Cultural imperialism, also called cultural colonialism, comprises the cultural aspects of imperialism. "Imperialism" here refers to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between civilisations, favouring a more powerful civilisation. Thus cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture over a less powerful society. This may take the form of cultural hegemony of industrialised or politically and economically influential countries influencing general cultural values and standardising (globalising) civilisations elsewhere.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
The Wretched of the Earth is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides a psychological and psychiatric analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation, and discusses the broader social, cultural, and political implications of establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people. The French-language title derives from the opening lyrics of "The Internationale".
Postcolonial feminism is a form of feminism that developed as a response to feminism focusing solely on the experiences of women in Western cultures and former colonies. Postcolonial feminism seeks to account for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world. Postcolonial feminism originated in the 1980s as a critique of feminist theorists in developed countries pointing out the universalizing tendencies of mainstream feminist ideas and argues that women living in non-Western countries are misrepresented.
Homi K. Bhabha is an Indian English scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. He is married to attorney and Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Bhabha, and they have three children.
In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other identify the other human being, in their differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian, who has also made contributions to postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity.
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term Subaltern Studies is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who share many of their views and they are often considered to be "exemplary of postcolonial studies" and as one of the most influential movements in the field. Their anti-essentialist approach is one of history from below, focused more on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite.
Ranajit Guha is a historian of the Indian Subcontinent who has been vastly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959, and was a reader in history at the University of Sussex. He currently lives in Purkersdorf, Austria on the edge of the Vienna Woods, with his German-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, whom he met at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the Australian National University where both continued their work.
Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It refers to a political tactic in which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered, cultural, or political identity to represent themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily "essentialize" themselves, despite it being based on erroneous logic, and to bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, such as equal rights or antiglobalization.
Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Hybridity, in its most basic sense, refers to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture. Hybridity is used in discourses about race, postcolonialism, identity, anti-racism and multiculturalism, and globalization, developed from its roots as a biological term.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of imperial power.
The Third Space is a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory of identity and community realized through language or education. It is attributed to Homi K. Bhabha. Third Space Theory explains the uniqueness of each person, actor or context as a "hybrid". See Edward W. Soja for a conceptualization of the term within the social sciences and from a critical urban theory perspective.
Coolitude is a term coined by Mauritian poet Khal Torabully to describe the cultural interactions of the Indian and Chinese "coolie" diaspora in Mauritius, and by extension also similar migrations. It refers to a transcultural process, articulating imaginaries and cultures in non-essentialist method. The intellectual exploration of indenture started in 1989 when Torabully became aware that his personal history was in limbo, as independent Mauritius still operated an educational system which was established during the colonial era, and as such taught little of Mauritian history. Indenture or coolie trade was out of focus. He decided to address the "silence of the archives".
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a 2013 book by the Indian sociologist and New York University professor Vivek Chibber.
