Postcolonialism: 

(De-)Colonization and Postcolonial Reading/Writing/Social Strategies

The Empire writes back -- by creolizing the language, pluralizing the history, appropriating modes of power to establish the colonized's identity﹐or by physically going back to the metropolitan center  . . .

Postcolonial Reading/Writing/Social Strategies

Four Critical Models in the Studies of Postcolonial Literature

cultural syncretism

Postcolonial Reading/Writing/Social Strategies --resistance as subversion, or  opposition, or mimicry 

• decentring and pluralizing canon, official history and Western hegemony;
  -- Double Coding
• Post-Colonial Allegory/Re-Visioning of History: "revising, reappropriating, or reinterpreting history as a concept, and in doing so to articulate new "codes of recognition" within which those acts of resistance, those unrealized intentions and those re-orderings of consciousness that "history" has rendered silent or invisible can be recognized as shaping forces in a culture's tradition." (e.g. China Men, 《高砂百合》, See Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History)
• Mimicry --"Mimicry is, then, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power.  Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers. "(Bhabha "Of Mimicry and Man" p. 86)
  • Related strategies: a. mimicry in Irigaray; b. Camp in gay/lesbian cultures --An attitude at once casual and severe, affectionate and ironic, camp served to deflate the pretensions of main culture while elevating what the same culture devalued or repressed.
    A central issue: how its critical intentions can be recognized:  how to occupy a place in dominant culture, yet maintain a perspective on it that does not accept its eurocentric/pholocentric/homophobic and heterocentrist definitions, images, and terms of analysis.

    (Cf. 張小虹。〈越界認同：擬仿/學舌/假仙的論述危機〉 。
    《第五屆美國文學與思想研討會》。主編：紀元文。台北：中研院，Dec. 1997: 25-58。
    黃宗慧。〈雜的痛苦與/或雜的希望--從巴巴的揉雜理論談起〉。《英美文學評論》。第二期 (1995)。
     

   Examples: 1. Self-Images of Chinese-Americans; 2. Self-Images of North American Aboriginals
   Negotiation and Cultural Difference

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1. 'national' or regional models--which emphasize the distinctive features of the particular national or regional culture 
2. race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures 
3. comparative models of varying complexity which seek to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across two or more post-colonial literature 
4. more comprehensive comparative models which argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures. 

(syncreticism is the process by which previously distinct linguistic categories, and , by extension, cultural formations, merge into a single new form)". (Ashcroft 15  )   

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