Definition
Post-colonial theory — as epistemology, ethics, and politics — addresses the matters of post-colonial identity (cultural, national, ethnic), gender, race, and racism, and their interactions in the development of a post-colonial society, and of a post-colonial national identity; of how a colonised people’s (cultural) knowledge was used against them, in service of the coloniser’s interests; and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific socio-economic relations, between the powerful and the powerless. Identity politics comprise the perspectives of the colonial subjects, his and her creative resistance to the coloniser’s culture; and how that resistance psychologically complicated the imperial-colony project for the European man and woman. Hence, among the cultural media to aid colonisation was the anti-conquest narrative genre, which produced colonial literature that ideologically legitimated the imperial domination of a people.
Read more about this topic: Postcolonialism
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
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—The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, the first sentence of the article on “life” (based on wording in the First Edition, 1935)
“No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—”devoted and obedient.” This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.”
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