Postcolonialism:
(De-)Colonization and Postcolonial Reading/Writing/Social Strategies
Provider:
Kate Liu / 劉紀雯
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 . . .
(Undergraduate
students, please read Reader's Guide pp. 190; 195-96)
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)
Examples:
1. Self-Images of Chinese-Americans; 2. Self-Images of North American Aboriginals
Negotiation and Cultural Difference
Four Critical Models in the Studies of Postcolonial
Literature
"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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Literary
Criticism Databank: Postcolonialism
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