Цитаты из книги Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts

A simple distinction between centre/margin, colonizer/colonized, metropolis/ empire, civilized/primitive represents very efficiently the violent hierarchy on which imperialism is based and which it actively perpetuates.

Affect is one of the three divisions described in modern psychology – the cognitive, the conative and the affective – and refers to the domain of non-cognitive experience that includes feelings, emotions and other autonomic responses to stimuli.

Indigenous peoples are those ‘born in a place or region’ (OED).

Subaltern, meaning ‘of inferior rank’, is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. Subaltern classes may include peasants, workers and other groups denied access to ‘hegemonic’ power.

Building on an earlier Spanish and Portuguese practice of enslaving Africans along the Atlantic coast, Charles V granted a patent to a Flemish merchant in 1517 to import 4,000 black slaves per year into Hispaniola, Cuba and Jamaica. The organization of European slavery over the next three centuries has its genesis in this trading concession.

The concept of a savage/civilized dichotomy is traceable at least as far back as Homer’s Odyssey. In English, the OED defines ‘uncivilized’ as ‘existing in the lowest stage of culture (1588)’; ‘pertaining to or characteristic of savages (1614)’. The notion of civilizing cultures (or persons) goes back at least to 1601: ‘To make civil. To bring out a state of barbarism; to instruct in the arts of life; to enlighten and refine.’

Postcolonialism (or often post-colonialism) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. As originally used by historians after the Second World War in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘postcolonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization.

The metropolis in European thought was always constituted as the seat of culture, and this meaning is readily transferred to the imperial/colonial relationship. There is frequent slippage in the use of the term to cover ‘mother country’ (England, France) or, metonymically, their chief cities, London and Paris.

During the eighteenth century, however, new kinds of travellers began to emerge, especially the scientific travellers in search of new geographical and biological information, and the missionaries who began increasingly to travel to spread the Christian religion and who, like the scientific explorers, saw their interaction with the people of the worlds they entered as essentially benign.

The concern with binarism was first established by the French structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who held that signs have meaning not by a simple reference to real objects, but by their opposition to other signs. Each sign is itself the function of a binary between the signifier, the ‘signal’ or sound image of the word, and the signified, the significance of the signal, the concept or mental image that it evokes.

Abrogation refers to the rejection by postcolonial writers of a normative concept of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ English used by certain classes or groups, and of the corresponding concepts of inferior ‘dialects’ or ‘marginal variants’.

Nigeria and India are examples of colonies of occupation, where indigenous people remained in the majority but were administered by a foreign power. Examples of settler colonies where, over time, the invading Europeans (or their descendants) annihilated, displaced and/or marginalized the indigenes to become a majority non-indigenous population, include Argentina, Australia, Canada and the United States.

The period after the Second World War saw an upsurge of new independent states. India and Pakistan were ‘granted’ independence in 1947, as were the majority of African states in 1960. But it is worth noting how long the process of achieving independence took to complete. Some countries in the Caribbean, for instance, did not become independent until the 1980s.

The condition of exile involves the idea of a separation and distancing from either a literal homeland or from a cultural and ethnic origin. Critics such as Andrew Gurr (1981) have suggested that a distinction should be drawn between the idea of exile, which implies involuntary constraint, and that of expatriation, which implies a voluntary act or state.

Ethnography is that field of anthropological research based on direct observation of and reporting on a people’s way of life. It is the basic methodology employed by cultural anthropologists and consists of two stages: fieldwork, which is the term used for the process of observing and recording data; and reportage, the production of a written description and analysis of the subject under study.