Key concepts in Post colonial studies

ABROGATION

Abrogation refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of ‘correct’ or

‘standard’ English used by certain classes or groups, and of the corresponding concepts of
inferior‘ dialects’ or ‘marginal variants’. The concept is usually employed in conjunction with
the term appropriation. Thus abrogation is an important political stance, whether articulated or
not, and even whether conscious or not, from which the actual appropriation of language can
take place. In arguing for the parity of all forms of English, abrogation offers a counter to the
theory that use of the colonialist’s language inescapably imprisons the colonized within the
colonizer’s conceptual paradigms –the view that‘ you can’t dismantle the master’s house with
the master’s tools’. Abrogation implies rather that the master’s house is always adaptable and
that the same tools offer a means of conceptual transformation and liberation.

ALTERITY

Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas, meaning ‘the state of being other or different;
diversity, otherness’. Its English derivatives are alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter ego.
The term was adopted by philosophers as an alternative to ‘otherness’ to register a change in the
Western perceptions of the relationship between consciousness and the world. Since Descartes,
individual consciousness had been taken as the privileged starting point for consciousness, and
‘the “other” appears in these [post-Enlightenment] philosophies as a reduced “other,” as an
epistemological question’ That is, in a concept of the human in which everything stems from the
notion that ‘I think, therefore I am’, the chief concern with the other is to be able to answer
questions such as ‘How can I know the other?’, ‘How can other minds be known?’ This is a key
feature of changes in the concept of subjectivity, because, whether seen in the context of
ideology, psychoanalysis or discourse, the ‘construction’ of the subject itself can be seen to be
inseparable from the construction of its others. Literary theorists commonly see the most
influential use of alterity in Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the way in which an author moves
away from identification with a character.

AMBIVALENCE
A term first developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one
thing and wanting its opposite. It also refers to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion
from an object, person or action (Young 1995: 161). Adapted into colonial discourse theory by
Homi Bhabha, it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the
relationship between colonizer and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent because the
colonized subject is never simply and completely opposed to the colonizer. Rather than assuming
that some colonized subjects are ‘complicit’ and some ‘resistant’. The problem for colonial
discourse is that it wants to produce compliant subjects who reproduce its assumptions, habits
and values – that is, ‘mimic’ the colonizer. But instead it produces ambivalent subjects whose
mimicry is never very far from mockery. Ambivalence describes this fluctuating relationship
between mimicry and mockery, an ambivalence that is fundamentally unsettling to colonial
dominance.

APARTHEID

An Afrikaans term meaning ‘separation’, used in South Africa for the policy initiated by the
Nationalist Government after 1948 and usually rendered into English in the innocuous sounding
phrase, ‘policy of separate development’. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and 1936 by the
Land Acts which restricted the amount of land available to black farmers to 13 per cent. But in
1948 the Apartheid laws were enacted, including the Population Registration Act, which
registered all people by racial group; the Mixed Amenities Act, which codified racial segregation
in public facilities; the Group Areas Act, which segregated suburbs; the Immorality Act, which
illegalized white–black marriages; and the establishment of the so-called Bantustans, or native
homelands, to which a large proportion of the black population was restricted. The policy of
segregation extended to every aspect of society, with separate sections in public transport, public
seats, beaches, and many other facilities. Further segregation was maintained by the use of Pass
Laws which required non-whites to carry a pass that identified them, and which, unless it was
stamped with a work permit, restricted their access to white areas. An extreme instance of this is
when the post-structuralist philosopher and cultural critic Jacques Derrida employed the term in
an influential essay, suggesting that it had acquired a resonance as a symbol that made it an
archetypal term of discrimination and prejudice for later twentieth-century global culture.

APPROPRIATION
A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of the
imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought and argument
such as rationalism, logic and analysis–that may be of use to them in articulating their own social
and cultural identities. This process is sometimes used to describe the strategy by which the
dominant imperial power incorporates as its own the territory or culture that it surveys and
invades. Appropriation may describe acts of usurpation in various cultural domains, but the most
potent are the domains of language and textuality. Chinua Achebe (quoting James Baldwin),
noted that the language so used can ‘bear the burden of another experience’, and this has become
one of the most famous declarations of the power of appropriation in post-colonial discourse. By
appropriating the imperial language, its discursive forms and its modes of representation, post-
colonial societies are able, as things stand, to intervene more readily in the dominant discourse,
to interpolate their own cultural realities, or use that dominant language to describe those
realities to a wide audience of readers.

COLONIALISM

The term colonialism is important in defining the specific form of cultural exploitation that
developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years. Colonialism is the policy of a
nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people or territories, generally with the
aim of economic dominance. The colonising country seeks to benefit from the colonised country
or land mass. In the process, colonisers impose their religion, economics, and medicinal practices
on the natives. Although many earlier civilizations had colonies, and although they perceived
their relations with them to be one of a central imperium in relation to a periphery of provincial,
marginal and barbarian cultures, a number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the
post-Renaissance practices of imperialism. Edward Said offers the following distinction:
‘imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan
centre ruling a distant territory; “colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of
imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory’.

COMPRADOR

A Portuguese word meaning ‘purchaser’, comprador was originally used to refer to a local
merchant acting as a middleman between foreign producers and a local market.Marxists have
used it to refer specifically to those local bourgeoisie who owe their privileged position to
foreign monopolies and hence maintain a vested interest in colonial occupation. In post-colonial
theory the term has evolved a broader use, to include the intelligentsia – academics, creative
writers and artists – whose independence may be compromised by a reliance on, and
identification with, colonial power.The assumption that a comprador class is necessarily and
identifiably distinct from the rest of the society is therefore somewhat questionable. The word
continues to be used to describe a relatively privileged, wealthy and educated élite whom a
maintain a more highly developed capacity to engage in the international communicative
practices introduced by colonial domination, and who may therefore be less inclined to struggle
for local cultural and political independence.

ORIENTALISM

Edward Said uses orientalism to mean the way that people in Western cultures imagine and
interpret the differences between themselves and people of Eastern cultures. Orientalism is a
style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between "the Orient"
and (most of the time) "the occident." The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a
relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Said discusses
Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient ‘dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it:
in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over
the Orient’. In this sense it is a classic example of Foucault’s definition of a discourse.
Significantly, the discourse of Orientalism persists into the present, particularly in the West’s
relationship with ‘Islam’. Orientalism models a wide range of institutional constructions of the
colonial other, one example being the study, discussion and general representation of Africa in
the West since the nineteenth century. The significance of Orientalism is that as a mode of
knowing the other it was a supreme example of the construction of the other, a form of authority.