POSTCOLONIALISM

Colonialism

Postcolonialism is a theoretical perspective concerned with the residual effects of global colonization and its aftermath. The most basic understanding of what it means for popular culture is that it intersects with race, but that the primary focus is a question of cultural superiority and inferiority, not racial.

At one point in relatively recent history, well over eighty percent of the inhabited surface of the world was either a colonizing power or was colonized. Colonization was and is a massive force in world affairs.

For example, the “Scramble for Africa” was from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, as European powers, which had only colonized the coasts of Africa in the preceding centuries as stops on the voyage to India and as slave-acquiring stations, competed with each other to control the land to Cairo from their respective coastal colonies (see this). The map changed over the centuries from the one on the left to the one on the right. This is why World War I was, in fact, a world war.

(http://www.mapandmaps.com/1700-5016/1700-5016.jpg) (http://historiesofcatastrophicdreaming.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/post-scramble-for-africa.jpg)

Yet, colonialism is something that Americans, as a whole, tend to think isn't relevant to their lives or culture. As we explain the concepts involved in this section of the course, the relevance of this perspective to our lives will also be demonstrated.

Imperialism has been a driving force in world history since as long as we have records. Civilizations have historically tended to expand. This usually entails the subjugation of that civilization's neighbors. The world "imperialism" obviously comes from the same root word as the word for "empire," but it doesn't always have to be so overt. Imperialism refers, in general, to one society's subjugation of another. This can be in many forms. The Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Chinese Dynasties, Alexander the Great, the Indian Mughals, the ancient Egyptians of Babylonians -- all of these empires expanded and conquered surrounding people. Sometimes the treatment of subjugated neighbors was relatively benevolent (although, don't let the history books' whitewashed version of the joys of being conquered by the Romans fool you), but it was often brutal with such things as murder, rape, slavery and certainly heavy taxes and much looting and pillaging involved.

Often an imperial power would set up a puppet government to rule over the newly annexed territory. Hitler propped up a regime when he invaded France, and the classic example is King Herod from the New Testament. He ruled the conquered Palestine region for the Roman Emperor.

With imperialism, the problem for the conquering power is that everyone knows you are the bad guys. Revolts are inevitable. This is why tax collectors are considered worse sinners than prostitutes in the much of the discourse of the New Testament -- they took money from the Jews to be sent to Rome. Of course, if the conquering power decimated the population with war and disease, as the Spanish did to the native peoples of South America, there isn't much hope for revolt for quite a few generations.

So another form of imperialism gradually developed, and it is almost as if the powers were using the lessons of ideology and hegemony to cement their power. Colonialism is the subjugation of one people by another, just as in imperialism, but it always involved some form of settlement. Occupied countries always have some kind of presence from the occupier -- usually troops and the like. But in colonies, waves of people from the colonizing country seem to move to the colony to set up house. Colonies become almost ideology factories as the colonizer doesn't just want the land and resources and gold, but the people themselves. An added benefit for the colonizer, as with the Israelis encouraged by their government to settle in occupied Palestine, it makes it that much harder for a revolt or the consensus of the international community to throw you out.

This colonialism is what characterizes the phase of colonialism most recent in historical memory, the global colonization efforts of the European powers throughout the sixteenth through twentieth centuries.

Religious missionaries come to proselytize. Schools are set up to teach the population Spanish or English or French. Perhaps the speaking of the native languages is forbidden. Irish history is awash with tales of schools where speaking Gaelic would get you beaten. Droves of poor Europeans come from their native land to the colonies to live, typically grabbing whatever land they see and claiming it for their own.

This particular form of rule seems to have been a result of the way Europeans spread out over the globe. This spread, although it was influenced by sheer plundering avarice in the case of the Spanish in the Americas, was usually connected with trade for spices and other "exotic" goods with the ancient civilizations of the East. Flat out conquering of the people in such "far off" regions was not really possible for anyone but Spain in the sixteenth century, so trade routes, through the Middle East and around Africa were developed. People moved to spots on the trade routes and soon colonies were established.

The colonies became a site of romance and adventure and opportunity for the newly arrived people. They became a refuge for the oppressed of England and elsewhere. They could escape the hard times in their native lands by helping to participate in the oppression of others. So colonists come to North America and proceed to wipe out the indigenous population. Manifest Destiny argued that everything to the Pacific Coast was theirs for the taking and they slowly progressed west. The wars with the Indians were wars of colonial subjugation.

What is strange about the colonial situation is that you get things like the American Revolution, where colonists break free from the colonizing nation to continue the imperial efforts on their own. And of course, when there are no longer enough native peoples to conscript into working your farms and plantations, importing enslaved workers from Africa becomes the modus operandi of choice.

Ideological cover or justification for these activities develop. In England there is the "white man's burden" and with France it is the "civilizing mission."

Colonialism is heavily related to racism, but there is some argument that racism develops out of colonialism, when people begin to try to justify why they are "over there." If the people in these colonies are savage and primitive and inferior and need you to go and teach them all the trappings of civilization, perhaps a revisionist history can be created, one whereby colonization is not the practice of European societies who'd run through most of their natural resources, but it was for the good of the poor dark people of the world who needed the light of European superiority to guide their way.

The Other

So colonization necessarily leads to a category called the "other." The other (sometimes the word is capitalized) is a marker of radical difference from the Europeans. Others are not fully human. They are exotic. They are a place where Europeans can write their own fears. Europeans, even the explorers who ventured off into the unknown" did not really try to learn about native cultures. Native peoples were the other, and they were defined and described merely as the opposite of the white European ideal. Europeans thought themselves to be honest, hardworking and intelligent. So the others were deceitful, lazy and stupid. For the Europeans, all of Africa was riddled with cannibals (the imagined extreme opposite of all civilization), when it fact it was not. The cannibal myth provided the perfect vision of the other, degraded, inhuman, evil. Of course, the cannibal because a creature of philosophical speculation as people did get stranded in lifeboats or on islands or in the Donner Pass as they participated in colonial expansion (see Barker, Hulme & Iverson, 1998). So cannibalism became a vision of the ultimate degradation that a white person could fall to. More often than not the savage lands were blamed, not the colonial avarice that started it all.

Just as in film nonwhites were so often portrayed by whites in makeup, Europeans seemed to be unable to see beyond their own projections of what "those people" had to be. Because if the others weren't like that, they'd have had to admit that what they were doing was wrong. But if those poor unfortunate others needed and even wanted someone to rule over them, so much the better.

Since the other is defined by an imagination of what it is not, there are few specific borders between types of others. People are reduced to racist essentialisms or culturally imperialistic judgments about “The Orient” or “The Dark Continent” or “The East.” You can see the legacy of this kind of imagined and syncretistic other in a series of popular cultural references over time.

In my life, this kind of imaginary is a deep part of my childhood, so much so that my mom gave me a monkey wearing a fez and a vest serving with a banana leaf to put business cards on for my office when I got this job. Of course images of animals wearing clothes is a classic racist image, from Heart of Darkness to the colonial fable of Babar the elephant, who becomes a superior being when he visits England and can learn to wear clothes and thus rules the animals, but of course, he is still not as a good as a real person.

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OjE4QgI13Js/SPe7bcI_4OI/AAAAAAAABJc/tfSrxvsljjs/s400/Babar+3.jpg)

This desk ornament from my mom, though, illustrates this syncretistic conception of the other because the fez is from Morocco while service on a banana leaf is from India. The sameness of the other, the lack of individual identities of either individuals (“I can’t tell them apart!”) or cultures is a key part of this dynamic. Thus, apparently we don’t know or don’t care that Africa is not a country in 1977’s The Rescuers:

(http://25.media.tumblr.com/54c3ee421fc54f965247f34da81f6d0f/tumblr_mfrpzzTvav1qe9yi8o1_500.png)

Another example is a place called Jungle Island at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, where I grew up:

Instead of going into the expensive, roller-coaster strewn main park, for a few quarters, my Nana would take me to this place. As you can see on the map to the right, this archetypal jungle is inhabited by various others from 3 different continents, as well as complete fictions like the 3 Little Pigs. We’ve got Native Americans, Witch Doctors and Cannibals:

This kind of thinking allows Americans to grow up thinking there have been cannibals in Africa. There really never were. Cannibalism is practiced in places like New Guinea and Tahiti. And it is never done because someone is hungry and white folks happen to walk by. It is a specific ritual tradition practiced in specific circumstances. By as recently as 1985’s King Solomon’s Mines, we see it played, again, for an African joke:

Think also of the indiscriminate mixing of cultures in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s famous dinner scene. Bugs, a South American food, are served with snakes and monkey’s brains, which are more clearly Chinese, and eyeball soup, which is an African folk tale. But it is all combined to represent the evil of the Indian Pankot Palace:

So this dark other, which exists in the European imaginary of a Here There Be Monsters fiction on old maps of Africa, is part of the hegemonic excuse matrix for the colonial project. And it becomes an embodiment of evil or inferiority or childishness. But it also sometimes becomes a sort of canvas on which Americans and Europeans were able to define themselves. The Robinson Crusoe mythology, continued in TV shows like Survivor, and extended through a century of Westerns, shows us the hero defining himself in his encounter with the darkness of the other, not just in the people he meets, but in the inherent darkness that lurks in these places, a darkness which might at any time put a deeper claim on his soul, as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, again, when Indy drinks the blood and falls into the spell of the black sleep of Kali (this theme reemerges in the Viietnam-set Heart of Darkness film Apocalypse Now). Our hero must avoid this, but he must also chart his own way, and this kind of colonial tale, kept alive in the adventure genre of Indiana Jones and pirate movies, as well as Westerns, reminds us that the Western civilization that defends itself in these tales is not always to be desired. As capitalism grows in its ideological reach, the cult of masculine individualism grows as well. A man cannot simply represent society. He must be on his own. So this business of the other is complex.

It is important that the place be generally empty of civilization so that the Western hero can find himself. Thus, even though some estimates show that North American has more wilderness space than Africa, what we see when a movie or show goes to Africa is the Serengeti with giraffes striding along. This is one of the things wrong with The Lion King. The first Disney movie set in Africa has no people. Tarzan does not do much better.

There are two specific forms of othering that are a part of this legacy, as well.

Primitivism

The other, cannibal (destroy them!) or just childish (civilize them!), is almost always seen as primitive. Primitivism, which sees these other cultures and peoples as being lower on an evolutionary scale, inferior racially and culturally, is the most common ideology that is associated with colonial ideas (see Torgovnick, 1990). If you hold to these notions you can, as many Southerners did in the 1850s, argue that slavery was beneficial to Africans because they were too primitive to really aspire to anything more and by bringing Christianity to them, you were, on balance, doing them a favor. This is an immensely convenient belief for an oppressor.

In addition to the expected forms of racism that develop from this, there are a set of peculiar things which develop.

One of these is the fiction of the lost white tribe. The ruins of ancient civilizations in Ethiopia and what was then called Rhodesia were discovered by Westerners in the 1800s. The theory was that there must have been lost white tribes in Africa that built these things, because certainly the Africans would have been unable to do so given what notions of primitivism and racism suggested. Most Tarzan stories have this long lost white tribe as part of the plot. The most common attribution is that these were ruins from the rule of King Solomon of the Bible, who had gained his vast wealth through kingdoms in Africa. This is the idea behind the bestselling book of 1897, King Solomon’s Mines. Its phenomenal success inaugurated the adventure genre. We follow adventurer Allan Quatermain, who can of course speak stacks of native languages (just like Indiana Jones, as they are all so primitive and easy, “mumbo jumbo”), as he travels/adventures to find treasure.

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_gkgLc1NErGE/Sa8_f17AWRI/AAAAAAAAB40/VSqX1xnVwto/s400/kingsolomonsmines2.png)

His travels give us another legacy of primitivism, this notion that the people are tied to the land (they are more primitive, closer to nature) and that the land itself is like a person, a virgin waiting to be furrowed by the plows of Westerners.

As they travel between Sheba’s breasts down the valley, they finally get to the bush which surrounds the cave where the treasure lies. It is guarded by giant crabs, of course, and inside is a snaggle-toothed black witch. She attempts to seal them in the chamber forever, but she is crushed by a massive stone. This was, for almost a century, taken completely seriously.

This close-to-nature question is tricky, as well, one aspect of savagery, which was, for Native Americans, negatively defined symbolically by the specter of scalping (invented by whites, by the way). But the “positive” version of this was the noble savage, close to nature (because, of course, they were not fully human), who could teach us some of those simpler virtues. Here’s Iron-Eyes Cody, who showed up in pro-environment commercials when I was a kid (he’s a white guy in makeup). There’s also Disney’s Pocahontas:

(a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ilzyGavrTJU/USt0x1i-t6I/AAAAAAAAU5k/_o-MUsySNbI/s1600/iron_eyes.jpg">http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ilzyGavrTJU/USt0x1i-t6I/AAAAAAAAU5k/_o-MUsySNbI/s1600/iron_eyes.jpg) (http://taioo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/dz5ox.jpg)

And, of course, the ponytail-linked Na’vi of Avatar. That is a classic adventure story come to life. Only with the help of the smart white hero in blue-face can they hope to defeat the technological terror of flying vehicles and missiles:

(http://www.motikon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/avatar-navi-blue-action-image.jpg) (http://lh5.ggpht.com/_AkrZ09GYiws/So3AmglZ4JI/AAAAAAAAK7g/i6iD9QuJViI/s800/avatar_navi.jpg)

We are so hooked into these notions that news accounts of disease in Africa (Bass, 1998) or of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffused with the ideas and imagery developed from colonialism. As a friend with Middle Eastern heritage said in response to the common phrase “They just don’t respect life the way we do”: “No, they just don’t value your life the way you do. They like theirs just fine.” Bass describes how roads were purposely left unpaved and slow in the parts of Africa where hemorrhagic fever viruses like Ebola are somewhat regular occurrences. Americans, “helping” the primitives in the Peace Corps, paved the roads and built bridges. Then, in the 90s, huge outbreaks of Ebola decimated populations. Ebola kills you fast. So if you make the roads slower than an infected person could flee to the next village, you can contain outbreaks. The Americans made assumptions based on notions of primitivism and civilization and never really bothered to ask.

Both forms of primitivism have their appeals, as well. bell hooks (1992) talks about this as “eating the other.” It’s what we do when we got to try some new or “exotic” or “strange” “ethic” food (hot dogs aren’t ethnic?) in a restaurant that has a mysterious native language menu you could ask for. It’s what we do when we watch travel channel documentaries late at night on various “lost” tribes in the Amazon. Why are we allowed to see the women’s breasts on basic cable? It’s not because they are in their “natural” state of dress. Why don’t we see bare breasts on nudist beach documentaries or MTV Spring Break coverage then? Is it because those “primitives” are not considered fully human in the racist imaginary of basic cable?

We eat the primitive other by wanting to be and/or borrow both the savagery and the noble savage innocence. Both sides can be seen in this old travel ad:

(http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-rfh28k23xkxddm.jpg)

Sometimes we want the savagery. The parties, the spicy food, the tattoos and piercings (both brought back to the West by sailors), the potentially lax sexual mores. It might be why you travel abroad for Spring Break:

This desire for the savage primitive is what inspired some of the push to abstraction in modern art in Picasso and:

The desire for noble savagery inspired other trends in modern art, as with Gauguin:

It has also inspired any number of vacation ads:

The lack of hardworking Western European industry that was evidence of a peoples’ lack and justified a colonial takeover in the 1800s is now a break from the soul-crunching burden of modern society.

Various “primitive” things are desired by busy Americans, especially in and around new agey Sedona, where you can find your sources of energy in mystical vortexes, get your chakra balanced, do yoga, and order tempeh. You can also buy kachinas, dream-catchers, god’s-eyes, storyteller dolls and whatnot:

(http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/15/74815-004-48960E20.jpg) (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Dreamcatcher.jpg/300px-Dreamcatcher.jpg) (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rNOsd6z9t6w/R1BYQYfcfUI/AAAAAAAAARI/tRPf-GSs24c/s1600-R/god%27s%2Beyes.jpg) (http://onceuponatime.outlawpoetry.com/files/2011/07/the-storyteller-illustratio.jpg)

Orientalism

But the other is also categorized in a different way. When faced with the ancient civilizations of the Orient (historically the Middle East and India, later China and eastern Asia), simple primitivism was inadequate. History couldn't be manipulated with ideas of lost white tribes as easily when confronted with the ancient Chinese dynasty holding off their civilization against the "primitive, savage barbarians" of Mongolia or an Arab culture which preserved the science and knowledge of the ancient Greeks when Europe fell into the Dark Ages. How do justify your subjugation of Africa when all of the technology you hold so dear as a marker or your superior civilization until the 19^th century was invented in China first (yes, including moveable type). Orientalism, then, is a perspective on the other that sees such societies as decadent (Said, 1977). Decadence implies both a kind of decay and a sense of sexuality. Oriental societies become exotic locales where spices and sexualized harem girls and opium dens and curvy streets and strange customs exist.

The harem girl pictures are the first widely spread pornography in Europe.

They are significant because of all the elements they represent. The culture of one of these “oriental” countries becomes simply another field to be plowed by Westerners. Of course, there are no more virgins to be found, but the cultural life of a place becomes a playground just like nature. And all the Islamic virtues that overlay the harem are now seen as hollow and fleeting and easily pierced, like the veil, for curious men. There is always this sense that if you scrape hard enough at the surface veneer of an Eastern culture, if you turn over enough rocks, you will find evil, sex and violence. As if that wasn’t true of every city on Earth, regardless of race and culture!

This, the opening scene of 1937 French crime drama Pepe le Moko, illustrates the orientalist mindset:

You can see the same kind of mindset in the trailer for Big Trouble in Little China. And, again, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the same message. Underneath the civilized show of Pankot Palace, there is a heart-removing evil underground of blood-drinking, voodoo doll (sure, those are from two oceans away, but why not?) using culture of child slavery and evil. The bad guys in that film are the same as in Gunga Din, the Thugees, worshippers of Kali, who are ordered to “kill for the sake of killing” in that film, and looking for “darkness to cover the earth” in the new one. The Thugee history in various attempted revolts against British rule in India is ignored. They are now senseless brutes.

Once India is finally colonized by the British, the glories of its civilization must be rendered as former or in the past or as crumbling. If technology and building great buildings and having distinguished scholarship are the marks of the civilization that Europe was supposedly bringing the world, then some picture of these great civilizations as having lost the fire of that had to be created. Then it was of course realized as European powers proceeded to overrun the counties or militarily engage them to the point where that ancient civilization had to some extent disappeared. It's hard to keep up with your poetry and architecture when suddenly the only job you can get is as a tour guide or a houseboy.

Conclusion

Even though overt colonialism has largely ended, the influences of these ideas and ideologies exist to this day. They are harder to see, since criteria of racism seem to be the only things obvious to Americans, especially. Going to an exotic restaurant to consume the other seems perfectly innocent fun, as do the activities of Indiana Jones.

India gained its independence in 1947. A wave of decolonization followed. By the 60s most former colonies had been liberated, although Zimbabwe didn't make it until the 70s. South Africa's colonial government (by then run entirely by indigenous whites) didn't change until the 90s, and Hong Kong only was officially decolonized in 1998 (of course, then it went back to China, so it never really had much independence). Of course, the native peoples of North America and Australia will not get their land back any time soon. Although the US supposedly doesn't have colonies, Puerto Rican and Hawaiian nationalists would tell you something a bit different. At the very least, when the US deposes governments like it did in Guatemala or props up military dictators, as it did in Haiti, the Philippines and Zaire, we can seem imperialism at work.

The recent violence in East Timor is because of a colonial situation. The Indonesian government, with full US backing, invaded and subjugated the island and the people on it in the 1970s. East Timor has been working toward freedom ever since.

And certainly the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe following 1988 could be considered decolonization.

Decolonization of course brings problems. After decades or centuries of rule, it is fiendishly difficult to get your economy back on track, especially if most things of value had already been taken. Ethnic and religious strife, which had been controlled by the brutal restrictions of the colonial regime, now would often come to the surface, as they did in India, Yugoslavia and central Africa.

This unit certainly has been filled with a lot of history, but it is necessary, as it is a history American schools do not usually teach.

What this means for popular culture is that the ideologies of colonialism, and especially of primitivism and orientalism are very robust in our culture, largely because they are usually unnoticed and unquestioned. Just watch a travel show and you'll see. Just look to the history of films set in Africa (over 400) or any other colonial region. Most children's fiction, from the 1880s through the 1950s (and thus most live action Disney films from 1950 to 1970) were "adventure" stories which are either set in colonial times or locales or have colonial themes. Generations of boys grew up with a colonial setting being one where white heroes have adventures.

All of this in ingrained. You can see this in the extent to which most of you will strenuously resist the idea that there is anything bad in Indiana Jones.

As the new Lara Croft videogame comes out, or as you decide whether or not to watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on Netflix or another episode of The Amazing Race on cbs.com, as you watch the Uruk-hai being dug out of the mud in The Fellowship of the Ring or await the Avatar sequels, be aware. Unlike for race and feminism and queer theory, there is very little apparent progress here, partly because, I think, this stuff is so generally hidden.

So let’s take a look at a piece of your childhood, The Wild Thornberrys and see what you think:

By Steve Vrooman, revised March 2013

References

Barker, F., Hulme, P, & Iverson, F. (1998). Cannibalism and the colonial world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Bass, J. (1998). Hearts of darkness and hot zones: The ideologeme of imperial contagion in recent accounts of viral outbreaks. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84, 430-447.

hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Said, E. (1977). Orientalism. www.odsg.org/Said_Edward(1977)_Orientalism.pdf.

Torgovnick, M. (1990). Gone primitive: Savage intellects, modern lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P.