Postcolonial Theory
•Said, excerpt from Orientalism (NATC, 1986-2012)
•Spivak, excerpt from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (NATC, 2193-2208)
•Deleuze and Guattari, excerpt from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (NATC, 1598-1601)
Benedict Anderson writes in a section of Imagined Communities about Latin. How it was once used, became something for the elite, and is now a language to be read, not spoken, and is reserved for the educationally privileged. He says that “for the older Latin was not arcane
because of its subject matter or style, but simply because it was written at all, I.e. because of its status as text” (1918). What is culture supposed to mean anymore anyways? If culture is meant to evolve, what good does it do to simply trickle out the elite from the mainstream? Anderson also notes Martin Luther saying “where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal
religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century. In this titanic ‘battle for men’s minds’, Protestantism was always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin” (1918).
There is a defensiveness that comes with any progress, this is proven true. In summarization, change is not always welcome. In fact change is typically met with resistance (I assume you know
what’s coming next). There is a specific implication that culture, in fact, is dead. All that is left is recycling of ideas and the idea of something ‘new’ is dead. Culture is recycled. There will be nothing new. Possibly one of the most accessible pieces of evidence for this is fashion. Fashion is never anything new, it is recycled and marketed as something new. Of course there is 80’s revival, 90’s grunge revival, etc. Most recently, there was a 90’s rave culture and bohemian 70’s revival. And of course, these initial fashion statements were based off of something else, and so on. Fashion is proof there is no new culture, only regurgitation of what once was new.
what’s coming next). There is a specific implication that culture, in fact, is dead. All that is left is recycling of ideas and the idea of something ‘new’ is dead. Culture is recycled. There will be nothing new. Possibly one of the most accessible pieces of evidence for this is fashion. Fashion is never anything new, it is recycled and marketed as something new. Of course there is 80’s revival, 90’s grunge revival, etc. Most recently, there was a 90’s rave culture and bohemian 70’s revival. And of course, these initial fashion statements were based off of something else, and so on. Fashion is proof there is no new culture, only regurgitation of what once was new.
An afterthought that should be noted:
"A single, definitive definition of postcolonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticized it as a concept embedded in identity politics. Postcolonial Theory - as epistemology, ethics, and politics - addresses matters of identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity, of how a colonized people's knowledge was used against them in service of the colonizer's interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, circulated repetitively and finally legitimated in service to certain imperial interests. At the same time, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonist's creative resistance to the colonizer and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects, which utilized a range of strategies, including anti-conquest narratives, to legitimize their dominance."
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