Цитаты из книги Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts

The term ‘ethnicity’, however, really only achieves wide currency when these ‘national’ groups find themselves as minorities within a larger national grouping, as occurs in the aftermath of colonization, either through immigration to settled colonies such as USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or by the migration of colonized peoples to the colonizing centre.

Ethnicity is a term that has been used increasingly since the 1960s to account for human variation in terms of culture, tradition, language, social patterns and ancestry, rather than the discredited generalizations of race with its assumption of a humanity divided into fixed, genetically determined biological types.

The concept of resistance literature (mugãwamah) was first applied in a description of Palestinian literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani in his study Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948–1966. For Kanafani, literature itself is arena of struggle.

Resistance movements arose within European empires as the demand for independence gathered force and the impetus for decolonization increased. Algerians, for instance, fought a sustained war against French conquest for two decades after 1830, led by Abd El-Khader.

Social Darwinism, in both its positive and its negative implications, concurred readily with imperial practice, particularly the paradoxical dualism that existed in imperialist thought between the debasement and the idealization of colonized subjects.

Whatever the nature of the postcolonial society, language always negotiates a kind of gap between the word and its signification. In this sense, the dynamic of naming becomes a primary colonizing process because it appropriates, defines and captures the place in language. Perhaps the most comprehensive example of this is the drafting of the Mercator Projection Atlas in 1636.

One of the most sustained discussions of the linguistic construction of place occurs in Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987), which proposes a concept he calls ‘spatial history’. Such history examines place as a palimpsest on which the traces of successive inscriptions form the complex experience of place, which is itself historical.

In many cases, ‘place’ does not become an issue in a society’s cultural discourse until colonial intervention radically disrupts the primary modes of its representation by separating ‘space’ from ‘place’. A sense of place may be embedded in cultural history, in legend and language, without becoming a concept of contention and struggle until the profound discursive interference of colonialism.

Since the binarism inherent in the concept connotes a centre and a periphery, colonies are by definition constructed as peripheral to the metropolitan ‘centres’.

The importance of the liminal for postcolonial theory is precisely its usefulness for describing an ‘in-between’ space in which cultural change may occur: the transcultural space in which strategies for personal or communal self-hood may be elaborated, a region in which there is a continual process of movement and interchange between different states.

The expansionist policies pursued by the modern industrial powers from 1880 have been described as ‘classical imperialism.’

The term [hegemony] is useful for describing the success of imperial power over a colonized people who may far outnumber any occupying military force, but whose desire for self-determination has been suppressed by a hegemonic notion of the greater good, often couched in terms of social order, stability and advancement, all of which are defined by the colonizing power.

The term indicates the colonizers’ fear of contamination by absorption into native life and customs. The construction of native cultures as either primitive or degenerate in a binary discourse of colonizer/ colonized led, especially at the turn of the century, to a widespread fear of ‘going native’ among the colonizers in many colonial societies.

In some respects, globalization, in the period of rapid decolonization after the Second World War, demonstrates the transmutation of imperialism into the supra-national operations of economics, communications and culture. This does not mean that globalization is a simple, unidirectional movement from the powerful to the weak, from the central to the peripheral, because globalism is transcultural in the same way that imperialism itself has been.

The term ‘fundamentalism’ strictly means an adherence to fundamental principles in any field of human endeavour or belief, but in practice it has usually been applied to ideological adherence, especially an adherence to religious dogma. The term was first widely employed in this sense in the 1920s in the United States, where it emerged during the religious backlash against Darwinism among Protestant sects in the Bible Belt of the mid-West and the South.

Although there are many legendary accounts of early voyages, and considerable historical evidence of extensive, even intercontinental, travel by peoples such as the Vikings in the Dark and Middle Ages, European travel beyond the traditional fringes of the Mediterranean appears to have taken a giant leap forward in the early Renaissance.

The word ‘exotic’ was first used in 1599 to mean ‘alien, introduced from abroad, not indigenous’.