Topic:
Discuss: Colonialism, Imperialism, Neo – Colonialism, Post colonialism, Anti
colonialism, Anti – imperialism and Decolonization.
Name:
Patel Kinjal
Paper
Name: The Postcolonial Literature
Paper
No:
11
Roll
No:
14
STD: M.A
2
SEM: 3
Submitted
to:
Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Colonialism:
Colonialism
is the establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of
colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a set of
unequal relationships between the colonial power and the colony and often
between the colonists and the indigenous population.
Meaning:
The
word “Colony” comes from the Latin colonial-“a place for agriculture”. It means
the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country,
territory, or people.
History
of European Colonial Period:
century.
When several European powers established Colonies in Asia, Africa, and the
Americas. At first the countries followed mercantilist policies designed to
strengthen the home economy at the expense of rivals, the colonies were usually
allowed to trade only with the mother country.
Aim
of Colonialism:
The
novel by Joseph Conrad- ‘The Heart of Darkness truly depicts the aim of
colonialism. Colonialism was always portrayed in the colonizing country as
bringing benefits for the colony. On the name of civilization and education
they robbed them off with their raw material and labor. Many now- independent
colonies have not yet recovered completely from the psychological trauma of
colonialism.
Modern
colonialism started with the Age of Discovery. Portugal and Spain discovered
new lands built trading posts or conquered large extensions of land. The 17th
century saw the creation of the French colonial empire and the Dutch and the
English overseas possessions, Swedish and Danish empire also flourished.
The
spread of colonial empires was reduced in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries by the American Revolutionary war and the Latin American wars of
independence. In the late 9th century, many European countries were
involved in the scramble for Africa.
The colonial
system was the major cause of the world wars. During the 20th
century the overseas colonies of the losers of the world war .I were
distributed among the victors as mandates but it was not until the end of world
war 2.That the second stage of decolonization began in earnest. In 1999 Portugal
gave up the last of Europe’s colonies in Asia, Macaque to china ending an era
that had lasted six hundred years.
“The
worst thing that colonialism did was to could our view of our past” -
Barack Obama
“Colonialism
the enforced sprayed of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among
the colonizers?” -
Anthony Burgese
Neo
Colonialism
Neo
colonialism or Neo Imperialism is the geopolitical practice of using
capitalism, Business Globalization and cultural Imperialism to influence a country,
in lieu of either direct military control or indirect political control I.E.
Imperialism and hegemony.
Term:
The
political signs term “Neo colonialism” Became popular usage in reference to the
continued European economic and cultural control of African countries that had
been decolonize in the after math of the Second World War (1939-1345).
Kwame
Nkrumah president of Ghama (1960-1966), is believed to have coined the term
“Neo colonialism”, which appeared in 1963.
Kwame
Nkrumah used this term to described the socio-economic and political control
that can be exercised economically – linguistically ,where by promotion of the
culture of the neo colonist country facilities the cultural assimilation of the
colonized people and thus opens the national economy to the multinational
corporations of the neo colonial country.
In
post colonial studies, this term deals with the domination paraxis ( Social,
Cultural , Economical) of countries from the developed world in the respective
internal affairs of the countries of the developing world.
A
neo colonialism critics can include ‘ De facto’ colonialism and an economic
critic 0f the disproportionate involvement of modern capitalist business in the
economy of a developing country , where by multinational corporations continue
to exploit the natural resources of the formal colony, that such economic control is inherently neo- colonial, and this
is akin to the imperial and hegemonic verities of colonialism practiced by the
United States and the empires of European countries from 16th
century owe words up to the 20th century.
Colonialism:
Neo
colonialism is discussed in the works of Jean – Paul Sartre and Noam Chomsky.
“We
face neither East nor West:
We
face forward.”
“A
State in the grip of neo- colonialism is not master of its own destiny. It is
this factor which makes neo-colonialism such a serious threat to word.”
---- Kwame Nkrumah
Post
colonialism:
Post
colonialism or studies is an academic discipline featuring methods of
intellectual discourse that analyze ,explain and respond to the cultural
legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of
controlling a country and establishing setters for the economic explanation of
the native people and their land. During from post modern schools of thought,
postcolonial studies analyze the politics of knowledge by analyzing the functional
relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and
neocolonialism.
As a
genre of contemporary history, post colonialism question and reinvents the
modes of cultural perception the ways of viewing and of being viewed.
Post
colonialism records human relations among the colonial nations and the subaltern
peoples exploited by colonial rule.
Post
colonialism presents, explains and illustrates the ideology and the praxis of neo
colonialism, with examples drawn from the humanities-history and political science,
philosophy and Marxist theory, sociology, anthropology and human geography, the
cinema, religion and the theology, feminism, linguistics and post colonial
literature which the ant conquest narrative genre presents the stories of colonial
subjugation of the subaltern man and woman.
Post
colonialism can b used to denote the immediate time after colonialism which is
a problematic application of the term, because the immediate, historical, political
time is not included to the categories of critical theory.
Helen
Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins writes in postcolonial drama: Theory, practice,
politics (1996)
“
The term post colonialism-According to a too-rigid etymology-is frequently
misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has
ceased or the time following the politically determined independence way on
which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naive
teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post colonialism is,
rather, an engagement with one contestation of colonialism, discourse, power
structures and social hierarchies….. A theory of post colonialism must then
respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post- independence,
and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism.”
Post
– colonial Drama – 1996.
The field of post – colonialism studies has
been gaining prominence since the 1970s. The growing currency within the
academy of the term “postcolonial” was consolidated by the appearance in the
1989 of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post -Colonial Literature's by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.
In
literal sense “postcolonial” is that which has been preceded by colonization.
The ‘postcolonial’ sometimes includes countries that have yet to achieve
independence, or people in First World countries who are minorities or even
independent colonies that now contend. With “Neo-colonial” forms of subjugation
through expanding capitalism and globalization. The ‘postcolonial’ is used to
signify a position against imperialism and Euro centrism.
Views
of Frantz Fanon about colonialism:
Frantz Fanon was very unequivocal in his call
for Africans to encounter colonial violence with what he called “greater
violence”. This was because in his view “no diplomacy, no political genius, no
skill” can cope with colonialism except “force”. He spoke of colonialism in
very bitter terms-
“Colonialism is not a thinking
machine.”
Fanon held ----
“Nor a body endowed with reasoning
faculties. It is violence in its natural state and will only yield when
confronted with greater violence.
Anti
– Colonialism:
Colonialism
is the act of occupation by a foreign country. England for example, colonized
the USA. Anti-colonialism is the act of political struggle of colonized people
against the specific idiocy and practice of colonialism.
Anti-colonialism
signifies the point at which the various forms of opposition become articulated
as a resistance to the operations of the colonialism in political, economic and
cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to reject colonial power and
restore local control.
Anti-colonialist
movements often expressed themselves in the appropriation and subversion of
forms borrowed from the institutions of the colonizer and turned back on them.
It may accompany a demand for recognition of cultural difference on a board and
diverse front as in the Indian national congress which sought to unite a
variety of ethnic groups with different religious and racial identities in a single
national independence movement.
In
the second half of the 20th century anti-colonialism was often
articulated in terms of libration. The idea of the need to empower and
recognize the local as a specific and distinct feature of post-colonial
politics in ways that radicalized the more rigid and orthodox practices of
post-Stalinist Marxist though Cabral and fanon contributed and received
recognition.
Anti-colonialism frequently perceived
resistance to be the product of a fixed and definitive relationship in which
colonizer and were in absolute and implacable opposition. Setter colonies illustrate
the power of filiative modes of cultural representation to affect a stronger and
more complete hegemony of the colonial culture.
Anti-imperialism:
Anti
– imperialism is a term that may be applies to a movement opposed to any form
of colonialism.
In
political science and international relations, anti- imperialism is the opposition
to colonialism, colonial empire, hegemony, and imperialism. Anti- imperialism
includes opposition to wars of conquest, especially wars meant to conquer and colonies
countries whose territories do not border the imperialism power and wars meant
to subjugate peoples of dig gerent cultures. Anti- imperialism also comprises
political opposition to the territorial expansion of a country beyond its
established borders.
Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt assert that traditional anti- imperialism is no longer
relevant. In the pr book ‘Empire’. Negri and Hardt argue that imperialism is no
longer the practice or domain of any one nation or state. Rather, they claim,
the “Empire” is a corporation’s media, popular and intellectual culture and so
forth and thus traditional anti- imperialist methods and strategies can no
longer be applied against them.
Examples
of anti-imperialists include Republican senators of the Roman Republic, and members
of the Anti Imperialist it League which opposed the absorption of the
Philippines after the Spanish American War of 898.
The
term “Imperialism”, was originally introduced into English in 1870s by the
opponents of the allegedly aggressive and ostentatious imperial policies of
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It was shortly appropriated by
supporters of imperialism like Joseph Chamberlain.
Imperialism
can be designated as policy of idealism and philanthropy. Some believes that it
was characterized by political self-interest and a growing greed. Some writers
have expanded the time period associated with the term so that it now
designates neither a policy, nor a short space of decades in the late 19th
century, but a global system extending over a period of centuries. While
dealing with this term we can go back to crusades, Christopher and Columbus.
Decolonization:
Decolonization
refers to the undoing of colonialism, the unequal relation of polities whereby
one people or nation establishes and maintains dependent Territory over
another. It can be understood politically or culturally.
Decolonization
refers particularly to dismantlement of the Neo-Imperial empires established
prior to World War 1 throughout Africa and Asia in the years after World War 2.
The
Oxford English Dictionary defines decolonization as “the withdrawal from its
colonies of a colonial power, the acquisition of political or economic
independence by such colonies.
The
United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization has stated that in the
process of decolonization there is no alternative to the colonizer’s allowance
of self-determination, but in practice decolonization may involve either
non-violent revolution or national liberation wars by pro-independence groups.
We
can find the examples of decolonization as early as the writings of Thucydides,
there have been several particularly active periods of decolonization in modern
times.
As a
philosophy, “decolonization” refers to the ability to view and discuss
non-European cultures from an unbiased, non-Western perspective.
Great
Britain’s Thirteen North American colonies were the first to break from British
Empire in 1776, and was recognized as an independent nation by the Treaty of
Paris in 1783 after Britain’s defeat at the hands of American militias and the
French.
The
post-war period also saw America push hard to accelerate decolonization and
bring an end to the colonial empires of its Western allies, most importantly
during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
World
War 2 gave the Japanese Empire occasion to conquer vast swaths of Asia,
sweeping into China and seizing the Western colonies of Vietnam Hong Kong. The
process of decolonization coincides with the new Cold War between the Soviet
Union and the U.S.
The
process of decolonization coincided with the new Cold War between the Soviet
Union and the United States and with the early development of the new United
Nations. Decolonization was often affected by superpower competition. It also
significantly changed the pattern of international relation in a more general
sense.
References:
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