' (Turner 1896: 296). In a similar vein, Theodore Roosevelt ( 1889: 26-7), in his four-volume examination of the frontier, entitled The Winning of the West, portrayed the frontier farmers and 'warlike borderers' as an 'oncoming white flood', while their adversaries, the native Indians, were considered to be the 'most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock' (ibid.: 17). Roosevelt's notion of an 'oncoming white flood' being associated with a civilizing mission found an international expression in what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which will be mentioned below. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the waves of colonization and settlement had passed their peak, the earlier Jeffersonian objective of separating the Indians from their land, of incorporating and assimilating the Indian into an advancing civilization, had taken its toll. War and subsequent treaties resulted in Native America being constricted to about 2.5 per cent of its original land base within 48 contiguous states of the union (Rickard 1998: 58), and the violent appropriation of land and subsequent confinement of native Indian communities to limited reservations gave another darker expression to the meaning of the frontier (Slotkin 1998; Takaki 1993: 228-45; and Zinn 1980: 124-46). The reality of war and violence was customarily represented as an unavoidable, preordained consequence of the beneficial march of a new civilization (see, for example, Tocqueville 1990: 25). The expansion of the frontier, and the territorial constitution of the United Stares as we know it today, had another dimension which was also particularly relevant to the later projection of power and hegemony in the societies of the South, and especially in the context of US-Latin American relations. On the eve of the US-Mexican War, and in the wake of the annexation of Texas from Mexico, a pivotal cause of the war, notions of 'Manifest Destiny' came to circulate in the worlds of journalism and politics. John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, and the originator of the term, had already written in 1839 of a boundless future for America, asserting that 'in its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles'. It was six years later in 1845, in relation to continuing opposition to the annexation of Texas into the Union, that O'Sullivan wrote of 'our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions' (both quotations in Pratt 1927: 797-8). The doctrine of 'manifest destiny' embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of approximately 50 percent of Mexico's original territory. Furthermore, as with accompanying characterizations of the native Indians' purported lack of efficient utilization of their natural resources, it was observed by President Polk, at the end of the War in l848, that the territories ceded by Mexico had remained and would have continued to remain of 'little value to her or to any nation, while as part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United States, to the commercial world, and the general interests of mankind' (quoted in Gantenbein 1950: 560). | Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 35-36) | the process of settlement and colonization brought to life intellectual traits of profound importance-the emergence of a 'dominant individualism', a 'masterful grasp of material things', a 'practical, inventive turn of mind', a 'restless, nervous energy', which all reflected the specificity of the American intellect for nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion the demands for a 'vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries are indications that the movement will continue ). In a similar vein, Theodore Roosevelt in his four-volume examination of the frontier, entitled The Winning of the West, portrayed the frontier farmers and 'warlike borderers' as an 'oncoming white flood', while their adversaries, the native Indians, were considered to be the 'most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock' Roosevelt's notion of an 'oncoming white flood' being associated with a civilizing mission found an international expression in what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary as the waves of colonization and settlement had passed their peak, the earlier Jeffersonian objective of separating the Indians from their land, of incorporating and assimilating the Indian into an advancing civilization, had taken its toll. and the violent appropriation of land and subsequent confinement of native Indian communities to limited reservations gave another darker expression to the meaning of the frontier The reality of war and violence was customarily represented as an unavoidable, preordained consequence of the beneficial march of a new civilization The expansion of the frontier, and the territorial constitution of the United Stares as we know it today, had another dimension which was also particularly relevant to the later projection of power and hegemony in the societies of the South, and especially in the context of US-Latin American relations. On the eve of the US-Mexican War a pivotal cause of the war, notions of 'Manifest Destiny' came to circulate in the worlds of journalism and politics. John L. O'Sullivan had already written that 'in its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles' The doctrine of 'manifest destiny' embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority, and it was deployed to justify war and the appropriation of approximately 50 percent of Mexico's original territory the territories ceded by Mexico would have continued to remain of 'little value to her or to any nation, while as part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United States, to the commercial world, and the general interests of mankind' | The AFF manifest in a coloniality of American policy makers and society continuing the message of Manifest Destiny. | 4,285 | 116 | 2,860 | 675 | 18 | 445 | 0.026667 | 0.659259 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
4 | In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge, specially in mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. These beliefs and images served not only to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic. | Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 169,JC) | colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, instruments of expression, intellectual or visual It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers' own patterns of expression, and beliefs These beliefs and images served to impede the cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control | The assumed cultural norms of economic engagement entrenches a universal market aesthetic reenacting a pattern of domination inherent in colonial thought. | 1,038 | 155 | 683 | 159 | 21 | 106 | 0.132075 | 0.666667 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
5 | The category of the coloniality of power is not, of course, without its defects. But it has fewer than others, as well as having some local and global additional advantages. So let the coloniality of power be taken in my essay for what it is: a hypothesis designed to grapple with hierarchy based on what Quijano terms the 'social classification of the world's population around the idea of race'. The racial axis of mestizaje in Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, of peasants in Martinez's poem, 'Shoes', and of caste in Roy's The God of Small Things have colonial origins in the Americas and South Asia, but Anzalduia, Martinez, and Roy suggest that race, peasantry, and caste have proven to be more durable in our so-called postcolonial world. | Saldívar 07 (Jose David, Professor of Ethnic Studies @ UC Berkeley, “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 346-7, MCJC) | the coloniality of power is not without its defects. let the coloniality of power be a hypothesis designed to grapple with hierarchy based on what Quijano terms the 'social classification The racial axis of mestizaje suggest that race, peasantry, and caste have proven to be more durable in our so-called postcolonial world. | Capitalist motives perpetuate coloniality and the exclusion that it produces. | 747 | 78 | 324 | 125 | 10 | 52 | 0.08 | 0.416 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
6 | These questions are provoked by Arendt's brilliant suggestiveness, for her writing symptomatically performs the perplexities she evokes. Having brought close together the unique meaning and the causal agent, she says that the 'invisible actor' is an 'invention arising from a mental perplexity' corresponding to no real experience.47 It is this distancing of the signified, this anxious fantasm or simulacrum - in the place of the author - that, according to Arendt, indicates most clearly the political nature of history. The sign of the political is, moreover, not invested in 'the character of the story itself but only [in] the mode in which it came into existence'.48 So it is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political. What is temporal in the mode of existence of the political? Here Arendt resorts to a form of repetition to resolve the ambivalence of her argument. The 'reification' of the agent can only occur, she writes, through 'a kind of repetition, the imitation of mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama'.49This repetition of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find. Arendt's belief in the revelatory qualities of Aristotelian mimesis are grounded in a notion of t:ommunity, or the public sphere, that is largely consensual: 'where people are with others and neither for nor against them - that is sheer human togetherness'.50 When people are passionately for or against one another, then human togetherness is lost as they deny the fullness of Aristotelian mimetic time. Arendt's form of social mimesis does not deal with social marginality as a product of the liberal State, which can, if articulated, reveal the limitations of its common sense (inter-est) of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is, for Arendt, the denial of the disclosure of agency, the point at which 'speech becomes "mere talk", simply one more means towards the end'. My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural difference and discrimination. For instance, human togetherness may come to represent the forces of hegemonic authority; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and rearticulate the 'interest' of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and social antagonism cannot find their agents in Arendt's Aristotelian mimesis. In the process I've described as the return of the subject, there is an agency that seeks revision and reinscription: the attempt to renegotiate the third locus, the intersubjective realm. The repetition of the iterative, the activity of the time-lag, is not so much arbitrary as interruptive, a closure that is not conclusion but a liminal interrogation outside the sentence. | Bhabha 1994 (Homi K. Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University “The location of Culture” pg. 190-191) Routledge 1994 | the 'invisible actor' is an 'invention arising from a mental perplexity' corresponding to no real experience. this anxious fantasm indicates most clearly the political nature of history So it is the realm of representation and the process of signification that constitutes the space of the political The 'reification' of the agent can only occur, she writes, through 'a kind of repetition, the imitation of mimesis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually appropriate to the drama'. This repetition of the agent, reified in the liberal vision of togetherness, is quite different from my sense of the contingent agency for our postcolonial age. The reasons for this are not difficult to find 'where people are with others and neither for nor against them - that is sheer human togetherness' Arendt's form of social mimesis does not deal with social marginality as a product of the liberal State, which , reveal the limitations of its common sense of society from the perspective of minorities or the marginalized. Social violence is he denial of the disclosure of agency My concern is with other articulations of human togetherness, as they are related to cultural difference and discrimination human togetherness represent the forces of hegemonic authority; or a solidarity founded in victimization and suffering may, implacably, sometimes violently, become bound against oppression; or a subaltern or minority agency may attempt to interrogate and rearticulate the 'interest' of society that marginalizes its interests. These discourses of cultural dissent and social antagonism | Economic Engagement “towards” other countries is an act violent social mimesis, re-speaking the colonial position. | 3,149 | 115 | 1,608 | 493 | 15 | 249 | 0.030426 | 0.505071 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
7 | Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. 14 Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday. Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular socio-historical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas.15 For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise, the more widespread and ambitious in the history of humankind yet, that capitalism, an already existing form of economic relation, became tied with forms of domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas, and then elsewhere. Coloniality refers, first and foremost, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatio-temporal matrix of what was called America. | Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC) | Coloniality is different from colonialism Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many aspects of our modern experience Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular socio-historical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise that capitalism became tied with forms of domination and subordination that were central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas Coloniality refers, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatio-temporal matrix of what was called America. | Coloniality frames the way that we function. | 1,520 | 45 | 1,187 | 233 | 7 | 180 | 0.030043 | 0.772532 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
8 | In a recent work, Arturo Escobar (2003) makes the argument for the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and the need to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups. What such argument points to is not the incorporation or inclusion of the histories, praxis, and 'other' thought of subaltern groups as new objects of study — a kind of critical cultural studies of the other. Rather and as I have argued here, it suggests the building of new places and new communities of thought, interpretation, and intervention that seek to generate and build intersections among critical forms of decolonial thought and political-epistemic projects grounded in the histories and lived experiences of coloniality — what we might instead refer to as cultural studies 'others' or a cultural studies of decolonial orientation. Of course the issue is much deeper than the naming or conceptualization of spaces and places of critical thought. As I have attempted to make clear here, it is an issue grounded in the ways coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge have worked to enable modernity as the 'civilization' project of the West, a project that has systematically worked to subordinate and negate 'other' frames, 'other' knowledges, and 'other' subjects and thinkers. The location of critical thought and the meta-narratives that have directed it within this project, including that critical thought associated with the Left in Latin America, is demonstrative of the complexity of the problem and its simultaneously local and global nature. To begin to 'think thought' from 'other' places and with intellectuals for whom the point of departure is not the academy but political-epistemic projects of decoloniality, might open paths that enable shifts in the geopolitics of critical knowledge as well as the building of a shared praxis of a very different kind, a praxis that attempts to confront what the Afro-Colombian intellectual and ekobio mayor Manuel Zapata Olivella once affirmed: 'The chains are not on our feet, but on our minds'. | Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 234-5, MCJC) | Escobar akes the argument for the need to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and the need to think theory through the political praxis of subaltern groups. such argument points suggests the building of new places and new communities of thought, interpretation, and intervention that seek to generate and build intersections among critical forms of decolonial thought and political-epistemic projects grounded in the histories and lived experiences of coloniality what we might instead refer to as cultural studies 'others' or a cultural studies of decolonial orientation it is an issue grounded in the ways coloniality and the geopolitics of knowledge have worked to enable modernity as the 'civilization' project of the West, a project that has systematically worked to subordinate and negate 'other' frames, 'other' knowledges, and 'other' subjects and thinkers. To begin to 'think thought' from 'other' places and with intellectuals for whom the point of departure is not the academy but political-epistemic projects of decoloniality, might open paths that enable shifts in the geopolitics of critical knowledge 'The chains are not on our feet, but on our minds'. | Epistemological decolonization is key to liberating those imprisoned by coloniality. | 2,069 | 85 | 1,185 | 330 | 10 | 182 | 0.030303 | 0.551515 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
9 | It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial perspectives of the South will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist, Anı´bal Quijano (1991, 1998, 2000), we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a ‘colonial power matrix’ (‘patro´n de poder colonial’). This matrix affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet. Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989, Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (‘heterarchies’) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. What is new in the ‘coloniality of power’ perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive (or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and ‘free wage labor’ in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled ‘package’ called the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. | Grosfoguel 07 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 217, MCJC) | the conceptualization of the world-system, from decolonial perspectives will question its traditional conceptualizations we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a ‘colonial power matrix’ This matrix affects social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World Feminist concept intersectionality of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies f sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to pre-European patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women have a higher status and access to resources than some men The idea of race organizes the world’s population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. European patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the world’s population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. | The colonial power matrix installs an intersectional matrix of oppressions. | 2,872 | 76 | 1,564 | 412 | 10 | 222 | 0.024272 | 0.538835 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
10 | As Quijano suggested above, a key element of this modern classificatory model of power is the binary articulation of a new planetary geohistorical and biocultural identities based on the idea of “race.” This entailed the process through which corporeality or body/nature was violently separated from “non-body” (“subject,” “spirit” or “reason”). The colonization of the body/ nature by the secularized forms of the “spirit/soul” is the central plot of the Cartesian epic which also is the nerve centre of the modern/colonial world (Veroli 2002). As Nicolas Veroli put it, “After the rain there must come the sun” goes the old French proverb. Similarly, after doubt there comes certainty in the Cartesian epic: I have doubted everything that could be doubted, and must thus come to the conclusion that the only thing I cannot doubt is my own existence as the one who doubts. But who am I? The inquiry must turn from the question of existence to that of identity: what is this “I” that doubts? The theoretical task, henceforth, is that of constituting the cogito, the subject, as a purely homogeneous substance that will contain no trace of alterity. “I” must be “I” and not another. Since, as it turns out, I can only be (with absolute certainty) a thing that thinks, a thinking thing, that is, the opposite of a material or extended thing, corporeality will be the stand-in for alterity, for the threat of heterogeneity. (ibid: 5) The implication of this binary separation is that it embodies a radical view which did not only ascribe the values of certainty and uncertainty on the mind and body/nature respectively; it also became the model on which to organize and classify the world in scales, scopes, meters, graphs and the usual allochthonous hierarchies and cartographies of mind, bio-culture and space. Additionally, the shift from the questions of existence6 to that of “identity” not only marked the move to a ceteris paribus7 conception of spaces, persons and peoplehood but also serves as the foundation of what Foucault described as disciplinary power and bio-politics. The classification and reclassification of the planet’s population based on this Cartesian split between mind and body came to represent the foundational binary principle that was used to organize and manage bodies, spaces and cultures. Martin Heidegger argued in his book on Nietzsche that …when it (the Cartesian cogito) is nonetheless thought through in its metaphysical import and measured according to the breath of its metaphysical project, then it is the first resolute step through which modern machine technology, and along with it the modern world and modern mankind, became metaphysically possible for the first time. (Heidegger 1982: 116) Quijano argues that without the “expulsion of the body from the realm of the spirit” the notion of “race” in its modern sense would not have been possible. The notion of “inferior races” relies on the treatment of these inferior races as “objects” of study, “correction,” domination, exploitation and discrimination precisely because they are not “subjects” or “rational subjects.” This lack of “rationality” is seen as the defining quality of those races who like the natural world represents as Georg Simmel put it, the personification of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within” (Simmel 1964: 413). It is then understandable why Thomas Jefferson wrote in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) that in the faculties of memory and imagination the “Negro” appears to be equal to “whites.” But that when it comes to reason and rationality they (Negroes) are inferior since none can be found capable of “tracing or comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” However, Jefferson argues that these reason-challenged Negroes “are more generally gifted than whites with accurate ears for tune and time” (Levine 1978: 4). In other words, “Negroes” and the “others,” alongside the natural world, came to be seen as blank or empty mental and physical spaces without history, or perhaps, “raw materials” subjected to “gardening,” “design,” “cultivation” and “weed poisoning” (Beilharz 2001). The extent of this hostility is easily confirmed by the fact that the modern world view sees the growing distance from nature and the “image of its origin” as “progress” and development. According to Walter Mignolo (2005:114) | Ikeotuonye 07 (Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #212, BW) | a key element of this modern classificatory model of power is the idea of “race. The colonization of the body/ nature by the secularized forms of the “spirit/soul” is the nerve centre of the colonial world The implication of this binary separation embodies a radical view on which to organize and classify the world in scales, scopes, meters, graphs and the usual hierarchies and cartographies of mind, bio-culture and space. the shift from the questions of existence6 to that of “identity” not only marked the move to a ceteris paribus7 conception of spaces, persons and peoplehood but also serves as the foundation of what Foucault described as disciplinary power and bio-politics The classification and reclassification of the planet’s population based on this Cartesian split came to represent the foundational binary principle that was used to organize and manage bodies, spaces and cultures. without the “expulsion of the body from the realm of the spirit” the notion of “race” in its modern sense would not have been possible. The notion of “inferior races” relies on the treatment of these inferior races as “objects” of study, “correction,” domination, exploitation and discrimination because they are not rational subjects.” lack of “rationality” is seen as the defining quality of those races who like the natural world represents , the personification of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within ers,” alongside the natural world, came to be seen as blank or empty mental and physical spaces without history, or perhaps, “raw materials” subjected to “gardening,” “design,” “cultivation” and “weed poisoning” | Colonialism is the foothold for biopower and racism – European thought is predicated off the assumption of a white exceptionalism | 4,425 | 130 | 1,693 | 706 | 20 | 265 | 0.028329 | 0.375354 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
11 | Coloniality as both a concept and lived reality provides a foundational context for understanding this 'other' intellectual production in Latin America in general and in the Andes in particular. While colonialism ended with independence, coloniality is a model of power that continues. Central to the establishment of this model was the codification of differences in ways that construct and establish a domination and inferiority based on race, serving as a fundamental criterion for the distribution of the population in ranks, places and roles within the social structure of power (Quijano 2000). While this codification was installed with colonialism and with the naming of a hierarchal ordering of social identities: whites, mestizos, 'indios' and 'negros', the latter two erasing the cultural differences that existed before colonialization, its efficacy remains ever present. Such efficacy in fact extends to the 'coloniality of knowledge'; that is, the hegemony of Eurocentrism as the perspective of knowledge, and an association of intellectual production with 'civilization', the power of the written word, and with the established racial hierarchy (Quijano 2000). In this construction and its maintenance over more that 500 years, indigenous and black peoples are still considered (by dominant society but also by the white-mestizo Left) as incapable of serious 'intellectual' thinking. It is in this context that the eurocentricity and racialized character of critical thought takes form. | Walsh 07 (Catherine, “Shifting the Geopolitic of Critical Knowledge,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 228-9, MCJC) | Coloniality as both a concept and lived reality provides a foundational context for understanding this 'other' intellectual production in Latin America While colonialism ended with independence, coloniality is a model of power that continues. Central to the establishment of this model was the codification of differences that construct and establish a domination and inferiority based on race serving as a fundamental criterion for the social structure of power While this codification was installed with colonialism and with the naming of a hierarchal ordering of social identities: whites, mestizos, 'indios' and 'negros', the latter two erasing the cultural differences that existed before colonialization, its efficacy remains ever present In this construction and its maintenance over more that 500 years, indigenous and black peoples are still considered (by dominant society but also by the white-mestizo Left) as incapable of serious 'intellectual' thinking. It is in this context that the eurocentricity and racialized character of critical thought takes form. | Colonialism created the hierarchy for exclusion. | 1,500 | 49 | 1,070 | 222 | 6 | 156 | 0.027027 | 0.702703 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
12 | IT is MY perception that the shape of the signifying process as it applies to indigenous peoples is formed by a certain semiotic field, a field that provides the boundaries within which the images of the indigene function. The existence of this semiotic field constitutes an important aspect of the ‘subjugated knowledges’ to which Foucault refers in Power/Knowledge (1980:81). The indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker. And yet the individual signmaker, the individual player, the individual writer, can move these pawns only within certain prescribed areas. Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a minor issue since the game, the signmaking is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse, that of British imperialism. Terms such as ‘war-dance,’ ‘war-whoop,’ ‘tomahawk,’ and ‘dusky’ are immediately suggestive everywhere of the indigene. To a North American, at least the first three would seem to be obvious Indianisms, but they are also common in works on the Maori and the Aborigine. Explorers like Phillip King (Narrative 1827) generally refer to Aborigines as Indian, and specific analogies to North American Indians are ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Australian literature. Terms misapplied in the Americas became re-misapplied in a parody of imperialist discourse. The process is quite similar to one Levi-Strauss describes in The Savage Mind (1972): ‘In other words, the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system’ (75). Obvious extreme ethnographic differences between the different indigenous cultures did little to impede the transposition. To extend the chessboard analogy, it would not be oversimplistic to maintain that the play between white and indigene is a replica of the black and white squares, with clearly limited oppositional moves. The basic dualism, however, is not that of good and evil, although it has often been argued to be so, as in Abdul R.JanMohamed’s The Economy of Manichean Allegory’ (1985): ‘The dominant model of power—and interest—relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native’ (63). JanMohamed maintains that in apparent exceptions ‘any evident “ambivalence” is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity, operating very efficiently through the economy of its central trope, the manichean allegory’ (61). Such a basic moral conflict is often implied but in contemporary texts the opposition is frequently between the ‘putative superiority’ of the indigene and the ‘supposed inferiority’ of the white. As Said suggests, the positive and negative sides of the image are but swings of one and the same pendulum: ‘Many of the earliest oriental amateurs began by welcoming the Orient as a salutary derangement of their European habits of mind and spirit. The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth…. Yet almost without exception such overesteem was followed by a counter-response: the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably under-humanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth’ (1978:150). Almost all of these characterizations could be applied to the indigenes of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, as positive or negative attributes. The complications of the issue extend even beyond oppositions of race, as Sander Gilman suggests in Difference and Pathology (1985): Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. This can be observed in the shifting relationship of antithetical stereotypes that parallel the existence of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ representations of self and Other. But the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responds to stresses occurring within the psyche. Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world can and do occur. We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other. We can move from loving to hating. (18) The problem is not the negative or positive aura associated with the image but rather the image itself…. At least since Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1952) it has been a commonplace to use ‘Other’ and ‘Not-self for the white view of blacks and for the resulting black view of themselves. The implication of this assertion of a white self as subject in discourse is to leave the black Other as object. The terms are similarly applicable to the Indian, the Maori, and the Aborigine but with an important shift. They are Other and Not-self but also must become self. Thus as Richon suggests and Pearson implies, imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs for reflection. ‘The project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidated the imperialist self,’ explains Gayatri Spivak in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ (1985c: 253). Tzvetan Todorov in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (1982) also notes how the group as Other can function. This group in turn can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the ‘normal’; or it can be exterior to society, i.e., another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. | Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95 (Bill, Gareth, Helen, Professors at the University of NSW, University of Western Australia, Queen’s University, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 232-234, AM) | the shape of the signifying process as it applies to indigenous peoples is formed by a certain semiotic field, a field that provides the boundaries within which the images of the indigene function. The indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white signmaker. the individual signmaker, can move these pawns only within certain prescribed areas. Whether the context is Canada, New Zealand, or Australia becomes a minor issue since the game, the signmaking is all happening on one form of board, within one field of discourse Terms misapplied in the Americas became re-misapplied in a parody of imperialist discourse. the operative value of the systems of naming and classifying commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, extreme ethnographic differences between the different indigenous cultures did little to impede the transposition. The dominant model of power—and interest—relations in all colonial societies is the manichean opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native’ The Orient was overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its primitivism, and so forth…. Yet the Orient suddenly appeared lamentably under-humanized, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, Because there is no real line between self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self. the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ responds to stresses occurring within the psyche. Thus paradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world can and do occur imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs for reflection. ‘The project of imperialism has always refracted what might have been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidated the imperialist self This group can be interior to society: women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the ‘normal’; or it can be exterior to society beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own. | Lack of understanding leads to objectification and rejection of the “Other” from a society that is familiar to the “Subject” | 6,060 | 124 | 2,456 | 963 | 20 | 390 | 0.020768 | 0.404984 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
13 | The idea that humanity is universally defined by the separation from nature first emerged in seventeenthcentury Europe and developed in tandem with the industrial revolution, as the appropriation of land increased, accompanied by the increasing demand for natural resources. It is again crucial to bear in mind that this “universally defined” split is by no means universal. The cleaving of mind from nature is again specific to the Western world. This was quite clear to a progeny of Africans enslaved by Dutch “settlers”: We of the khoin, we never thought of these mountain and plains, these long grass lands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed. It was the whites who called it wild and claimed it was filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always been friendly and tame. It has given us food and drink and shelter even in the worst of droughts. It was only when the whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really became wild.” (André Brink 1983:21) | Ikeotuonye 07(Festus is a writer, activist and Fellow at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland, “Connexus Theory and the Agonistic Binary of Coloniality: Revisiting Fanon’s Legacy”, pg. #213, BW) | The idea that humanity is universally defined by the separation from nature first emerged in Europe with the industrial revolution this “universally defined” split is by no means universal. The cleaving of mind from nature is again specific to the Western world. This was quite clear to a progeny of Africans enslaved by Dutch “settlers”: we never thought of these mountain and plains, these long grass lands and marshes as a wild place to be tamed It was the whites who called it wild and claimed it was filled with wild animals and wild people. To us it has always been friendly and tame. It was only when the whites moved in and started digging and breaking and shooting, and driving off the animals, that it really became wild.” | Western European globalization is the root cause for environmental exploitation – Western identity sees nature as a frontier to be tamed, whereas the natives were one with nature | 1,031 | 178 | 732 | 179 | 28 | 129 | 0.156425 | 0.72067 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
14 | Such invasion of the human spirit, such painful process of forced adherence and identification with the oppressor’s version of the world, causes two indelible marks in the spirits of the colonised according to Fanon (1967). On the one hand, the feeling of inferiority, for the reason that even once assimilated, the colonized are never considered equals, and they are continuously reminded of their lack of capabilities; on the other hand, the dependency complex, which assaults those who have traded all their values in the attempt to treasure proof of their humanity, those who have learnt to despise their origins, and later find themselves without a home. Fanon (1967) portrays the deep psychological impact that someone suffers who must artificially adopt a language different from the one of the group he was born in as an “absolute mutation” (p. 19). A psychological mutation that must be directed from schools, where kids are taught to “scorn the dialect,” “avoid creolism” (p. 20), and ridicule those who use it. Nevertheless, the oppressors do not walk away free. Their own chains also imprison them, they will always have to distrust the oppressed, and they will have to live fearing freedom. They know that renouncing to oppress challenges their own identity, as Fanon puts it, “It is the racist who creates his inferior” (p. 93). And in this context of violence and suspicion, Fanon finds himself “in a world where words wrap themselves in silence; in a world where the other endlessly hardens himself” (p. 229). | Nieto, Ph.D in Public Policy in the University of Massachusetts Boston, 2007 [David, Summer 2007, “The Emperor’s New Worlds Language and Colonization,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of self-Knowledge, Volume:5 special double issue, page #2 , TZ] | invasion of the human spirit, such painful process of forced adherence and identification with the oppressor’s version of the world, causes two indelible marks in the spirits of the colonised the feeling of inferiority, for the reason that even once assimilated, the colonized are never considered equals, and they are continuously reminded of their lack of capabilities; on the other hand, the dependency complex, which assaults those who have traded all their values in the attempt to treasure proof of their humanity, those who have learnt to despise their origins, and later find themselves without a home the deep psychological impact that someone suffers who must artificially adopt a language different from the one of the group he was born in as an “absolute mutation the oppressors do not walk away free. Their own chains also imprison them, they will always have to distrust the oppressed, and they will have to live fearing freedom. | Our perception of language destroys the human spirit of all deemed another | 1,525 | 74 | 943 | 251 | 12 | 154 | 0.047809 | 0.613546 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
15 | Coloniality of power was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of 'race' as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. Unlike in any other previous experience of colonialism, the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior.1 The process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following centuries gave way to the imposition of such a 'racial' criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first place, new social identities were produced all over the world: 'whites', 'Indians, 'Negroes', 'yellows', 'olives', using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their 'racial' nature. Then, on that basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania. During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same 'racial' lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world. Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism, especially after the First World War, and with the changing requirements of capitalism itself. But distribution of work is by no means finished, since Eurocentered coloniality of power has proved to be longer lasting than Eurocentered colonialism. Without it[Eurocentered colonilaism], the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained.2 So, coloniality of power is based upon 'racial' social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of 'racist' social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power. | Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 171, JC) | the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior. The process of Eurocentrification gave way to the imposition of such a 'racial' criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. new social identities were produced all over the world using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their 'racial' nature on that basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania During colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, was organized basically following the same 'racial' lines of global social classification, Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism Without [Eurocentered colonilaism], the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained coloniality of power is based upon 'racial' social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power. | Colonization leads to racism. | 2,371 | 30 | 1,367 | 348 | 4 | 200 | 0.011494 | 0.574713 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
16 | Monstrosity? Literary meteorite? Delirium of a sick imagination? Come, now! How convenient it is! The truth is that Lautreamont had only to look the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster, his hero. No one denies the veracity of Balzac. But wait a moment: take Vautrin, let him be just back from the tropics, give him the wings of the archangel and the shivers of malaria, let him be accompanied through the streets of Paris by an escort of Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous ants, and you will have Maldoror.12 The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men." To digress for a moment within my digression, I believe that the day will come when, with all the elements gathered together, all the sources analyzed, all the circumstances of the work elucidated, it will be possible to give the Chants de Maldoror a materialistic and historical interpretation which will bring to light an altogether unrecognized aspect of this frenzied epic, its implacable denunciation of a very particular form of society, as it could not escape the sharpest eyes around the year 1865. Before that, of course, we will have had to clear away the occultist and metaphysical commentaries that obscure the path; to re-establish the importance of certain neglected stanzas-for example, that strangest passage of all, the one concerning the mine of lice, in which we will consent to see nothing more or less than the denunciation of the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money; to restore to its true place the admirable episode, of the omnibus, and be willing to find in it very simply what is there, to wit, the scarcely allegorical picture of a society in which the privileged, comfortably seated, refuse to move closer together so as to make room for the new arrival. And-be it said in passing-who welcomes the child who has been callously rejected? The people! Represented here by the ragpicker. Baudelaire's ragpicker: Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls, He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes. He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause.13 Then it will be understood, will it not, that the enemy whom Lautreamont has made the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" and who from time to time is found dead drunk, "drunk as a bedbug that has swallowed three, barrels of blood during the night," it will be understood that it is not beyond the clouds that one must look for that creator, but that we are more likely to find him in Desfosses' business directory and on some comfortable executive board! But let that be. The moralists can do nothing about it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism. I almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit. | Césaire 1972 (Aimé, Francophone poet, author and politician from Martinique. "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature, “Discourse on Colonialism” Translated by Joan Pinkham) Monthly Review Press: New York and London, 1972. | the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster the same world, the same man, hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of "the flesh of other men. the evil power of gold and the hoarding up of money the enemy, the cannibalistic, brain-devouring "Creator," the sadist perched on "a throne made of human excrement and gold," the hypocrite, the debauchee, the idler who "eats the bread of others" The moralists can do nothing about it. Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism. I almost forgot hatred, lying, conceit. | As long as colonialism exists there can be nothing but violence, corruption and barbarism | 3,612 | 89 | 1,142 | 615 | 14 | 191 | 0.022764 | 0.310569 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
17 | However, that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’, according to the times, agents, and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes or estates. In fact, if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale, the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources and work among the world population, it is very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are precisely the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America and onward. In the same way, in spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship between the European also called ‘Western’ culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination. It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths. This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it. | Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru , “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 168-169,JC) | specific colonial structure of power produced the social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’ These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be ‘objective’ categories of a historical significance if we observe the main lines of exploitation and social domination the main lines of world power today, and the distribution of resources it is very clear that the large majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated against, are the members of the ‘races’, ‘ethnies’, or ‘nations’ into which the colonized populations, were categorized in the formative process of that world power, from the conquest of America in spite of the ct that political colonialism has been eliminated Western’ culture continues to be one of colonial domination. we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths | Colonialism shaped the systems of discrimination that dominates the racial, political, and social hierarchal. | 1,740 | 110 | 967 | 273 | 14 | 144 | 0.051282 | 0.527473 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
18 | The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all representations that function only in relation to each other and (despite appearances) have no real necessary basis in nature, biology or rationality. Colonialism in an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity. And yet to function ad if they were absolute, essential, and natural. The first result of the dialectical reading is thus the denaturalization of racial as artificial constructions, colonial identities evaporate into thin air; they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were essential. This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign that an anticolonial politics is possible. In the second place, the dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European Self needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even unwanted – violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward full consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward. | Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 129 | The White and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all representations that function only in relation to each other and have no real necessary basis in nature, biology or rationality. Colonialism in an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity. the dialectical interpretation makes clear that colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must be continually renewed. The European Self needs violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even unwanted – violence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward full consciousness. The failed dialectic suggests the possibility of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward. | Colonization of the “Other” leads to an Increasingly Violent Struggle of Life and Death | 1,823 | 87 | 1,179 | 277 | 14 | 176 | 0.050542 | 0.635379 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
19 | In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate. The process consists, in fact, of two moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather, it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. Eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders, for example, recognized the absoluteness of this difference clearly, “The Negro is a being, whose nature and dispositions are not merely different for those of the European that are the reverse of them. Kindness and compassion excite in his breast implacable and deadly hatred, but stripes and insults, and abuse, generate gratitude, affection and inviolable attachment!” Thus, the slaveholders’ mentality, according to an abolitionist pamphlet. The non-European subjects acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of the colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign, and distant thus turns out to be very close and intimate. Knowing, seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even if this knowledge and contact take place only on the plane of representation and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the metropole. The intimate struggle with the slave, feeling the sweat on its skin, smelling its odor, defines the vitality of the master. This intimacy, however, in no way blurs the division between the two identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the boundaries and the purity of the identities be policed. The identity of the European Self is produced in this dialectical movement. Once the colonial subject is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn be subsumed (cancelled and raised up) within a higher unity. The absolute Other is reflected back into the most proper. Only through opposition to the colonized does the metropolitan subject really become itself. What first appeared as a simple logic of exclusion, then, turns out to be a negative dialectic of recognitions. The colonizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialectical twist, that negative colonized identity is negated in turn to found the positive colonizer Self. Modern European thought and the modern Self are both necessarily bound to what Paul Gilroy calls the “relationship of racial terror and subordination.” | Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Associate Professor of Literature @ Duke and independent researcher and currently an inmate at the Rebibbia prison in Rome, formerly a lecturer in Politics at Paris University and a Professor of political science at the University of Padua, “Empire” Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 127-8 | In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon. The non-European subjects acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. Precisely because the difference of the Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second moment as the foundation of the Self Knowing, seeing, and even touching the colonized is essential, even if this knowledge and contact take place only on the plane of representation and relate little to the actual subjects in the colonies and the metropole This intimacy, in no way blurs the division between the two identities in struggle, but only makes more important that the boundaries and the purity of the identities be policed Once the colonial subject is constructed as absolutely Other, it can in turn be subsumed within a higher unity The colonizer does produce the colonized as negation, but, through a dialectical twist, that negative colonized identity is negated in turn to found the positive colonizer Self. | Colonialization Leads to Absolute Otherization and Racial Terror | 2,813 | 64 | 1,221 | 443 | 8 | 200 | 0.018059 | 0.451467 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
20 | At the political and administrative levels, the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies, many of which survive more or less intact, continue, in numerous cases, to have devastating consequences - even if largely unintended (though by no means always, given the venerable place of divide et impera in the arcana imperii ). Mahmood Mamdani cites the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government. Belgian colonial administrators created extensive political and juridical distinctions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, whom they divided and named as two separate ethnic groups. These distinctions had concrete economic and legal implications: at the most basic level, ethnicity was marked on the identity cards the colonial authorities introduced and was used to distribute state resources. The violence of colonialism, Mamdani suggests, thus operated on two levels: on the one hand, there was the violence (determined by race) between the colonizer and the colonized; then, with the introduction of ethnic distinctions among the colonized population, with one group being designated indigenous (Hutu) and the other alien (Tutsi), the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itself. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, which Mamdani suggests was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' (2001: 11; 2007), needs therefore to be understood as a natives' genocide - akin to and enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. It is not necessary to elaborate this point; for present purposes, it is sufficient to mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. The genocide in Rwanda need not exclusively have been the consequence of colonial identity formation, but does appear less opaque when presented in the historical context of colonial violence and administrative practices. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences. In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples, the African state as an aberration standing outside modernity, and so forth, it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of colonialism, which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention. Comparable arguments have been made about the consolidation of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial India, where the corresponding terms were 'native' Hindu and 'alien' Muslim (with particular focus on the nature and extent of the violence during the Partition) (Pandey, 1998), or the consolidation of Jewish and Arab identities in Palestine and the Mediterranean generally. | Shaikh 07 (Nermeen. Broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now!. Interrogating Charity and the Benevolence of Empire. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.JMR) | the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies many of which have devastating consequences the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government created extensive political and juridical distinctions The violence of colonialism operated on two levels violence between the colonizer and the colonized the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itsel The Rwandan genocide was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples , it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of colonialism, which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention | Genocide and Civil War is an inevitable product of postcolonial thinking—it banalizes political violence against the colonized | 3,217 | 126 | 1,497 | 471 | 17 | 208 | 0.036093 | 0.441614 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
21 | The postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or the "dependency" theory. As a mode of analysis it attempts to revise those nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set up the relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists attempts to provide a holistic social explanation, forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres. It is from this hybrid location of cultural value-the transnational as the translational-that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project. It has been my growing conviction that the encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up "colonial" textuality have enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and judgment that have become current in contemporary theory: aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to "totalizing" concepts, to name but a few. To put it in general terms, there is a "colonial" countermodernity at work in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century matrices of Western modernity that, if acknowledged, would question the historicism that, in a linear narrative, analogically links late capitalism to the fragmentary, simulacral, pastiche-like symptoms of postmodernity. This is done without taking into account the historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy that were generated in the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both the foreign and native varieties-and that transformed, in the process, both antagonistic sites of cultural agency. Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications. The incommensurability of cultural values and priorities that the postcolonial critic represents cannot be accommodated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical world. And the cultural potential of such differential histories has led Fredric Jameson to recognize the "internationalization of the national situations" in the postcolonial criticism of Roberto Retamar. Far from functioning as an absorption of the particular by the general, the very act of articulating cultural differences "calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-duc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures."2 The historical grounds of such an intellectual tradition are to be found in the revisionary impulse that informs many postcolonial thinkers. C. L. R. James once remarked that the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the Western metropolis. A similar process of cultural translation, and transvaluation, is evident in Edward Said's assessment of the response from disparate postcolonial regions as a "tremendously energetic attempt to engage with the metropolitan world in a common effort at reinscribing, reinterpreting, and expanding the sites of intensity and the terrain contested with Europe." | Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57) | postcolonial perspective departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or the "dependency" theory. it attempts to revise nationalist or "nativist" pedagogies that set up the relation of Third and First Worlds in a binary structure of opposition The perspective resists attempts to provide a holistic social explanation, forcing a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres postcolonial intellect attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project historical traditions of cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy the attempt to produce an "enlightened" colonial subject-in both the foreign and native varieties Postcolonial critical discourses require forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications cultural values and priorities cannot be accommodated within a relativism that assumes a public and symmetrical world. articulating cultural differences "calls us into question fully as much as it acknowledges the Other . . . neither re-duc[ing] the Third World to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor ... vacuously celebrat[ing] the astonishing pluralism of human cultures. the postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an "older" colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the West | Postcolonial thinking requires the recognition of cultural differences, key to prevent degrading of individuals to subalterns | 3,610 | 126 | 1,551 | 518 | 16 | 222 | 0.030888 | 0.428571 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
22 | Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries and from the testimony of minorities within the geopolitical division of East/West, North/ South. These perspectives intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that have attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, and peoples. Their critical revisions are formulated around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity. To assimilate Habermas to our purposes, we could also argue that the postcolonial project, at its most general theoretical level, seeks to explore those social pathologies-"loss of meaning, conditions of anomie"-that no longer simply "cluster around class antagonism, [but] break up into widely scattered historical contingencies."' These contingencies often provide the grounds of historical necessity for the elaboration of strategies of emancipation, for the staging of other social antagonisms. Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. This reconstitution requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written: the rearticulation of the "sign" in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet. productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse. | Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57) | Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world . perspectives emerge from the colonial or anticolonialist testimonies of Third World countries These intervene in the ideological discourses of modernity that attempted to give a hegemonic "normality" to the uneven development and disadvantaged, histories of nations and peoples critical revisions are formulated around cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the "rationalizations" of modernity pathologies break up into widely scattered historical contingencies These provide Reconstituting the discourse of cultural difference demands more than a simple change of cultural contents and symbols, for a replacement within the same representational time frame is never adequate. the time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of "lack" or "excess" or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. "indeterminism" is the mark of the conflictual yet. productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse | Only radical change of social norms strays away from ideology | 2,132 | 61 | 1,266 | 296 | 10 | 175 | 0.033784 | 0.591216 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
23 | Furthermore, and very much linked to issues of representation, a postcolonial perspective would question the geographies of reference for self and other, and their interrelation or intersubjectivity. What is missing in both Bauman and Foucault is a sense of the difference that colonialism or Empire makes to the ways in which power, politics and knowledge combine and work out their effects on the landscape of social change. Spivak (1999), in her work on the post-colonial, which includes a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, has reminded us of the 'sanctioned ignorance' and occlusion of the colonial and imperial moment in Western post-structuralist thinking. The ways in which non-Western others have been and continue to be represented is reflected in a range of subordinating forms of classification, surveillance, negation, appropriation and debasement, as contrasted to a positive self-affirmation of Western identity (Spurr 1993).8 These forms of representation, incisively analysed by Säid (1978 and 1993), find expression within the frame of North-South relations post-1989, as Doty (1996) has shown, and their production is crucial to the sustainability of particular relations of power and subordination. As has been outlined above, Euro-Americanism exemplifies many of the problems associated with the depiction and representation of non-Western societies, and the elements I mentioned in that section could be considered in a geopolitical setting as having three interwoven components - representations of: a) the other, e.g. the Third World; b) the self, e.g. the First World and, c) the interrelations between self and other, e.g. First World/Third World relations. Frequently critiques of the geopolitics of representation focus on (a) and (c) so that in the example of dependency perspectives (discussed in chapter 5) the critical assessment of modernization theory focused on the inadequate portrayal of Third World reality (a) and the overly sanguine depiction of First World-Third World relations (c), whereas the image drawn of the First World self was subjected to much less critical scrutiny, even though, it might be suggested, that representation was quite vital to the functioning of the theory, as also is the case with the neo-liberal discourse of development (see chapter 4). These three intersecting components, need to be borne in mind in the development of any critique of the state of North-South relations and they can be seen as an important part of any post-colonial perspective. How might such a perspective be initially specified? I want to outline five elements, to which I shall return in chapter 6. 1 . As an analytical mode, as distinct from a historical periodization, the post-colonial seeks to question Western discourses of, for example, progress, civilization, modernization, development and democracy, by making connections with the continuing relevance of invasive colonial and imperial power that these discourses tend to evade. 2. The post-colonial can be employed to highlight the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized, or globalizers and globalized. 3. The post-colonial as a critical mode of enquiry can be used to pose a series of questions concerning the location and differential impact of the agents of knowledge. Not only does a post-colonial perspective consider the thematic silences present in influential Western discourses, it also challenges the pervasive tendency to ignore the contributions of African, Asian and Latin American intellectuals and their counter-representations of West/non-West relations. 4. Fourth, as a mode of analysis, the post-colonial seeks to give key attention to the 'centrality of the periphery', to foreground the peripheral case since, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1983: 184) once put it, it is 'in the outskirts of the world . . . that the system reveals its true face'. 5. Fifth, the post-colonial in terms of the way I interpret it in this text carries with it an ethico-political positionality that seeks to oppose the coloniality and imperiality of power and re-assert the salience of autonomy and popular resistance to Western penetrations. This is an issue to which I shall return in subsequent chapters. | Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 19-21) | a postcolonial perspective would question the geographies of reference for self and other, and their interrelation or intersubjectivity. What is missing in both Bauman and Foucault is a sense of the difference that colonialism or Empire makes to the ways in which power, politics and knowledge combine and work out their effects on the landscape of social change. Spivak has reminded us of the 'sanctioned ignorance' and occlusion of the colonial and imperial moment in Western post-structuralist thinking. The ways in which non-Western others have been and continue to be represented is reflected in a range of subordinating forms of classification, surveillance, negation, appropriation and debasement, as contrasted to a positive self-affirmation of Western identity As has been outlined above, Euro-Americanism exemplifies many of the problems associated with the depiction and representation of non-Western societies, and the elements I mentioned in that section could be considered in a geopolitical setting as having three interwoven components - representations of: a) the other, e.g. the Third World; b) the self, e.g. the First World and, c) the interrelations between self and other, e.g. First World/Third World relations. geopolitics of representation focus on (a) and (c) so that in the example of dependency perspectives the critical assessment of modernization theory focused on the inadequate portrayal of Third World reality and the overly sanguine depiction of First World-Third World relations whereas the image drawn of the First World self was subjected to much less critical scrutiny These three intersecting components, need to be borne in mind in the development of any critique of the state of North-South relations and they can be seen as an important part of any post-colonial perspective the post-colonial seeks to question Western discourses of, for example, progress, civilization, modernization, development and democracy, by making connections with the continuing relevance of invasive colonial and imperial power that these discourses tend to evade The post-colonial can be used to pose a series of questions concerning the location and differential impact of the agents of knowledge a post-colonial perspective challenges the pervasive tendency to ignore the contributions of African, Asian and Latin American intellectuals and their counter-representations of West/non-West relations as a mode of analysis, the post-colonial seeks to give key attention to the 'centrality of the periphery' the post-colonial in terms of the way I interpret it in this text carries with it an ethico-political positionality that seeks to oppose the coloniality and imperiality of power and re-assert the salience of autonomy and popular resistance to Western penetrations | Instead of accepting a Euro-American mindset of thinking of the “third world” as the “other” and subjecting the non-Western countries to subordination, accept the postcolonial mindset of rejecting the Western narrative. | 4,242 | 219 | 2,789 | 651 | 31 | 417 | 0.047619 | 0.640553 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
24 | Thus, it can be argued that whereas within the frame of global politics there is more interdependence, the pace of cultural communication, military delivery, disease transmission and so on have accelerated, and that while global issues of refugees, ecology, arms control, organized crime and terrorism have become more intense, nevertheless the territorial state remains the most visible and organized site of political action in the world (Connolly 2001). It is a crucial crossroads for politics, the political and the spatial. But are all nation-states geopolitically positioned in the same way? Clearly they are not; and what needs stressing in the context of a post-colonial perspective on North-South relations is the difference that both coloniality and imperiality have made. Making this connection is also part of the geopolitical. How? Customarily, the analysis of the relations between politics and the political is worked out within the conceptual confines of an implicitly Western territorial state. There is an assumption of a pre-given territorial integrity and impermeability.9 But in the situation of peripheral polities, the historical realities of external power and its effects within those polities are much more difficult to ignore. What this contrast points to is the lack of equality in the full recognition of the territorial integrity of nation-states. For the societies of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the principles governing the constitution of their mode of political being were deeply structured by external penetration, by the invasiveness of foreign powers. The framing of time and the ordering of space followed an externally imposed logic, the effects of which still resonate in the postcolonial period. The struggles to recover an autochthonous narrative of time to counter a colonialist rule of memory, and to rediscover an indigenous amalgam of meanings for the territory of the nation have formed a primary part of post-Independence politics. In what were referred to as 'wars of national liberation', the struggle to breathe new life into the time-space nexus of independence lay at the core of the anti-imperialist movement. This then is one modality of the geopolitical, of a transformative rupture, where anti-colonial movements were the disrupting and destabilizing currents able to challenge and eventually bring to an end the colonial appropriation of national space. | Slater 2004 (David, Professor of Social and Political Geography at Loughborough University, “Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations”, p 23-24) | within the frame of global politics the territorial state remains the most visible and organized site of political action in the world But are all nation-states geopolitically positioned in the same way? Clearly they are not; and what needs stressing in the context of a post-colonial perspective on North-South relations is the difference that both coloniality and imperiality have made. in the situation of peripheral polities, the historical realities of external power and its effects within those polities are much more difficult to ignore. What this contrast points to is the lack of equality in the full recognition of the territorial integrity of nation-states. For the societies of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the principles governing the constitution of their mode of political being were deeply structured by external penetration, by the invasiveness of foreign powers. The framing of time and the ordering of space followed an externally imposed logic, the effects of which still resonate in the postcolonial period. The struggles to recover an autochthonous narrative of time to counter a colonialist rule of memory, and to rediscover an indigenous amalgam of meanings for the territory of the nation have formed a primary part of post-Independence politics the struggle to breathe new life into the time-space nexus of independence lay at the core of the anti-imperialist movement This then is one modality of the geopolitical, of a transformative rupture, where anti-colonial movements were the disrupting and destabilizing currents able to challenge and eventually bring to an end the colonial appropriation of national space. | Even though nation states are the most organized political sites in the world, some nation states are clearly positioned differently, which is an outgrowth of the coloniality and imperiality formerly imposed on the post colonial countries. Reject the aff-it embodies the colonial mindset. | 2,415 | 288 | 1,646 | 368 | 43 | 254 | 0.116848 | 0.690217 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
25 | As I end let me return to the beginning of my article, to the fallen towers and falling idols. What has befallen the ideals and the ideas of global progress now that the New World is bereft of its towers, its towering ladder without rungs targeted as the symbol of our times? Such days that eerily hollow out the times and places in which we live confront our sense of progress with the challenge of the unbuilt. The unbuilt is not a place, Wittgenstein says, that you can reach with a ladder; what is needed is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress: Our civilisation is characterised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure . . . I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible buildings. (Culture and Value, 7e, 1930) Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. The rubble and debris that survive carry the memories of other fallen towers, Babel for instance, and lessons of endless ladders that suddenly collapse beneath our feet. We have no option but to be interested in constructing buildings; at the same time, we have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt –- ‘the foundation of possible buildings’, other foundations, other alternative worlds. Perhaps, then, we will not forget to measure Progress from the ground, from other perspectives, other possible foundations, even when we vainly believe that we are, ourselves, standing at the top of the tower. | Bhabha ‘03(Homi K, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Harvard, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University, "Democracy De-realized." Diogenes 50.1 (2003): 34-5, http://dio.sagepub.com/content/50/1/27.full.pdf+html) | The unbuilt is not a place, that you can reach with a ladder; what is needed is a perspicuous vision that reveals a space, a way in the world, that is often obscured by the onward and upward thrust of progress Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure Neither destruction nor deconstruction, the unbuilt is the creation of a form whose virtual absence raises the question of what it would mean to start again, in the same place, as if it were elsewhere, adjacent to the site of a historic disaster or a personal trauma. We have no option but to be interested in constructing buildings; at the same time, we have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt –- ‘the foundation of possible buildings’, other foundations, other alternative worlds. Perhaps, then, we will not forget to measure Progress from the ground, from other perspectives, other possible foundations, even when we vainly believe that we are, ourselves, standing at the top of the tower. | The alternative is the Unbuilt of Colonial social construction, where we refuse to engage in their narrative of growth that comes at the expense of the Other. | 1,939 | 159 | 1,113 | 336 | 27 | 192 | 0.080357 | 0.571429 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
26 | How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgment, transform our sense of the subject of culture and the historical agent of change? If we contest the grand, continuist narratives, then what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal (Said) or interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation within a transnational world culture? Such problematic questions are activated within the terms and traditions of postcolonial critique as it reinscribes the cultural relations between spheres of social antagonism. Current debates in postmodernism question the cunning of modernity-its historical ironies, its disjunctive temporalities, the paradoxical nature of progress. It would profoundly affect the values and judgments of such interrogations if they were open to the argument that metropolitan histories of civitas cannot be conceived without evoking the colonial antecedents of the ideals of civility. The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or transpose values across cultures through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity." Cultural translation transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its mode of nar-ration. The sign of cultural difference does not celebrate the great continuities of a past tradition, the seamless narratives of progress, the vanity of humanist wishes. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between moment when the rule of language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the sign-turns into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. The rule of language as signifying system-the possibility of speaking at all-becomes the misrule of discourse: the right for only some to speak diachronically and differentially and for "others"-women, migrants, Third World peoples, Jews, Palestinians, for instance-to speak only symptomatically or marginally. How do we transform the formal value of linguistic difference into an analytic of cultural difference? How do we turn the "arbitrariness" of the sign into the critical practices of social authority? In what sense is this an interruption within the discourses of modernity? This is not simply a demand for a postcolonial semiology. From the postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for oneself-emerges from the moment of undecidability-a claim made by Jacques Derrida in "Des Tours de Babel," his essay on "figurative translation." Let us not forget that he sees translation as the trope for the process of dis-placement through which language names its object. But even more suggestive, for our postcolonial purposes, is the Babel metaphor that Derrida uses to describe the cultural, communal process of "making a name for oneself": "The Semites want to bring the world to reason and this reason can signify simultaneously a colonial violence . . . and a peaceful transparency of the human condition." This is emphatically not, as Terry Eagleton has recently described it, "the trace or aporia or ineffable flicker of difference which eludes all formalization, that giddy moment of failure, slippage, or jouissance."5 The undecidability of discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization of the formal arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, as Habermas suggests, the central ambivalence of the knowledge structure of modernity; "unconditionality" is the Janus-faced process at work in the modern moment of cultural judgment, where validity claims seek justification for their propositions in terms of the specificity of the "everyday." Undecidability or unconditionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding.... Validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times, but the claim must always be raised here and now, in specific contexts."6 Pace Eagleton, this is no giddy moment of failure; it is instead precisely the act of representation as a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of cultural knowledges. Habermas illuminates the undecidable or "unconditional" as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of context-bound everyday practice. However, Habermas's notion of communicative reason presumes intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition. This renders his sense of cultural particularity essentially consensual and essentialist. What of those colonial cultures caught in the drama of the dialectic of the master and the enslaved or indentured? | Bhabha 92 (Homi, Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, Summer 1992, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question, pp. 46-57) | How does the deconstruction of the sign, the emphasis on indeterminism in cultural and political judgment, transform our sense of the subject of culture and the historical agent of change? what alternative temporalities do we create to articulate the contrapuntal (Said) or interruptive (Spivak) formations of race, gender, class, and nation within a transnational world culture? . The postcolonial translation of modernity does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural tradition or transpose values across cultures through the transcendent spirit of a "common humanity." Cultural translation transforms the value of culture-as-sign: as the time-signature of the historical "present" that is struggling to find its mode of nar-ration. Culture-as-sign articulates that in-between moment when the rule of language as semiotic system-linguistic difference, the arbitrariness of the sign-turns into a struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify. This is not simply a demand for a postcolonial semiology. From the postcolonial perspective, it is an intervention in the way discourses of modernity structure their objects of knowledge. The right to signify-to make a name for oneself-emerges from the moment of undecidability The undecidability of discourse is not to be read as the "excess" of the signifier, as an aestheticization of the formal arbitrariness of the sign. Rather, it represents, the central ambivalence of the knowledge structure of modernity; Undecidability or unconditionality "is built into the factual processes of mutual understanding.... and transcends spaces and times, but the claim must always be raised here and now it is a mode of regulating the limits or liminality of cultural knowledges Habermas illuminates the undecidable or "unconditional" as the epistemological basis of cultural specificity, and thus, in the discourse of modernity, the claim to knowledge shifts from the "universal" to the domain of context-bound everyday practice | Postcolonial translation of modern discourse shapes our understanding of the world | 4,851 | 83 | 1,981 | 715 | 11 | 293 | 0.015385 | 0.40979 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
27 | Fanon also states that the dreams of the colonized constantly turn towards the desire to take the place of the colonizer. This desire of ‘becoming-Other’ is mirrored in the colonizer, who wants to become the colonized, making the colonized into the threat to the ‘natural order’ (Krautwurst 2003). This mutual desire of becoming is also a mutual desire of destruction. The colonizer, says Fanon, would like nothing better than to annihilate the colonized: le colon demande à chaque représentant de la minorité qui opprime de descendre 30 ou 100 ou 200 indigènes [et] il d’un seul s’aperçoit que personne n’est indigné et qu’à l’ex trême tout le problème est de savoir si on peut faire ça coup ou par étapes. (Fanon 2002: 81-82) However, this annihilation would result in suicide. The colonizer requires the colonized at two levels of existence: economic and psychological. The labour power of the colonized is required in order for the colony to be viable. Also, elimination of the colonized would be elimination of the opposite end of the colonizer’s identifying binary. Similarly, the logic of the colonized is couched in the capacity of swallowing the colonizer through the sheer force of numbers. This desire for mutual destruction marks the beginning of anti-colonial violence and decolonization—not just of land, but also of mind and body. Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, is a kind of “self-rehabilitation of the oppressed [which] begins in directly confronting the source of his dehumanization” (Bulhan 1985: 147). This rehabilitation is expressed through the act of violence. This violence demonstrates to the colonized that the colonial structures are not impervious to harm, and that her inferiority, entrenched through colonial ideology, is not essential. What becomes essential is that both colonized and colonizer are mortal, and that both shed blood. Thus through (violent) action against the symbols of colonialism, the colonized becomes more than a mere thing or animal. Therefore, at some level, Fanon is concerned with the transformation of the colonized individual into ‘man,’ which corresponds to a certain humanism in his thought: “la ‘chose’ colonisé devient homme dans le processus même par lequel elle se libère” (Fanon 2002:40). However, as his thought develops over the course of Les damnés de la terre, it becomes clear that this ‘becoming man’ by no means corresponds to a simple desire for recognition by the colonizer, or to fit within the category of ‘man’ as determined by universal humanism. The necessary violence to which the colonized resorts is a process of becoming. Through this process, the colonized becomes an agent, experiences that which is required to realize oneself in the world. This agent making, anti-colonial violence works against the existing structures of violence, both colonial and humanist. Through this violence there transpires a mutual transformation of both sides of the previously Manichean binary. As will be discussed in the final section, the transformative, anti-colonial violence is accompanied by the blossoming of a ‘national consciousness’ which is neither exclusionary nor a refounding of the violent structures of the state. As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks states, anti-colonial violence as presented by Fanon is “utterly beyond good and evil [and] does not avail of a self-justifying meta-narrative” (2002: 85). This recognition of the pure nature of anti-colonial violence is the opening necessary for a discussion linking it to Derrida’s concept of divine violence. The spontaneous outbursts of violence that are the initial expressions of anticolonial violence have no ends in mind; this is violence as pure means, as pure expression, as pure anger, it has “no other aim than to show and show itself” (Derrida 2002: 287). Anti-colonial violence destroys the colonial law, the expression of universal humanism, through demonstrating its untenable inconsistencies. The boundaries of the colonial state are destroyed; violence begins to be perpetrated in the métropole itself (viz. the café bombings in France during the Algerian war of independence). The boundaries between colonizer and colonized are likewise destroyed. As mentioned, each becomes no less mortal than the other. In language strangely similar to that used by Derrida, Fanon states that once anti-colonial violence begins, the “enterprise of mystification” practiced by the “demagogues, opportunists, magicians” becomes “practically impossible” (Fanon 2002: 91; translation mine). The violence against the colonial structure pits divine violence against mythic violence; as the thousands of colonized are felled by machine gun fire, the founding/ preserving mythic violence of the colonial state works against itself. Its arbitrary nature becomes clear through its constant shedding of representative blood. Each victim of colonial violence represents all colonized individuals, in the consciousness of the colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer this is because the shapeless masses of the colonized are indistinguishable one from the other; for the colonized, colonial massacres work as the threat principle of the state. In this orgy of violence, which is at once both founding and preserving, the colonial state drives itself towards suicide. The foundational becomes all the more present in each preservation of order, and necessarily demystifies the foundation of the colonial state from the sheer quotidian presence of mythic fate. Each victim of anticolonial violence, however, is killed without warning, without threat. Anti-colonial violence does not threaten, and is never arbitrary. This violence is expiatory: through his death, the colonizer receives the capacity for atonement for his complicity in the violence of the colonial structure. The only possible characteristic of divine violence outlined by Derrida which presents a problem is bloodshed; for Derrida, “[b]lood would make all the difference” (2002: 288). Anti-colonial violence does not seem capable of escaping from the shedding of blood. However, it is clear that, as with divine violence, anti-colonial “violence is exercised on all life but to the profit of for the sake of the living” (ibid). The lack of a “self-justifying meta-narrative” (Seshadri-Crooks 2002: 85) in anticolonial violence, far more than bloodshed, seems to really ‘make all the difference.’ This is not to say that Fanon does not recognize that attempts are constantly made to ideologically channel anti-colonial violence. This channeling comes for the most part from the national (colonized) bourgeoisie and nationalist political parties, who attempt to pacify the colonized, and seize the role of ‘interlocutor’ between those working against the colonial structures, and those representing those structures. These actors work to re-orient the violence of the colonized towards a non-radical, passive acceptance of the terms of decolonization as determined by the colonizing power itself. Fanon characterizes the national bourgeoisie and mainstream political actors as “une sorte de classe d’esclaves libérés individuellement, d’esclaves affranchis” (Fanon 2002: 60-61). This ideological recuperation of spontaneous, divine, anti-colonial violence results not in the potential for a complete annihilation of the violence of colonial/ state structures, but a recreation of them. Just as Derrida states that “all revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses […] justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, of a new state” (2002: 269), Fanon recognizes that: [l]e militant qui fait face, avec des moyens rudimentaires, à la machine de guerre colonialiste se rend compte que dans le même temps où il démolit l’oppression coloniale il contribue par la bande à construire un autre appareil d’exploitation (2002: 138-9) For Fanon, prevention of the founding of a new ‘apparatus of exploitation’ is only possible through the inculcation of a national consciousness. This national consciousness denies the accumulation of power, and the rational recuperation, of the foundational violence of the state through a horizontal spread of capacity, responsibility and agency. This links with the mutual recognition achieved through the transformative process of anti-colonial violence, and with Derrida’s requirement of a recognition of the unique in any possible non-violent politics. | Krebs 07 (Andreas Krebs, Phd University of Ottawa,“The Transcendent and the Postcolonial Violence in Derrida and Fanon”,pg. 93, BW) | the dreams of the colonized constantly turn towards the desire to take the place of the colonizer. This desire of ‘becoming-Other’ is mirrored in the colonizer a mutual desire of destruction The colonizer would like nothing better than to annihilate the colonized However, this annihilation would result in suicide The labour power of the colonized is required in order for the colony to be viable. Similarly, the logic of the colonized is couched in the capacity of swallowing the colonizer through numbers. This marks the beginning of anti-colonial violence and decolonization not just of land, but also of mind and body. Anti-colonial violence is a self-rehabilitation of the oppressed in directly confronting the source of his dehumanization expressed through the act of violence violence demonstrates to the colonized that the colonial structures are not impervious to harm, and that her inferiority, entrenched through colonial ideology, is not essential. What becomes essential is that both colonized and colonizer are mortal, through action against the symbols of colonialism, the colonized becomes man this ‘becoming man’ by no means corresponds to a simple desire for recognition by the colonizer, or to fit within the category of ‘man’ as determined by universal humanism. The necessary violence to which the colonized resorts is a process of becoming. Through this process, the colonized becomes an agent, experiences that which is required to realize oneself in the world Through this violence there transpires a mutual transformation of both sides of the previously Manichean binary accompanied by the blossoming of a ‘national consciousness’ which is neither exclusionary nor a refounding of the violent structures of the state. anti-colonial violence as presented by Fanon is “utterly beyond good and evil does not avail of a self-justifying meta-narrative the initial expressions of anticolonial violence have no ends in mind this is violence as pure means, as pure expression, as pure anger, it has “no other aim than to show and show itself Anti-colonial violence destroys the colonial law, the expression of universal humanism, through demonstrating its untenable inconsistencies. The boundaries of the colonial state are destroyed ). The boundaries between colonizer and colonized are likewise destroyed. each becomes no less mortal than the other the “enterprise of mystification” practiced by the “demagogues, opportunists, magicians” becomes “practically impossible” The violence against the colonial structure pits divine violence against mythic violence; as the thousands of colonized are felled by machine gun fire, the founding mythic violence of the colonial state works against itself Its arbitrary nature becomes clear through its constant shedding of representative blood. Each victim of colonial violence represents all colonized individuals, in the consciousness of the colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer this is because the shapeless masses of the colonized are indistinguishable one from the other; for the colonized, colonial massacres work as the threat principle of the state. In this orgy of violence, which is at once both founding and preserving, the colonial state drives itself towards suicide. The foundational becomes all the more present in each preservation of order, and necessarily demystifies the foundation of the colonial state from the sheer quotidian presence of mythic fate. Each victim of anticolonial violence, however, is killed without warning, without threat. Anti-colonial violence does not threaten, and is never arbitrary. This violence is expiatory: through his death, the colonizer receives the capacity for atonement for his complicity in the violence of the colonial structure. anti-colonial “violence is exercised on all life but to the profit of for the sake of the livin national bourgeoisie and nationalist political parties, attempt to pacify the colonized These work to re-orient the violence of the colonized towards a non-radical, passive acceptance prevention of the founding of a new ‘apparatus of exploitation’ is only possible through the inculcation of a national consciousness. This denies the accumulation of power, of the foundational violence of the state through a horizontal spread of capacity, responsibility and agency. This links with the mutual recognition achieved through the transformative process of anti-colonial violence, and with Derrida’s requirement of a recognition of the unique in any possible non-violent politics. | In the colonial situation a desire of the Colony to destroy the colonized perpetuates a system of violence-only resisting the desire to become colonizer can the violence be overthrown through a symbolic upheaval. | 8,426 | 213 | 4,526 | 1,269 | 33 | 679 | 0.026005 | 0.535067 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
28 | War is the opposite of the anarchical relation of absolute responsibility for the Other that gives birth to human subjectivity. The obliteration of the transontological takes the tendency of producing a world in which war becomes the norm, rather than the exception. That is the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the non-ethics of war become naturalized through the idea of race. The damne´ is the outcome of this process. Her agency needs to be defined by a consistent opposition to the paradigm of war and the promotion of a world oriented by the ideals of human generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. Fanon suggests as much in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks: Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?65 Fanon’s message is clear: decolonization should aspire at the very minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity.66 Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects. In this sense, a consistent response to coloniality involves both decolonization and ‘des-gener-accio´n’ as projects, both of which are necessary for the YOU to emerge. Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life. | Maldonado-Torres 07 (Nelson, PhD, Religious Studies with a Certificate for Outstanding Work in Africana Studies, Brown University, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, pg. 243, MCJC) | The obliteration of the transontological takes the tendency of producing a world in which war becomes the norm, rather than the exception the basic meaning of the coloniality of being: the radical betrayal of the trans-ontological by the formation of a world in which the non-ethics of war become naturalized through the idea of race This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift. decolonization should aspire at the very minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects Only in this way the trans-ontological can shine through the ontological, and love, ethics, and justice can take the role that the non-ethics of war have occupied in modern life. | Decolonization creates a free flow of subjectivity where race, sex, and gender dynamics can be dismantled from the war frame constituting the colonial situation. | 1,787 | 162 | 960 | 293 | 24 | 153 | 0.081911 | 0.522184 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
29 | Under the spell of neo-liberalism and the magic of the media promoting it, modernity and modernization, together with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, a paradise where, for example, when you can no longer buy land because land itself is limited and not producible or monopolized by those who control the concentration of wealth, you can buy virtual land!!3 Yet, when people do not buy the package willingly or have other ideas of how economy and society should be organized, they become subject to all kinds of direct and indirect violence. It is not a spiritual claim, or merely a spiritual claim that I am making. The crooked rhetoric that naturalizes 'modernity' as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of 'coloniality'. In order to uncover the perverse logic — that Fanon pointed out — underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize the 'mind' (Thiongo) and the 'imaginary' (Gruzinski) — that is, knowledge and being. Since the mid-seventies, the idea that knowledge is also colonized and, therefore, it needs to be de-colonized was expressed in several ways and in different disciplinary domains.4 However, the groundbreaking formulation came from the thought and the pen of Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano. Quijano's intellectual experience was shaped in his early years of involvement in the heated debates ignited by dependency theory, in the seventies. Dependency theory, however, maintained the debate in the political (e.g., state, military control and intervention) and economy, analyzing the relation¬ships of dependency, in those spheres, between center and periphery.5 That knowledge could be cast also in those terms was an idea to which Enrique Dussel, in 1977, hinted at in the first chapter of his Philosophy of Liberation titled 'Geo-politics and Philosophy'. In a complementary way, in the late eighties and early seventies, Anibal Quijano introduced the disturbing concept of 'coloniality' (the invisible and constitutive side of 'modernity'). In an article published in 1989 and reprinted in 1992, titled 'Colonialidad y modernidad- racionalidad' Quijano explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge; and ended the argument with the natural consequence: if knowledge is colonized one of the task ahead is to de-colonize knowledge.6 In the past three or four years, the work and conversations among the members of the modernity/coloniality research project',7 de-coloniality became the common expression paired with the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power (economic and political) to coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge), were incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project.8 One of the central points of Quijano's critique to the complicity between modernity/rationality, is the exclusionary and totalitarian notion of Totality (I am aware of the pleonasm); that is a Totality that negates, exclude, occlude the difference and the possibilities of other totalities. Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary. It is not the case, Quijano added, that in non-European imperial languages and epistemologies (Mandarin, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Aymara, etc.), the notion of Totality doesn't exist or is unthinkable. But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology (from Theo-logy to secular Ego- logy (e.g., Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am'), non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality. The cases of the Ottoman and Inca Empires are often quoted as examples of respect for the difference. I am not of course offering the examples of the Ottoman and the Inca Empires as idea for the future but just in order to show the regionalism of the Western notion of Totality. I am observing that from 1500 on, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etc., moved toward and inverted 'recognition': they had to 'recognize' that Western languages and categories of thoughts, and therefore, political philosophy and political economy, were marching an expanding without 'recognizing' them as equal players in the game. Quijano’s project articulated around the notion of ‘coloniality of power’ moves in two simultaneous directions. One is the analytic. The concept of coloniality has opened up, the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages performed by the Totality depicted under the names of modernity and rationality. Quijano acknowledges that postmodern thinkers already criticized the modern concept of Totality; but this critique is limited and internal to European history and the history of European ideas. That is why it is of the essence the critique of Totality from the perspective of coloniality and not only from the critique of post-modernity. Now, and this is important, the critique DELINKING 4 5 1 of the modern notion of Totality doesn’t lead necessarily to post-coloniality, but to de-coloniality. Thus, the second direction we can call the programmatic that is manifested in Quijano as a project of ‘desprendimiento’, of de-linking. At this junction, the analytic of coloniality and the programmatic of decoloniality moves away and beyond the post-colonial. | Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.450-2, MCJC) | Under the spell of neo-liberalism modernity and modernization, together with democracy, are being sold as a package trip to the promised land of happiness, Yet, when people have other ideas of how economy and society should be organized, they become subject to all kinds of direct and indirect violence The crooked rhetoric that naturalizes 'modernity' as a universal global process and point of arrival hides its darker side, the constant reproduction of 'coloniality' In order to uncover the perverse logic underlying the philosophical conundrum of modernity/coloniality and the political and economic structure of imperialism/colonialism, we must consider how to decolonize knowledge and being the idea that knowledge is also colonized and, therefore, it needs to be de-colonized was expressed in several ways and in different disciplinary domains Quijano explicitly linked coloniality of power in the political and economic spheres with the coloniality of knowledge; and ended the argument with the natural consequence: if knowledge is colonized one of the task ahead is to de-colonize knowledge de-coloniality became the common expression paired with the concept of coloniality and the extension of coloniality of power (economic and political) to coloniality of knowledge and of being (gender, sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge), were incorporated into the basic vocabulary among members of the research project But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality. The cases of the Ottoman and Inca Empires are often quoted as examples of respect for the difference. The concept of coloniality has opened up, the re-construction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages | Decolonizing knowledge and being is essential in bringing down coloniality. | 5,621 | 76 | 1,896 | 853 | 10 | 281 | 0.011723 | 0.329426 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
30 | The last statement may sound somewhat messianic but it is, nonetheless, an orientation that in the first decade of the twenty-first century has shown its potential and its viability. Such ‘destruction’ shall not be imagined as a global revolution lead by one concept of Totality that would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian. The Soviet Union was already an experiment whose results is not an exemplar to follow. The statement shall be read in parallel to Quijano’s observations about none-totalitarian concepts of totality; to his own concept of heterogeneous structural-histories (I will come back below to this concept), and to what (I will develop below) pluriversality as 4 5 2 CULTURAL STUDIES a universal project . And, above all, it shall be read in complementarity with Quijano’s idea of ‘desprenderse’ (delinking).10 In this regard, Quijano proposes a de-colonial epistemic shift when he clarifies that: En primer te´rmino, la descolonizacio´n epistemolo´gica, para dar paso luego a una nueva comunicacio´n inter-cultural, a un intercambio de experiencias y de significaciones, como la base de otra racionalidad que pueda pretender, con legitimidad, a alguna universalidad. Pues nada menos racional, finalmente, que la pretension de que la especı´fica cosmovisio´n de una etnia particular sea impuesta como la racionalidad universal, aunque tal etnia se llama Europa occidental. Porque eso, en verdad, es pretender para un provincianismo el tı´tulo de universalidad (italics mine).11 The argument that follows is, in a nutshell, contained in this paragraph. First, epistemic de-colonization runs parallel to Amin’s delinking. A delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics. ‘New inter-cultural communication’ should be interpreted as new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the concept of inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador). Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. De-linking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project. I’ll come back to this point in section IV (‘The grammar of de-coloniality’). | Mignolo 07 (Walter, professor@ Duke U on semiotics and literary theory, “DELINKING The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, volume:21, pg.452-3, MCJC) | Such ‘destruction’ shall not be imagined as a global revolution lead by one concept of Totality that would be different from the modern one, but equally totalitarian Quijano proposes a de-colonial epistemic shift epistemic de-colonization runs parallel to delinking. A delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics. de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity | Epistemic de-colonization collapses and delinks the political with coloniality | 2,641 | 79 | 643 | 388 | 9 | 93 | 0.023196 | 0.239691 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
31 | From such a colonial encounter between the white presence and its black semblance, there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. For if Sade's scandalous theatricalization of language repeatedly reminds us that discourse can claim "no priority," then the work of Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationo f colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation."This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status," Fanon suggests, "(is) both present and mummified, it testified against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal."20 The ambivalence of mimicry--almost but not quite-suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal. What I have called its "identity-effects," are always crucially split. Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its "otherness," that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory" otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry. So Edward Long can say with authority, quoting variously, Hume, Eastwick, and Bishop Warburton in his support, that: Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female.22 Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry-a difference that is almost nothing but not quite-to menace- a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to "a part," can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouves of the colonial discourse- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body. And the holiest of books - the Bible - bearing both the standard of the cross and the standard of empire finds itself strangely dismembered. In May 1817 a missionary wrote from Bengal: | Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 131-133) | there emerges the question of the ambivalence of mimicry as a problematic of colonial subjection. Edward Said will not let us forget that the "ethnocentric and erratic will to power from which texts can spring"19 is itself a theater of war. Mimicry, as the metonymy of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of thefixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge in the defiles of an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorizationo f colonial representations. A question of authority that goes beyond the subject's lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation. This culture . . . fixed in its colonial status There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as "thinking the unthought"21 which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man's alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory" otherness" is precisely the "other scene" of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness. The "unthought" across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates "reality" as mimicry. Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire--seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths- are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of "civil" discourse. colonial power can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably. In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouves of the colonial discourse . Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body. | Mimcry breaks out of the traditional notion of colonization. | 4,900 | 61 | 2,763 | 741 | 9 | 415 | 0.012146 | 0.560054 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
32 | The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, "writ by the finger of the Divine" 1 often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe l'oeil, irony, mimicry, and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects, mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said2 describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination- the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history-change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration,3 then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a differencteh at is almost thes ame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalenceo f mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "rupture" the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a "partial" presence. By "partial" I mean both "incomplete" and "virtual." It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. | Bhaba 1984 (Homi K, Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, 1984, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467)(pg. 127) | discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, "human and not wholly human" mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history-change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a differencteh at is almost thes ame, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both "normalized" knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace. | Mimicry may be used as a tool to oppress the postcolonial subject, or a method to explode the postcolonial power matrix. | 3,706 | 121 | 2,282 | 573 | 21 | 346 | 0.036649 | 0.603839 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
33 | The idea of totality in general is today questioned and denied in Europe, not only by the perennial empiricists, but also by an entire intellectual community that calls itself postmodernist. In fact, in Europe, the idea of totality is a product of colonial/modernity. And it is demonstrable, as we have seen above, that the European ideas of totality led to theoretical reductionism and to the metaphysics of a macro-historical subject. Moreover, such ideas have been associated with undesirable political practices, behind a dream of the total rationalization of society. It is not necessary, however, to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity. What is to be done is something very different: to liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity. Outside the 'West', virtually in all known cultures, every cosmic vision, every image, all systematic production of knowledge is associated with a perspective of totality. But in those cultures, the perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; of the irreducible, contradictory character of the latter; of the legitimacy, i.e., the desirability, of the diverse character of the components of all reality — and therefore, of the social. The idea of social totality, then, not only does not deny, but depends on the historical diversity and heterogeneity of society, of every society. In other words, it not only does not deny, but it requires the idea of an 'other' — diverse, different. That difference does not necessarily imply the unequal nature of the 'other' and therefore the absolute externality of relations, nor the hierarchical inequality nor the social inferiority of the other. The differences are not necessarily the basis of domination. At the same time — and because of that — historical-cultural heterogeneity implies the co- presence and the articulation of diverse historical 'logic' around one of them, which is hegemonic but in no way unique. In this way, the road is closed to all reductionism, as well as to the metaphysics of an historical macro- subject capable of its own rationality and of historical teleology, of which individuals and specific groups, classes for instance, would hardly be carriers or missionaries. The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable — even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in cognition. It is necessary to extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by free decisions made by free people. It is the instrumentalisation of the reasons for power, of colonial power in the first place, which produced distorted paradigms of knowledge and spoiled the liberating promises of modernity. The alternative, then, is clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power. First of all, epistemo- logical decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality. Nothing is less rational, finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is called Western Europe because this is actually pretend to impose a provincialism as universalism. The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society. This liberation is, part of the process of social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and as domina¬tion. | Quijano 2007 (Aníbal, PhD National University of San Marcos Peru, “COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY,” Cultural Studies, volume: 21, 1, pg. 177, JC) | It is not necessary, however, to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity. What is to be done is something very different: to liberate the production of knowledge, reflection, and communication from the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity. the perspective of totality in knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of all reality; the desirability, of the diverse character of the components of all reality — and therefore, of the social. At the same time — and because of that — historical-cultural heterogeneity implies the co- presence and the articulation of diverse historical 'logic' around one of them, which is hegemonic but in no way unique. The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable — even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its categories; of the dissolution of reality in discourse; of the pure negation of the idea and the perspective of totality in cognition The alternative, then, is clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power. epistemo- logical decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, , as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society | The alternative is to reject the aff – epistemological decolonization is necessary to clear the way for intercultural communication. Only then, can we liberate those who are imprisoned by coloniality. | 4,244 | 201 | 1,704 | 653 | 30 | 261 | 0.045942 | 0.399694 | Postcolonialism Kritik - Gonzaga 2013.html5 | Gonzaga (GDI) | Kritiks | 2013 |
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DebateSum
Corresponding code repo for the upcoming paper at ARGMIN 2020: "DebateSum: A large-scale argument mining and summarization dataset"
Arxiv pre-print available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07251
Check out the presentation date and time here: https://argmining2020.i3s.unice.fr/node/9
Full paper as presented by the ACL is here: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.argmining-1.1/
Video of presentation at COLING 2020: https://underline.io/lecture/6461-debatesum-a-large-scale-argument-mining-and-summarization-dataset
The dataset is distributed as csv files.
A search engine over DebateSum (as well as some additional evidence not included in DebateSum) is available as debate.cards. It's very good quality and allows for the evidence to be viewed in the format that debaters use.
Data
DebateSum consists of 187328 debate documents, arguements (also can be thought of as abstractive summaries, or queries), word-level extractive summaries, citations, and associated metadata organized by topic-year. This data is ready for analysis by NLP systems.
Download
All data is accesable in a parsed format organized by topic year here
Addtionally, the trained word-vectors for debate2vec are also found in that folder.
Regenerating it yourself
This is useful as the debaters who produce the evidence release their work every year. Soon enough I will update to include the 2020-2021 topic.
Step 1: Download all open evidence files from Open Evidence and unzip them into a directory. The links are as follows:
- 2019 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce Direct Commercial Sales and/or Foreign Military Sales of arms from the United States.
- 2018 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially reduce its restrictions on legal immigration to the United States.
- 2017 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and/or regulation of elementary and/or secondary education in the United States.
- 2016 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China.
- 2015 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic surveil-lance.
- 2014 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its non-military exploration and/or development of the Earth’s oceans.
- 2013 - Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic en-gagement toward Cuba, Mexico or Venezuela.
Step 2: Convert all evidence from docx files to html5 files using pandoc with this command:
for f in *.docx; do pandoc "$f" -s -o "${f%.docx}.html5"; done
Step 3: install the dependencies for make_debate_dataset.py.
pip install -r requirements.txt
Step 4: Modify the folder and file locations as needed for your system, and run make_debate_dataset.py
python3 make_debate_dataset.py
Credits
Huge thanks to Arvind Balaji for making debate.cards and being second author on this paper!
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