HIST2312 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Richard Attenborough, Great Divergence, Civilizing Mission
Week 11 Lecture – Post-Colonial
Historical context – decolonization (1945-s – post-oloialis sie s
Key ideas and thinkers
Criticisms of postcolonialism
Decolonization:
• Formally colonised countries gained independence
• Peoples thikig as still oloised
• Needed a decolonization of the mind to create freedom
• Critique of the forms of knowledge that gave power of the colonised peoples
Historians:
• Fanon – Wretched of the Earth (1961), strong psychological element, Marxism and
psychoanalytical theory influence, belief in own colonisation because of what is told,
ashamed of own blackness and take on the white culture
• Bob Marley – pop culture, Redemption Song (1979), in the middle ground, freeing of mental
slavery , Buffalo Soldier, themes of post-colonial thinking in decolonized countries
• Richard Attenborough – Gandhi (1983), thinking freed a nation from the colonizers, gaining
sympathy
• Edward Said – Orietalis , oe of the aties ho is esterised, fous on the
middle east, literary and cultural critic, influence on how the west presents the orient, orient
having two meaning (value neutral), particular way of writing about the non-western world
(passive, weak, feminine, romantic), rise of the concept of the other the riter ad hat is
eig ritte aout, ho theyre represeted or isrepreseted, iilisig issio ad
hite-as urde, sholarship ad ritig ere ot eutral atiities, disourse has
political effect
• The Subaltern Studies Group – thinking into historical writing, term used in the military
(subordinate or marginalised), translated in 1971 and become popular, concept of
hegemony (ruling class has the ruling ideas), control of ideas and thinking, institutions create
power-structure, beginning of history from below, led by Indian historian, started out as
empirical and becomes theoretical looking at the concept of gender
• Dipesh Chakrabarty – Provincializing Europe (2000), reproducing western view of the world,
conceptual framework, subtle form of colonisation through controlling ideas
• Niall Ferguson – Empire (2002), debate of situations getting out of control, placed in context
/, ais to rig order, epire strikes ak, lose to the oseratie party, foused on
writing popular history
• Pankaj Mishra – From the Ruins of Empire (2012), Asian intellectuals and how they
responded to empiricism
Criticism:
• Sometimes too theoretical
• Orietalis as a geeralisatio
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