The Praxis of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: An Outline

Much of the history of international relations is characterized by the violent attempts of one community to subjugate another. In 1955, Aimé Césaire wrote of the "great historical tragedy" that befell Africa in its encounter with European colonialism, an encounter that led Césaire to conclude that "Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in human history " (2000: 45). A range of important ethical issues emerges from a consideration of the past interaction between colonizing and colonized peoples, both in the African context and elsewhere in the world. This article first seeks to describe the key characteristics of colonialism as a system of domination and subjugation, before considering the legitimacy of contemporary judgments on the morality of historical colonialism. It then examines how the particular character of colonialism complicates arguments relating to the rectification of injustice. It concludes by asking what lessons those interested in ethics can learn from the diverse body of work produced by writers in the postcolonial tradition.

2019

The current paper is an attempt to review and present few main undercurrents and arguments of ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism,’ and try to articulate how these concepts help us to understand wider aspects of both these movements, and the resultant influence on colonizer and colonized peoples, cultures as well as literatures. The paper, however, will mainly rely on understanding the basic concepts of both these movements and locate them in historical perspectives to situate the emergence as well as decadence of colonialism and the gradual growth of postcolonial culture and literature across the countries that were once part of the vicious colonization project of the Europe.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1995

To the Editor: No alleged effect of colonization evokes greater moral indignation or fretful nostalgia than fragmentation. Colonialism breaks things. It shatters an imagined wholeness. Colonialism's will to power creates binaries where a unified field and healthy singularity of cultural purpose once existed. The self of the colonizer explodes a native cultural solidarity, producing the spiritual confusion, psychic wounding, and economic exploitation of a new and dominated other. Coloniza tion imposes evil, fear, and ignorance on the innocent native landscape. What might be termed neo-colonial studies (Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, for example) teaches that colonial rupture is the social, psychological, cultural, and economic equivalent of a paradigm shift, inaugurating a new regime of knowledge. Words and relations on either side of the colonial rupture are incommensurate. Neo-colonial studies, thus, dictates that the project of decolonization is erro neously, or at least naively, conceived if its goal is (as Amilcar Cabral pro poses) to return to the source or to recuperate native wholeness. Cabral writes, "A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if . . . they return to the upward paths of their own culture" (Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral [New York Monthly Review, 1973] 43). If the model of a paradigm shift is accepted, such a happy return is at best problematic. Emancipation from colonial domination never entails, or even suggests, fulfillment of the beautiful poetic dream implied by Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. The return to one's "native" land is a paradig matic impossibility. What then is to be made of the outbreak of supposed freedom-the decolo nizing moment-which carries a force similar in effect to the rupture of colo nization? Answers are legion, and they are complex. The answer that seems most theoretically interesting (and, I believe, most accurate) is that when the obvious chains and shackles are removed, fragmentation reveals its essential uselessness as an explanatory model. The great gift of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is his creative limning of this revelation. Achebe persuasively and subtly suggests that native, pastoral, folk, innocent, utopian, productive wholeness is never the ur-condition of anything that can reasonably be called culture. The things that fall apart in Achebe's fictions are already well on their way to toppling when the colonizers

Without colonialism there would be no post-colonialism. Colonialism is about the dominance of a strong nation over another weaker one. Colonialism happens when a strong nation sees that its material interest and affluence require that it expand outside its borders. Colonialism is the acquisition of the colonialist, by brute force, of extra markets, extra resources of raw material and manpower from the colonies. The colonialist, while committing these atrocities against the natives and territories of the colonies, convinces himself that he stands on high moral grounds. His basic assumptions in defense of his actions are: The colonized are savages in need of education and rehabilitation The culture of the colonized is not up to the standard of the colonizer, and it's the moral duty of the colonizer to do something about polishing it. The colonized nation is unable to manage and run itself properly, and thus it needs the wisdom and expertise of the colonizer. The colonized nation embraces a set of religious beliefs incongruent and incompatible with those of the colonizer, and consequently, it is God's given duty of the colonizer to bring those stray people to the right path. The colonized people pose dangerous threat to themselves and to the civilized world if left alone; and thus it is in the interest of the civilized world to bring those people under control. As a result of this the white Europeans ventured adventurously into the so called underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia and dominated a lot of geographical spaces

Colonialism has a great impact on the colonized culture, culture that is subjugated by the colonizers. Colonialism is the establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition, and expansion of colony in one territory by a political power from another territory. Ronald J. Harvath in his essay A definition of colonialism says, “Colonialism is a form of domination-the control by individuals or groups over the territory and/or behavior of other individuals or groups. (3)” Invasion towards culture by the colonizer was always prominent as it domination of this was a great tool for them to hegemonize the colonized. Even though the colonizers left, they burdened us with their culture’s impact on ours for which we have seen the birth of a mimic man, rise of language debate, identity crisis, etc. Post colonialism is an academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze, explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Through post colonial analysis the role of a mimic man to social change, language debate and identity crisis of the colonized can be re discovered.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.

Colonialism is ingrained in modern Western metaphysical project. The Western worldview which may be characterized as rationalist, masculine or androcentric, subject centred or egoistic, logical, dualist, outward looking or extrovert, aggressive scientific capitalist secularist humanistic and individualistic creates an environment, a worldview that is congenial to colonialist enterprise. It is logical corollary of certain of its philosophical assumptions. Perennialist traditionalist perspective provides a trenchant critique of colonialism and its background ideological framework of Western modernity. The traditional grounds for legitimating colonialist enterprise are forcefully critiqued. Everything for which the colonialist West stands for is rejected in favour of the marginalized voice of the traditional cultures and civilizations. Perennialists provide alternative cognitive and epistemic universe of their own to replace modernist colonialist epistemic and cognitive universe.

2002

Public Culture, 2002

Imperialism and colonialism insistently intrude upon political and cultural discussion despite the disappearance of imperialism from political language except as a term of critical approbation, and formal repudiation of colonialism as a legitimate or acceptable practice in world politics. Within the context of an international order based upon globally recognized norms of national sovereignty, the relationships these terms refer to seem much more problematic than they were in the heyday of a Euromodern order in the early twentieth century, when "empire" was born as a badge of honor, and colonial possessions were proudly displayed in world's fairs as signs of civilizational ascendancy. 1 As imperialism and colonialism were disavowed after 1945, the persistence of the inequalities they had shaped and the struggles of postcolonial states for development rendered them much more complicated as concepts than simple descriptions of domination and submission, Scholarship on imperialism and colonialism, especially the latter, has proliferated since the early 1950s, albeit with fluctuations in interest, as well as shifting pardigms. 2 The relationships suggested by those terms, and how we understand them, have been blurred further by economic and cultural globalization, which may account for the extensive interest in the subject the last two decades.