What is POSTCOLONIALISM? What does POSTCOLONIALISM mean? POSTOCOLONIALISM meaning

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• published: 18 Feb 2017
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What is POSTCOLONIALISM? What does POSTCOLONIALISM mean? POSTOCOLONIALISM meaning - POSTCOLONIALISM definition - POSTCOLONIALISM explanation. Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license. Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of a native people and its lands. Drawing from postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyse the politics of knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by examining the functional relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the imperial regime's depictions (social, political, cultural) of the colonizer and of the colonized. As a genre of contemporary history, postcolonialism questions and reinvents the manner in which a culture is being viewed, challenging the narratives expounded during the colonial era. Anthropologically, it records human nations between the colonists and the peoples under colonial rule, seeking to build an understanding of the nature and practice of colonial rule. As a critical theory, it presents, explains, and illustrates the ideology and practice of neocolonialism with examples drawn from history, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and human geography. It also examines the effects of colonial rule on the cultural aspects of the colony and its treatment of women, language, literature, and humanity. As an epistemology (the study of knowledge, its nature and verifiability), as an ethics (moral philosophy), and as a politics (affairs of the citizenry), the field of postcolonialism address the politics of knowledge—the matters that constitute the postcolonial identity of a decolonised people, which derives from: (i) the coloniser's generation of cultural knowledge about the colonised people; and (ii) how that Western cultural knowledge was applied to subjugate a non–European people into a colony of the European Mother Country, which, after initial invasion, was effected by means of the cultural identities of 'coloniser' and 'colonised'. A decolonised people develop a postcolonial identity from the cultural interactions among the types of identity (cultural, national, ethnic) and the social relations of sex, class, and caste; determined by the gender and the race of the colonised person; and the racism inherent to the structures of a colonial society. In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyses the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the coloniser; how such cultural resistance complicated the establishment of a colonial society; how the colonisers developed their postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the Us-and-Them binary social relation to view the non-Western world as inhabited by The Other. The neocolonial discourse of geopolitical homogeneity conflates the decolonised peoples, their cultures, and their countries, into an imaginary place, such as "the Third World", an over-inclusive term that usually comprises continents and seas, i.e. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. The postcolonial critique analyses the self-justifying discourse of neocolonialism and the functions (philosophic and political) of its over-inclusive terms, to establish the factual and cultural inaccuracy of homogeneous concepts, such as "the Arabs" and "the First World", "Christendom" and "the Muslim World", actually comprise heterogeneous peoples, cultures, and geography, and that realistic descriptions of the world's peoples, places, and things require nuanced and accurate terms.