Recent Tweets @rumagin
likes
Posts tagged "postcolonialism"

Thus in an initial phase the occupant establishes his domination, massively affirms his superiority. The social group, militarily and economically subjugated, is dehumanized in accordance with a poly dimensional method.

Exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations, rational oppression take turns at different levels in order literally to make of the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation.

This object man, without means of existing, without a raison d’etre, is broken in the very depth of his substance. The desire to live, to continue, becomes more and move indecisive, more and more phantom-like. It is at this stage that the well-known guilt complex appears. In his first novels, Wright gives a very detailed description of it.

Progressively, however, the evolution of techniques of production, the industrialization, limited though it is, of the subjugated countries, the increasingly necessary existence of collaborators, impose a new attitude upon the occupant. The complexity of the means of production, the evolution of economic relations inevitably involving the evolution of ideologies, unbalance the system. Vulgar racism in its biological form corresponds to the period of crude exploitation of man’s arms and legs. The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism.

Frantz Fanon

The Caribbean was the cradle of New World globalization. With the exception of the indigenous population, our people all came from somewhere else, into the belly of the Americas.

Characterised by waves of migrant experience, the Caribbean became a place of confluence, transience and hybridity which for years romanticized the struggle to be whole, to become one Caribbean people. In spite of this ideal, we remain as fragmented as ever, locked into nationalist crevices, linguistic divides and exclusivist cultural legitimacy.

The repeated production of idyllic images of an eternal playground for tourists on the one hand, and notions of the region as fragmented, failed and chaotic on the other; mask a complex history, leaving Caribbeans ambivalent about a sense of self.

We must answer the question, both creatively and critically, what is the Caribbean? What image of ourselves do we wear and to what extent do these images represent who we actually are? What is the truth of our own lived realities and how do we speak to each other of this reality?

My work exposes tensions within the larger context of a post-colonial history and the more recent experiences of post-independence. More personal explorations of home/land, longing and belonging, run through the work, interweaving poetic sequences with more direct references to our lived realities.

Annalee Davis                                                                                                          

January 2009,

St. George, Barbados

It has been my stance for some time now that the histories of colonialism, slavery, indentured labor, gender, oppression, and class stratification speak not only of the specific classes or peoples or regions to which they are most obviously tied, but more generally of the social differentiations that constitute modernity — of the everyday of modernity. Colonial or postcolonial or minority discourses, describe them as you like, help us to think through the ways in which hierarchies have been articulated and negotiated within modernity. I have argued against the citation of colonial-discourse analysis as a form of “post-Modernism”; I am more interested in rethinking the genealogies of modernity “against the grain.” As I asked in The Location of Culture, What was modernity for those who were part of its instrumentality or governmentality but, for reasons of race or gender or economic status, were excluded from its norms of rationality, or its prescriptions of progress? What contending and competing discourses of emancipation or equality, what forms of identity and agency, emerge from the “discontents” of modernity?

Homi Bhabha, 1995.

Less than one and double.
Less than one and double.

(via syeda)

(via syeda-deactivated20130423)