This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more

Politics Notes Theories of International Relations Notes

Postcolonialism Notes

Updated Postcolonialism Notes

Theories of International Relations Notes

Theories of International Relations

Approximately 27 pages

Realism; egoism; human nature; international anarchy; self-help; classical realism vs. neorealism; E. H. Carr; Hans Morgenthau; Kenneth Waltz Alexander Wendt; cultures of anarchy; intersubjectivity; Alter & Ego Geopolitics; End of History; Clash of Civilizations; Clash of Ignorance; Edward Said; critical geopolitics; Orientalism; cartography; popular culture; imagined communities; globalization Postcolonialism; Orientalism; Edward Said; Frantz Fannon; Homi Bhabha; strategic essentialism; Gayatri ...

Available here

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Theories of International Relations Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

POSTCOLONIALISM

QUESTIONS

  1. To what extent do colonial ideas and practices persist in contemporary IR? [2016]

Assess the claim made by postcolonial scholars that IR theory is ‘Western-centric’.

  1. To what extent does postcolonialism offer a reasonable critique of traditional statist approaches in IR? [2017]

CONTEXT: WHAT IS ‘COLONIALISM’?

  • ‘A settlement in a new country... a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to, or connected with, their parent state’ [Oxford English Dictionary]

  • Avoids any reference to people apart from the colonizers, thereby evacuating ‘colonialism’ of its confrontational/political implications.

  • No indication that this ‘new locality’ is already inhabited, nor that the process of ‘forming a community’ requires the un-forming or re-forming of indigenous structures via coercive means, e.g. genocide, plunder, enslavement, warfare, mass migration, etc.

  • Improved definition: ‘The combination of economic, social, political, and cultural policies by which an external power dominates and exploits the people, ideas and resources of an area’ [Krishna].

  • The official worldwide demise of slavery and ‘triangular trade’ was signaled rhetorically by abolition and national development*. Yet, the reality behind this rhetoric suggests that today’s world is not post-colonial in any meaningful sense; e.g. humanitarian intervention*, systemic poverty and disease, border disputes, supply chain exploitation*, the Washington Consensus*, etc.

POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

  • Removing the hyphen suggests a refusal to treat ‘postcolonial’ as synonymous with ‘European decolonization’. Postcolonial scholars are interested in how the legacy and transformative experience of colonialism continues to inform/manifest in modern world politics, and in reparative justice; serving as ‘a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’ world order and the multinational division of labor’ [Bhabha].

  • A normative commitment to identifying and interrogating Western-centric metanarratives in IR theory which ‘seek to parochially celebrate and defend/promote the West as the proactive subject of, and highest or ideal normative referent in, world politics’ [Hobson]

  • Comprised of three major themes:

  1. Temporality

  2. Production (i.e. productive agency and resistance)

  1. Economic/monetary hegemony*

  2. Subjectivity and knowledge production

  1. Place

  1. Geographical and demographical alternation; the Scramble for Africa imposed new territorial borders with little regard for existing cleavages nor distinctive forms of law/governance. This creates serious ethnic tensions that still reverberate today, e.g. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kashmir conflict (between India and Pakistan)

  2. Attention to the dislocation of colonized populations (postcolonial diasporas), transforming cultural configurations of ‘home’.

  3. The spatial metaphors of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’; ‘Global North’ and Global South’; ‘First World’ and ‘Third World*’. (see: GEOPOLITICS – cartographic sleight of hand)

KEY THINKERS & IDEAS

ORIENTALISM

Edward Said*

 In Orientalism (1978), Said discusses how Western hegemony is reproduced through elaborate stereotypical fictions and ‘imagined geographies’ that patronize/homogenize/feminize the ‘Orient’ by transposing undesirable traits (e.g. barbaric, mystical, stagnant, sensual) abroad. This, in turn, legitimates colonial intervention, violence and domestication. The binary opposition* between Occident and Orient, ‘civilized Self’ and ‘uncivilized Other’, is crucial to Western subjectivity and discourses of (illusory) danger.

EPIDERMALIZATION

Frantz Fanon

  • In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon provides a psychological analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization – impositions of language, culture, religion, education systems, etc. – upon colonized populations.

  • ‘The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with neurotic orientation’. [Fanon]

  • ‘The black man wants to be white, the white man slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are confronting a great deal of anger. This resentment takes us to a particular place: a zone of non-being... where black is not a man, and mankind is digging into his own flesh to find meaning’. [Fanon]

  • Fanon’s anger is directed not towards ‘blackness’ per se, but the proposition that one must be black (signifying ugliness, sin, naivety) in relation to whiteness (signifying beauty, virtue, intellect). It is the internalization – or ‘epidermalization’ – of this servile mentality that concerns him. Upon entering this colonial dynamic, the black man undergoes an experience of sensitization whereby his ego collapses, and self-motivation ceases. His entire purpose is hinged on emulating whiteness.

  • Colonialism is ‘a systematic negation of the other person’ in which ‘all attributes of humanity’ are denied.

  • Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo (see: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY)– ‘It is the silent scream of those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the hinterlands of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is the bitterness of those protesting against Empire, the superiority complex of neoconservative ideology, and the banality of the ‘War on Terror’. It is the anger of cultures, knowledge systems and modalities of being that are ridiculed, demonized, declared inferior or eliminated.’ [Sardar]

  • Fanon proffers a specific definition of dignity, located not in seeking parity with the gracious white man, but in self-reflection. It is about rising above imposed self-loathing, wholly appreciating oneself and one’s unique way of being, doing and knowing such than an international consciousness can emerge.

  • Decolonial resistance is thus described as a mentally cathartic practice that purges the native psyche of colonial servility and restores self-respect to colonized subjects.
...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Theories of International Relations Notes.

More Theories Of International Relations Samples