Thinking Activity: colonialism, imperialism , post colonialism, Globalization and environmental studies

 Hello  readers! 

Welcome  on my blog.  This  blog related to  colonialism, imperialism, post colonialism  , Globalization  and environmental  studies. 

● Introduction: 

"Imperialism, colonialism and the differences between them are defined differently depending on their historical mutations. . . . These fluctuations also complicate the meanings of the term ‘postcolonial’, a term that is the subject of an ongoing debate”

Postcolonial study  deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies and those societies' responses. ... The term “postcolonial” per se was first used in literary studies by The Empire Writes Back in 1989 to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies. Colonialism generally refers to the period when European countries would formally take control of another country of black or brown people.imperialism refers to the political and monetary dominance, either formally or informally.Colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably. The word colonialism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), comes from the Roman ‘colonia’ which meant ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’, and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their citizenship. Accordingly, the OED describes it as: 

a settlement in a new country … a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlersand their descendants and successors, as long as the connection withthe parent state is kept up.Loomba argues that the postcolonial marker is often placed too liberally for many cultures or areas on the Earth. It’s often used as a be all end all term, but this shouldn’t be so because, first, the definition for “colonialism” itself has gone through multiple changes through the history of the word; second, the effects of colonization on a culture or society are not universal. The effects of colonization can range greatly and vary from area to area, culture to culture, origin of the colonizers, and many more factors.

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☆   Ania Loomba 's view on situating colonialism / post colonialism: Loomba is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a specialist in renaissance drama, and it is understandable that among the best pages of Colonialism/Postcolonialism are the ones on colonialism and literature. She thus discusses how literary texts have not only reflected colonial tendencies but have also contained elements subversive of such tendencies. It is fascinating to follow Loomba as she traces rape as a key trope in colonial writing and uncovers the devices through which literary texts were taught to prop up racist ideologies and literature itself advocated as a tool for colonisation as in Macualay's famous Minute on Indian Education. This last point, of course, was made by Gauri Viswanathan in Masks of Conquest (1990).

■ Definition of  colonialism: 

" a settlement  in a new country… a body of people  who settle in a new locality, forming  , community  subject  to or  connected  with  their  parent  state; the community  is formed,consisting  of the  original  settlement  and  their descendant  and successors, with the parent  state  is  kept up." 

There is no hint that the ‘new locality’ may not be so ‘new’ and that the process of ‘forming a community’ might be somewhat unfair. Colonialism was not an identical process in different parts of the world but everywhere it locked the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history. In The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s single major addition to the story he found in certain pamphlets about a shipwreck in the Bermudas was to make the island inhabited before Prospero’s arrival . That single addition turned the adventure story into an allegory of the colonial encounter. The process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellions. Such practices produced and were produced through a variety of writings-public and private records, letters, trade documents, government papers, fiction and scientific literature. These practices and writings are an important part of all that contemporary studies of colonialism and postcolonialism try to make sense.

The cultural and historical past of the natives in a “postcolonial” land are often forgotten when labeling something as such, and only through consideration of what a culture has held onto, evolved into, or separated from can an accurate judgment be made on what type of society it is. Essentially, “postcolonial” is too vague and “a word that  useful only if we use it with caution and qualifications” (Loomba 1109) rather than liberally applying it to any place that has seen a colonizing force. One of the main qualifications seems to be how transformed a culture is. As Loomba says in “Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,” not all cultures are affected by the colonizing force, while some will remain dependent on the country even after with drawing from the area.

The title of Ania Loomba's Colonialism/ Postcolonia-lism indicates the lien she will take in introducing us to postcolonial studies: she will not see them as binaries, locked in permanent opposition, but as categories whose boundaries must be broken down so that we can see how the one inheres within the other. In other words, Loomba approaches colonial cultural studies in the wake of deconstruction, and other contemporaneous movements such as feminism and Foucaldian discourse analysis. Her intention, then, is not to give us a superficial picture of a settled site, but a detailed analysis of a fast-evolving subject located at an intriguing intersection of theory.

Ania Loomba's book is also notable for the rigor, the conciseness, and the lucidity with which she traces the contexts of contemporary colonial discourse analysis. Starting with Maxim's intense critique of the collusion of capital and colonisation, and the way Marxist concepts such as deification found their way into the indictment of colonialism carried out by intellectuals such as Aime Cesair and Frantz Fanon, Loomba moves on to discuss the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" for the analyst of colonisation. She also notes the subterranean ways in which colonial domination was carried out through the unwitting participation of the colonised in the process of their enslavement. Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation has been crucial in this respect as is Foucault's archaeology which focuses attention on the discursive practices of colonial regimes.

Ania Loomba's book is also notable for the rigor, the conciseness, and the lucidity with which she traces the contexts of contemporary colonial discourse analysis. Starting with Maxim's intense critique of the collusion of capital and colonisation, and the way Marxist concepts such as deification found their way into the indictment of colonialism carried out by intellectuals such as Aime Cesair and Frantz Fanon, Loomba moves on to discuss the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" for the analyst of colonisation. She also notes the subterranean ways in which colonial domination was carried out through the unwitting participation of the colonised in the process of their enslavement. Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation has been crucial in this respect as is Foucault's archaeology which focuses attention on the discursive practices of colonial regimes.

 Certainly, to this reviewer reading a postcolonialist of the deconstructionist sort such as Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak is often like being witness to a display of "radicalchic." One corrective to this, Loomba implies, is to relate the text to its economic and historical contexts and to always take stock of the "intricate, subtle, and even contradictory, connections between colonial representations, institutions, and policies."

Chapter 2 of Colonialism/Postco-lonialism discusses issues such as the construction of racial and cultural difference, the roles of gender and sexuality in colonial discourse, and concepts such as hybridity. Following Said, Loomba details the stereotyping inherent in colonialist discourse. For example, she comments on the depiction of the colonised either as barbaric and degenerate on the one hand and childlike and primitive on the other. Either ways, such characterisations were often made to further imperialist projects: the ignoble savage deserved to be conquered and the noble one subjected to a "civilising" scheme! Indeed, Loomba stresses that colonisations was to a great extent an "enlightenment" project, as the discourses of the human sciences such as ethnography were deployed to subjugate other races directly or indirectly. In the process, colonial categories were constructed, such as the one of martial races . Similarly, Loomba explains how class division were constituted to serve imperialist projects. For instance, a certain group within colonial society was elevated on the basis of, let us say, their lighter skins, and this group was then privileged as agents of imperial rule and were allowed to lord it over another group.

Loomba cautions against over-theorisation and urges for a practice which combines "socio-political critique and activism with an analysis of colonial and anti-colonial subjectivities."

British government on india it's called colonialism.The colonizer  to remain it's  defency complex.  The defencey  complex  for the colonized  is a fantasy. It's  fantasy  the colonized  does nit need the colonizes the member  . For the  colonized  is the material  idea. As needes   to  trade he needs to make money  number  of things  out of .

☆   Concluding  part : 

This concluding chapter offers an inevitably partial examination of challenges, indicating some new directions postcolonial studies has either taken, or must take. It highlights four areas: the environment; the history and present of indigenous peoples and societies; premodern histories and cultures; and the ongoing colonisation of territories, labour and peoples by global capitalism. All of these demand fresh thinking about colonial history, the shape of freedom, racial hierarchies, gender dynamics, and community. It suggests that such thinking is taking place, in the academy and beyond. Many commentators have suggested that postcolonial studies should not be thought of as a discrete field so much as an approach that has been honed by work on colonial dynamics and legacies in several disciplines; nevertheless, it is also a formation within the academy, shaped largely within English departments. The chapter also discusses some recent scholarship and political movements that show why that the colonial past and the globalized present are deeply interconnected.

Thank you...