Meaning Making and Post Colonial Theory

Meaning Making and Post Colonial Theory

• What does it mean to create meaning and identity within hegemonic narratives and post colonial technologies? Assimilation, migratory patterns, changing economic and political polices create the space within which identities are created. Participation within communal and non-communal spaces allows us to develop and express belonging within perspective cultural identities.
• What can organizations do to change the way meaning is made in order to give permission for the voices of the subaltern to speak? Exposing the forces of nation, gender, economic ties, and ethnicity helps to make the technologies of colonization apparent so that they can be overcome. 
• Dialogue and practice around polarized views and intercultural sensitivity can enhance and promote an understanding of the workings of colonizing forces. See Milton J. Bennett's The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity
• From within an organization, much can be done to bring the voices of cultural diaspora into the decision making process through the use of an elicitive model. With Lederach's elicitive model, a people's own cultural metaphors and meanings can help to broaden the understanding of an organizational structure so that all voices can be understood and valued.

Key Concepts in Post Colonial Theory

Notes on Hybridity:

Bakhtin (2004) states: The (...) hybrid is not only double-voiced and doubled-accented (...) but is also doublelanguaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousness, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] socio-linguistic, consciousness, two epochs (...) that come together and consciously fight in out of the territory of utterance (...) It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms (...) such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words.


A Link to More About Marginality and Cultural Identity


Noam Chomsky on Hegemony:

  

Uploaded on Apr 26, 2011

Renowned linguist, author, and dissident intellectual, Noam Chomsky, talks about the current state of the economy, the assault on social welfare programs and the prospects for resistance and hope in the years ahead. Noam Chomsky spoke at the University of Oregon campus in Eugene, Oregon, on April 20, 2011.

The program was sponsored by The Collins Distinguished Speaker Series and the Department of English of the University of Oregon at Eugene.

Racial Hierarchy, Hybridity, and Politics in the Americas

 

Uploaded on Apr 25, 2011

Colgate University, Monday, April 4, 2011

Michael Hanchard, professor at the JHU Krieger School of Arts & Sciences and co-director of the racism, immigration and citizenship program. His books include "Orpheus and Power: Afro-Brazilian Social Movements in Rio de Janeiro and S'o Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988," and "Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought." Hanchard has done fieldwork in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Cuba, Colombia, Ghana, Italy, and Jamaica.

What is Post-Colonial Studies?

What is Post-Colonial Studies?
 

• Post colonial studies looks at colonialism and its social, political, and cultural effects impacting cultures of people living in mother country and/or within a cultural hegemony. The aim is to lessen these effects and to help create social and cultural spaces that allow for their voices. Post colonial theorists give permission for these voices to be heard throughout their work to stop the silencing of them by dominant ideologies and/or value systems.
• Bahri (1996) states that "Post Colonial Studies often goes beyond the boundaries of its most basic definition, which is 'of, or relating to, or being the time following the establishment of independence in a colony' (American Heritage Dictionary). It is the study of the mechanisms of control and/or stages of development of anti-colonial nationalism. Further, Bahri (1996) states 'Moreover, the post-colonial sometimes includes countries that have yet to achieve independence, or people in First World countries who are minorities, or even independent colonies that now contend with neo-colonial forms of subjugation through expanding capitalism and globalization."
• Regarding Post-Colonial studies, Spivak (1992) states that the "subaltern is not just a classy word from 'oppressed,' for other, or for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie... In post-colonial terms, everything that has a limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern--a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern...Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and most dangerous. I mean just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern'...They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern. — Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa (1992)

Gayatri Spivak: 

The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work

 

Quotes on Post Colonial Theory