Postcolonial and Race Studies: Key Concepts and Theories

Chapter 10: Postcolonial and Race Studies

• Postcolonialism emerged as a driving force in literary studies, helping to reshape scholarship and teaching across the humanities and social sciences.
• Postcolonial Studies considers writing from colonizing peoples, colonized peoples, and, increasingly, formerly colonized peoples.
• Scholars described colonizing nations as “metropolitan” and sometimes divided the colonies into two different kinds: settler and occupation colonies.

Occupation Colonies

• Occupation Colonies: In colonies such as India, a small proportion of the population leaves their homes to exploit the colony and then returns home. Other colonizers then replace them.

Settler Colonies

• Settler Colonies: In colonies such as Australia, colonizers move permanently, and their descendants often grow far more numerous than the people they colonize.

Negritude

• Negritude was a literary and political movement put together by a group of French-speaking Black poets.
• Led by Senegalese Leopold Senghor.
• Aimed to break down established boundaries and stereotypes of Black people that had been cultivated through several centuries of colonial rule.
• They believed that Black people share a collective personality that differs radically from European colonizers.

Edward Said’s Orientalism

• Said argues that the West has constructed a colonial discourse that produces the ideas about the Orient—the East—that the discourse purports to describe.
• Said calls that colonial discourse Orientalism.
• Orientalism examines the historical, cultural, and political views of the East that are held by the West and examines how they developed and where they came from.
• It traces the various views and perceptions back to the colonial period of British and European domination in the Middle East.
• It consisted of translating works from the Oriental languages into European languages.
• The Orient existed to be studied, and that studying was done by Westerners who believed themselves to be superior to the "others," which is how they described the East.
• They were basically the opposite of the East and considered to be active while the Orient was considered to be passive. The Orient existed to be ruled and dominated.
• The misrepresentations of the Orient and the various aspects of the Orient led to confusion and misinterpretation by the scholars and politicians.

Bhabha’s Concept of Hybridity

Race Studies

• The study of race and ethnicity (Race/ethnic studies).
• Critical race studies/theory is a movement comprised of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.
• Racialization suggests something that is done to people, while the term "race" can suggest, by contrast, something that people simply are.

1. It indicates that we too often see racialized people through the lens of preconceptions and cultural patterns about race, as if race were a stable fact and not a continually shifting and provisional construction.