POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Postcolonial theory in Understanding Contemporary World Politics



Postcolonial theory in Understanding Contemporary World Politics

Introduction

The paper aims to critically analyze the relevance of Postcolonial theory in understanding contemporary world politics. The postcolonial theory emerges in recent decades as one of the great innovations. Theoretical and methodological approaches that propose critical analysis of centre-confliction relations are created by colonialism and the expansion of the capitalist world (Baxter & Sansom, 1992). The theory post colonial basically adopts the point of view of the culture of post-colonial societies, but also the symbolic effects of cultural exchange with historic colonial centres. Its theoretical foundations nurtured literary theory and aesthetics, philosophy post-structuralism anthropology and cultural variations in the linguistic turn. Another important concept to post-colonial theory to develop cultural imperialism - a multilateral suppression, in which the dominant culture and displace, subordinates all manifestations of slave culture, reducing them to imitate (Baylis & Smith, 2008).

The central element of postcolonial theory is that is a critical fundamentally concerned with the analysis of cultural forms that reflect or even challenge the relations of domination and subordination between regions and nations of world capitalism. In this sense, postcolonial theory has a dimension intrinsically critical and political (Albrow & King, 2009, pp. 101 - 119). A basic postulate of this theory is that conformation of a historic colonial subjectivity through culture is not something that has disappeared with colonialism; the contrary is the founding condition of persistence of cultural subordination in post colonialism. The focuses of postcolonial theorists are ambivalent, splitting the consciousness of the (post) colonial subject, based on cultural prospects. The consciousness of the (post) colonial subject is based on the unstable and often fundamentally negative identity associated with the problem of cultural dislocation (Mongia, 1996).

Background

Postcolonial studies are an important research field of literary studies and social sciences in universities in many countries. The assumption that both Marxism and postcolonial theory can offer prospects for capital and critical understanding of both the present and the process of forming a world unevenly polarized between a centre explorer and progressively enriched and peripheries progressively explored and impoverished (Dirlik, 1994, pp. 294-319). The concept of identity is one of the most confusing concepts, contradictory and inaccurate invented by modern thought. Modernity needed this concept to assign it to another of his inventions, from the fundamental point of view ideological: individual base philosophical, political and economical of all the social construction of European bourgeoisie from the Renaissance. This notion of identity, formulated to speak of individuals, then was moved to the societal level and began to speak of national identity (Dunne et. al., 2010). Another need bourgeois, linked to construction of modern national states, i.e. the need for territorial delimitation and political order that would allow a space world increasingly de-territorialized by functioning of the international economy.

Postcolonial studies have been jointly developed in two main fields: literary criticism and anthropology, mainly by intellectuals strongly influenced by the cultural and political legacy of the British colonial empire, especially in the ...