What is colonialism?  Postcolonialism? 

(資料庫文章- 概念 Slavery and Diaspora) 

• colonialism --military, economic, cultural oppression/domination of one country over another.
  • e.g. European invasion of Africa, Asia and the Americas since the 16 century onwards.
  • e.g. pre-capitalist colonialism: Before it, the Crusades in the 2nd century; Genghis Khan''s invasion of Middle East as well as China in the 13th century.
  causes of "modern" colonialism --modernization, nationalization, capitalism
  major differences: "Modern colonialism did more than extract tribute, goods and wealth from the countries that it conquered -- it restructured the economies of the latter, drawing them into a complex relationship with their own, so that there was a flow of human and natural resources between colonized and colonial countries.
   
• cultural imperialism--more implicit
  • e.g. English Studies in India --American Studies and American culture in Taiwan
• postcolonialism (See 相關圖片 Map 1 and 2):  the social, political, economic, and cultural practices which arise
          in response and resistance to colonialism.
  • re-define the term "postcolonial" --
    • a misnomer because decolonization is impossible;
    • a monster (like the term Third World) because it covers too many areas with all sorts of differences;
    • should be distinguished from the "post" in postmodernism.            

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internal colonialism

"cosmopolitan"  (From Social Text 31/32 ) 
--The term has come forward, . . . as a means of revising our map of habitation, designating a new mode of life ("dwelling-in-travel") that is increasingly common in our time. . . . Bhabha, for instance, focuses on "the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation" and "the anguish of cultural displacement and diasporic movement" that has itself become home, "a postcolonial place." [The third space]   The accommodative nature of the novel," he notes, has always brought forth the image of the house. What kind of narrative is it, then, he wonders, that can accommodate the postcolonial, and, more generally, "transnational" experience of the "unhomely"?  Through a reading of novels by Naipaul, Gordimer and Morrison, Bhabha invites us to imagine "world literature" as "the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projection of ''otherness''." 

--a concern with specifying the different experiences of mobile abiding characteristic of different communities. [e.g. Chinese, Caribbean and African diasporas] 

--a mode of thought skeptical of the claims of the "local" and the "particular." (Robbins) 

--a mode of thought that celebrates rootlessness as an epistemologically and politically enabling position (Brennan)

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The semantic basis of the term ''post-colonial'' might seem to suggest a concern only with the national culture after the departure of the imperial power. It has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence. . . 

We use the term ''post-colonial'', however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. 

What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power. (Ashcroft 1-2)

Ashcroft, Bill,Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.  

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