"Without colonialism there would be no post-colonialism. Colonialism is about the dominance of a strong nation over another weaker one. Colonialism happens when a strong nation sees that its material interest and affluence require that it expand outside its borders. Colonialism is the acquisition of the colonialist, by brute force, of extra markets, extra resources of raw material and manpower from the colonies. The colonialist, while committing these atrocities against the natives and territories of the colonies, convinces himself that he stands on high moral grounds. His basic assumptions in defense of his actions are:"// Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wisam Mansour
Literature of India in English
Edward Said
1
has shown that Colonialism was premised on Orientalism,
i.e. the construction of an Orient which emphasised the Orient as an « other »
which is distinct, different and inferior. To emphasise, the inferiority of the
Orient was established through the device of essentialising difference
– primarily in race and in terms of the universal evolutionary principles
between the Occident and the Orient. Said argues that it is precisely such a
construction that rationalised and made possible the hegemony of the
coloniser on the colonised. Even while Said’s work has been criticised, it has
been fruitfully used to understanding Indian colonial experience. One such
work is that of the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha. Bhabha says that the
British effort of educating Indians through the British education system was
ostensibly meant to create a class of Indians taking on English opinions,
morals and intellect. However Bhabha points out that this led to what he
termed as the ambivalent « mimic man », i.e. « one who learns to act English
but does not look English nor is accepted as such ». In Bhabha’s words « for
an Indian to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English »/////lusotopie
"1947 brought about the eventual independance of India, but it was a tainted one for Gandhi. The fighting between Muslims and Hindus had become terrible, despite fasts by the Mahatma which temporarlily levelled peace through some of the troubled areas (also covered well by the movie). In the end it was not enough, and India was divided into two seperate countries: India, of Hindu majority; and Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country. Gandhi's teachings of tolerance and love for all men as brothers often angered both Muslim and Hindu, and in the end he was murdered by a radical Hindu who evidently felt betrayed by the Mahatma's dual allegiance to both religions."///dialogues
" The specter of originality and its lack seems to haunt much of the work on colonialism and the postcolonial condition at the current conjuncture. This preoccupation with originality and secondariness has, of course, a history, one that is frequently rehearsed. Its imaginary origin can be traced back to Macaulay’s notorious “Minute on English Education” of 1835, which defined what Gayatri Spivak has termed the “subject-constituting project” of colonialism as the production of secondariness: westernized (male) subjects, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” [1] The melancholy success of such an interpellation was confirmed more than a century later by Frantz Fanon, writing (in the resonantly titled Black Skin, White Masks) on the conflictual economies of colonialism and racism: “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” [2] That the access to such a destiny was racially barred while remaining the only imaginative possibility for the (westernized) black male could not but be productive of profound pathologies. What was even worse, as Diana Fuss astutely suggests, was that “the black man under colonial rule finds himself relegated to a position other than the Other.…Black may be a protean imaginary other for white, but for itself it is a stationary ‘object’; objecthood, substituting for true alterity, blocks the migration through the Other necessary for subjectivity to take place.”"//Indian traffic
The Imperial Archive
Why are conflicts prevalent in post-colonial countries?//yahoo answers
The Camera Never Lies: Trauma in Sri Lanka
Effects of Colonization
"On the other hand, "post-colonialism" may designate, and denounce, the new forms of economic and cultural oppression that have succeeded modern colonialism, sometimes called "neo-colonialism". The term tends to point out that cooperation, assistance, modernisation and the like are in fact new forms of political and cultural domination as pernicious as the former imperial colonialism or colonial imperialism were: the devaluation of autochthonous ways of life and their displacement by the ethos of dominant nations which are technologically more advanced. Obviously, these two senses are intimately linked but foreground different aspects of a single process: the cultural homogeneization of ever larger areas of the globe. "//semioticonPostcolonial Poetry in English: Research Links
History of India
