welcome Reader's 🤗: Postcolonialism

Bill Ashcroft:-🤗

Bill Ashcroft is an Emeritus Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts. A founding exponent of post-colonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically the field of post-colonial studies. He is author and co-author of twenty one books, variously translated into five languages, Including Post-Colonial Transformation (Routledge 2001), Post-Colonial Futures (Continuum 2001); Caliban's Voice (Routledge 2008) Intimate Horizons (ATF 2009) and Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (Routledge 2016). He is the author of over 200 chapters and papers, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals.

Session video on " Postcolonialism Today":-

What is postcolonial theory?:-🧐

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical-theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.

Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may seek to build a better understanding of colonial life based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography, political science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and Christian thought.

At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism generally represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest.

Postcolonial and Globalization:-😒

He argues that the contemporary processes of globalization are often described in ahistorical terms, whereas much of recent literature on postcolonialism is reduced largely to apolitical analyses of literary texts, disconnected from issues of current and shifting configurations of power.

globalization is the expansion of communication links between different regions whereas colonialism was the expansion of both power and territory. However, the two are similar in the sense that the powerful have an upper hand and can increase their profits at the expense of the poor.

In literary analysis, colonialism refers to literature and criticism dealing with the periods of colonialization. This can be from the perspective of the colonized or the colonizers. Postcolonialism refers to the time after these colonized nations have become independent.

Postcolonial education addresses cultural imperialism by recognizing and unsettling its legacy in the school curriculum and the Western assumptions about knowledge and the world that underpin it, fostering a pedagogy of critique and transformation in the metropole and the periphery.

Postcolonial futures:-😱

On Post-Colonial Futures proposes a radical view of the influence that colonized societies have on their former colonizers. In this ground-breaking book, Bill Ashcroft extends the arguments he posed in The Empire Writes Back to investigate the transformative effects of post-colonial resistance and the continuing relevance of colonial struggle. The book demonstrates the remarkable capacity for change in the intellectual spheres of literature, history and philosophy. The transformations of post-colonial literary study have not been limited to a simply rewriting of the canon but have affected the ways in which all literature can be read and have led to a more profound understanding of the network of cultural practices that influence creative writing.

Postcolonial Utopianism:-🤔

Europeans established two types of colonies. One was designed primarily to exploit the labour of the inhabitants and the natural resources of the country, with the Congo and India prime examples. The second, while still exploiting the natural resources of the country and sometimes the labour of the inhabitants, was primarily for settlement; most of the North and South American colonies, New Zealand and South Africa are examples. A variant of the second that became indistinguishable from it occurred in some of the Australian colonies, in which one of the purposes of the colonial power was to get rid of undesirables of various sorts. The settler colonies produced a rich harvest of utopias; the colonies designed to exploit generally did not. The settlement colonies served the purposes of the settlers as well as those of the home country. Most settlers wanted to improve their own lives and some had a specific utopian vision in mind. Those who voluntarily travelled significant distances in often horrible conditions hoped either to practise a way of life they were unable to practise in the home country or to improve their lives materially or both. Probably the overwhelming majority of voluntary colonists were what are now disparagingly called economic immigrants.

Literature's Anticipatory Function:-🤭

The definition of anticipation is the state of being happy and excited about something upcoming. An example of anticipation is when someone is thrilled and looking forward to going on a cruise for the first time. ... An example of anticipation is the state of using a credit card and credit to pay for things.

What is anticipatory approach?

The anticipatory approach that we propose consists in understanding and conceptualizing anticipation and anticipatory behavior in natural cognition and implementing them in artificial systems.

Words commonly associated with anticipatory socialization include grooming, play-acting, training and rehearsing. ... Examples of anticipatory socialization include law school students learning how to behave like lawyers, older people preparing for retirement, and Mormon boys getting ready to become missionaries.

Anticipatory describes the feeling you get when you know what's coming. It can also describe something that happens because something else is going to happen later — like that anticipatory excitement you feel the night before a big party. ... It's related to the feelings you get while waiting and preparing for something.

Borders and Bordering:-🤨

Postcolonial bordering

When considering the postcolonial, it is important to keep in mind its historical trajectory in terms of how certain discourses of western self-understanding have reconciled the humanist and universalist elements of modernity with systematic oppression and exploitation.

This is the subjugation involved in knowledge production about conquered peoples and their lands – about the bordering of postcolonial communities and peoples through the idea of the nation The impact on early ethnography, cartography and cosmology cannot be overestimated, leading to a focus on nations as naturally enclosed territorial units and the state as their guardians. But it is also the inauguration of the ‘Subject’ itself, as Spivak argues. The emergence of the modern subject with a claim to knowledge who was guided by Enlightenment principles of reason and science, but also by the ‘urge to shut the other out into the opacity of the unknown alien, to be excluded or reduced to the status of a beast of burden and treated accordingly’. As Butler argues, power relations and hierarchies are affected by different temporal conceptions, where a linear and progressive understanding of time (and borders) facilitates the representation of some collectives as modern – as actors that advance history – while others are stuck in the past.Hence, it is difficult to talk about narratives of borders apart from the imaginary logic of international relations theory in which the organising principle of state sovereignty has resulted in the loss of sovereignty for others – other states, other communities and other individuals.

This implies that the traces of the colonial state have not withered away as sovereignty in the postcolonial world has often remained provisional and partial, and at times even despotic and viciously violent.

Cavafy," Waiting for the Barbarians":-😳

Waiting for the Barbarians is a 2020 action drama film directed by Ciro Guerra in his English-language directorial debut. The film is based on the novel of the same name by J. M. Coetzee. It stars Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, Gana Bayarsaikhan, and Greta Scacchi.

Waiting for the Barbarians had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2019. Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired U.S. distribution rights to the film, and released it on August 7 2020.

Link of the trailer :-

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2019. It was released on August 7, 2020, by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Despite receiving mixed reviews from film critics, the film was positively welcomed from audiences who praised its story, emotional weight, cast performances musical score, the tone, action scenes, the screenplay, and the directing while also becoming a financial success grossing dollars at the box-office.

The Borders within:-😉

Throughout its history, the nation that is now called the United States has been inextricably entwined with the nation now called Mexico. Indeed, their indigenous peoples interacted long before borders of any kind were established. Today, though, the border between the two nations is so prominent that it is front-page news in both countries. Douglas Monroy, a noted Mexican American historian, has for many years pondered the historical and cultural intertwinings of the two nations.

Here, in beautifully crafted essays, he reflects on some of the many ways in which the citizens of the two countries have misunderstood each other. Putting himself— and his own quest for understanding—directly into his work, he contemplates the missions of California; the differences between “liberal” and “traditional” societies; the meanings of words like Mexican, Chicano, and Latino; and even the significance of avocados and bathing suits. In thought-provoking chapters, he considers why Native Americans didn’t embrace Catholicism, why NAFTA isn’t working the way it was supposed to, and why Mexicans and their neighbors to the north tell themselves different versions of the same historical events. In his own thoughtful way, Monroy is an explorer. Rather than trying to conquer new lands, however, his goal is to gain new insights. He wants to comprehend two cultures that are bound to each other without fully recognizing their bonds. Along with Monroy, readers will discover that borders, when we stop and really think about it, are drawn more deeply in our minds than on any maps.

Borders and the Horizons of Literature:-🤓

This case study focuses on the pedagogical significance of the ‘theory of reception’ Theory & History of Literature, Jauss Theory and History of Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pressure in the teaching of literature in junior high and high school classrooms. Two lessons were video-recorded and their teachers were interviewed. It analyzes the encounter between the readers' ‘horizons of expectations’ and the ‘horizons of the text’ in authentic classroom discourse. The discourse analysis suggests a third type of ‘horizons of expectations’ typical for educational settings which might be called ‘horizons of pedagogical expectations’.

The results show the influence of students' prior knowledge over the text as a source of information about the text and exposes the teacher's pedagogical dilemma concerning appropriate methods of entering the text's historical and/or remote world. The findings of the study also suggest that Jauss' reception theory can help teachers steer their lessons, making them aware of the importance of the dialogic process between different historical horizons, and helping them deal with their students' responses more effectively.

Transnation:-🙄

Postcolonial and Transnational Studies examines the effects of the mobility of people, technologies, ideas, capital, and commodities on contemporary intellectual life, societies, cultural and literary practices. It highlights transcultural and diasporic experiences that exceed national, racial, religious, and linguistic boundaries and challenges traditional literary and humanities scholarship that reifies the classification of texts and cultures in terms of national and regional literatures. Through a primary focus on marginalized textual, literary and cultural formations, TCS thus seeks to redefine disciplinary boundaries such as American or British studies to include transhemispheric linkages, crossgendered and crossracial dynamics, and the shifting relations between host nations and homelands. Taking a theoretical approach to understanding such terms as "globalization," "transnationalism," "postcolonialism," and "neocolonialism," we also make a commitment to intellectual work as a practice of critical intervention in both the academy and broader world.

Postcolonial and Transnational Studies received funding from the Humanities Institute to organize a Research Workshop aimed at drawing together UB faculty and graduate students across the disciplines who are interested in transnational issues

Postcolonialism and the Nation:-☹️

Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism.

The consensus in the field is that "post-colonial"signifies a period that comes chronologically "after" colonialism. "Postcolonial," on the other hand, signals the persisting impact of colonization across time periods and geographical regions.