1. POSTCOLONIALISM

2.  Post-colonialism is an intellectual direction that exists since around the middle of the 20 th century.  It developed from and mainly refers to the time after colonialism.  The post-colonial direction was created as colonial countries became independent.  Nowadays, aspects of post-colonialism can be found not only in sciences concerning history, literature and politics, but also in approach to culture and identity of both the countries that were colonised and the former colonial powers.  However, post-colonialism can take the colonial time as well as the time after colonialism into consideration.

3.  The term “decolonisation” seems to be of particular importance while talking about post-colonialism.  In this case it means an intellectual process that persistently transfers the independence of former-colonial countries into people’s minds.  The basic idea of this process is the deconstruction of old-fashioned perceptions and attitudes of power and oppression that were adopted during the time of colonialism.

4.  post-colonialism has increasingly become an object of scientific examination since 1950 when Western intellectuals began to get interested in the “Third World countries”.  A major aspect of post-colonialism is the rather violent-like, unbuffered contact or clash of cultures as an inevitable result of former colonial times; the relationship of the colonial power to the (formerly) colonised country, its population and culture and vice versa seems extremely ambiguous and contradictory.  This contradiction of two clashing cultures and the wide scale of problems resulting from it must be regarded as a major theme in post-colonialism: For centuries the colonial suppressor often had been forcing his civilised values on the natives.

5.  But when the native population finally gained independence, the colonial relicts were still omnipresent, deeply integrated in the natives’ minds and were supposed to be removed.  So decolonisation is a process of change, destruction and, in the first place, an attempt to regain and lose power.  While natives had to learn how to put independence into practice, colonial powers had to accept the loss of power over foreign countries.  However, both sides have to deal with their past as suppressor and suppressed.

6.  This complicated relationship mainly developed from the Eurocentric perspective from which the former colonial powers saw themselves: Their colonial policy was often criticised as arrogant, ignorant, brutal and simply naïve.  Their final colonial failure and the total independence of the once suppressed made the process of decolonisation rather tense and emotional.

7.  Post-colonialism also deals with conflicts of identity and cultural belonging.  Colonial powers came to foreign states and destroyed main parts of native tradition and culture; furthermore, they continuously replaced them with their own ones.  This often lead to conflicts when countries became independent and suddenly faced the challenge of developing a new nationwide identity and self-confidence.  As generations had lived under the power of colonial rulers, they had more or less adopted their Western tradition and culture.

8.  The challenge for these countries was to find an individual way of proceeding to call their own.  They could not get rid of the Western way of life from one day to the other; they could not manage to create a completely new one either.  On the other hand, former colonial powers had to change their self-assessment.  This paradox identification process seems to be what decolonisation is all about, while post- colonialism is the intellectual direction that deals with it and maintains a steady analysis from both points of view.

9.  So how is this difficult process of decolonisation being done? By the power of language, even more than by the use of military violence.  Language is the intellectual means by which post-colonial communication and reflection takes place.  This is particularly important as most colonial powers tried to integrate their language, the major aspect of their civilised culture, in foreign societies.

10.  A lot of Indian books that can be attached to the era of post-colonialism, for instance, are written in English. The cross-border exchange of thoughts from both parties of the post-colonial conflict is supported by the use of a shared language.  one might say that post-colonialism is a vivid discussion about what happened with the colonial thinking at the end of the colonial era.  What legacy arouse from this era? What social, cultural and economical consequences could be seen and are still visible today? In these contexts, one examines alternating experiences of suppression, resistance, gender, migration and so forth.

11.  While doing so, both the colonising and colonised side are taken into consideration and related to each other.  The main target of post-colonialism remains the same: To review and to deconstruct one- sided, worn-out attitudes in a lively discussion of colonisation.

12.  The field of postcolonial studies was influenced by Edward Said's path-breaking book Orientalism.  In Orientalism Said applied Michel Foucault's technique of discourse analysis to the production of knowledge about the Middle East.  The term orientalism described a structured set of concepts, assumptions, and discursive practices that were used to produce, interpret, and evaluate knowledge about non-European peoples.  Said's analysis made it possible for scholars to deconstruct literary and historical texts in order to understand how they reflected and reinforced the imperialist project.  Unlike previous studies that focused on the economic or political logics of colonialism, Said drew attention to the relationship between knowledge and power.

13.  By foregrounding the cultural and epistemological work of imperialism, Said was able to undermine the ideological assumption of value-free knowledge and show that “knowing the Orient” was part of the project of dominating it.  Orientalism can be seen as an attempt to extend the geographical and historical terrain of the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology.

14.  Said uses the term Orientalism in several different ways. First, Orientalism is a specific field of academic study about the Middle East and Asia, albeit one that Said conceives quite expansively to encompass history, sociology, literature, anthropology and especially philology. He also identifies it as a practice that helps define Europe by creating a stable depiction of its other, its constitutive outside. Orientalism is a way of characterizing Europe by drawing a contrasting image or idea, based on a series of binary oppositions (rational/irrational, mind/body, order/chaos) that manage and displace European anxieties..

15.  Finally, Said emphasizes that it is also a mode of exercising authority by organizing and classifying knowledge about the Orient.  This discursive approach is distinct both from the materialist view that knowledge is simply a reflection of economic or political interests and from the idealist view that scholarship is disinterested and neutral.  Following Foucault, Said describes discourse as a form of knowledge that is not used instrumentally in service of power but rather is itself a form of power