Key Terms in Post-Colonial Theory and Geopolitics

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key critical concepts, terminology, and historical frameworks in post-colonial literary theory and geopolitical models.

Colonialism

The imperialist expansion of Europe into the rest of the world during the last four hundred years, establishing a relationship of control and influence by a dominant center over its margins or colonies.

Post-colonialism

The study of the effects of colonialism on cultures and societies, examining how European nations conquered 'Third World' cultures and how those groups have responded and resisted across three broad developmental stages.

Ambivalence

The ambiguous way colonizer and colonized view one another, wherein the colonizer views the colonized as inferior yet exotically other, and the colonized views the colonizer as enviable yet corrupt.

Alterity

'The state of being other or different'; the political, cultural, linguistic, or religious other, as well as the study of how a group differentiates itself from others.

Colonial education

The process by which a colonizing power assimilates a subaltern native elite or a larger population into its way of thinking and viewing the world.

Diaspora

The voluntary or enforced migration of peoples from their native homelands, often raising issues regarding maintaining or altering culture, language, and identity.

Essentialism

The essence or 'whatness' of something; the practice where groups decide what defines a particular identity, often overlooking internal differences to maintain power or mount resistance.

Ethnicity

A fusion of traits belonging to a group, including shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, behaviors, experiences, memories, and loyalties.

Exoticism

The process by which a cultural practice is rendered stimulating and exciting because of its difference from the colonizer's normal perspective.

Hegemony

The power of the ruling class to persuade other classes that their interests represent the interests of all, achieved through economic and political control as well as education and media.

Hybridity

New transcultural forms emerging from cross-cultural exchange across social, political, linguistic, or religious domains, which can be contentious and disruptive rather than peaceful.

Catalysis

The specifically New World experience of several ethnic groups interacting and mixing within a contentious environment, giving rise to new forms of identity and experience.

Creolization

The formation of societies resulting from ethnic and racial mixing that build a new material, psychological, and spiritual self-definition.

Identity

The way in which an individual or group defines itself, integral to self-concept, social mores, and national understanding, frequently involving essentialism and othering.

Ideology

'A system of values, beliefs, or ideas shared by some social group and often taken for granted as natural or inherently true' (Bordwell & Thompson 494).

Abrogation

A refusal to use the colonizer's language in a correct or standard way.

Appropriation

'The process by which the language is made to 'bear the burden' of one's own cultural experience.'

Magical realism

The adaptation of Western realist literary methods to describe indigenous cultures' experience of the mythical, magical, and supernatural, blending realism with the fabulous.

Mapping

The prescriptive and descriptive cartographic practice in colonialism used to assist territorial aggression, designate national boundaries, and establish claims.

Metanarrative

A grand or master cultural narrative that seeks to encompass and explain all small, local narratives as an overarching truth about the world.

Mimicry

The means by which colonized people adapt elements of the colonizer's culture (such as language, dress, and education) while altering them in important ways.

Nation/nation-state

An aggregation of people organized under a single government, driven both by struggles for ethnic and cultural identity and by competing beliefs in universal, multicultural geo-economic rights.

Orientalism

The process from the late 18th century to the present through which 'the Orient' was constructed as an exotic other by European culture, creating broad generalizations that mask cultural differences.

Other

The social or psychological process through which one group excludes or marginalizes another group by emphasizing differences and employing stereotypical depictions.

Race

The classification of human beings by physical and biological traits, historically employed to maintain power, build solidarity, or justify slavery and the 'white man's burden.'

Semiotics

A system of signs through which meaning is established, used culturally to build self-definition or by colonizing powers to control and assimilate a population.

Space

A geographic locale that remains empty by virtue of not being designated.

Place

What occurs when geographic space is made or owned, encompassing landscape, language, environment, and culture.

Subaltern

The lower or colonized classes who lack access to their own means of expression and are forced to rely on the language and methods of the ruling class.

Worlding

The process by which an individual, family, culture, or people is incorporated into dominant Western and Eurocentric global society.

Alfred Sauvy

The French demographer who coined the term 'Third World' in a 1952 article entitled 'Three Worlds, One Planet.'

First World

In the mid-20th-century Cold War model, the United States and its capitalist allies (such as Western Europe, Japan, and Australia); today used to describe powerful Western economies.

Second World

In the Cold War geopolitical model, the communist Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites; a designation that became largely obsolete after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Third World

Originally coined to describe nations not aligned with either Cold War bloc (typically impoverished former colonies in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East); now used as an outdated blanket term for developing countries.