COMS 378 - Key Terms

Colonialism

A consequence of imperialism that is the implanting of settlements in a distant territory.

*Imperialism

The practices, theories, and attitudes of a dominant nation ruling a distant territory. It is the formation of an empire.

Empire

A liminal and decentered principle of power underlying the operation of global capital.

Worlding

The ways a colonized space is brought into the ‘world’, to exist as a part of a world constructed by Eurocentrism.

Centre/Margin (Periphery)

It is the gradual establishment of an empire that depends on a stable hierarchical relationship or binary in which the colonized existed as the other of the colonizing culture.

*Epistemic Violence

Violence exerted through epistemic frameworks that legitimize the process of domination so that it becomes normalized.

Othering

Where the colonizing Other (Empire) or colonial discourse establishes itself at the same time, colonized others are produced as subjects.

Colonial Discourse

The system within a range of practices termed ‘colonial’ comes into being. It is the complex signs and practices that organize social existence and social reproduction within colonial relationships.

Civilizing Mission

The fundamental contradiction of empire between geographic expansion and invasion, designed to increase the prestige, economic or political power of the imperial nation, and its professed moral justification, its mission to bring order and civilization to the barbarous hordes.

Counter Discourse

The theory and practice of symbolic resistance where change is produced against the capacity of established discourses to ignore or absorb would-be subversion.

*Mimicry

The complex and uncertain reproduction of colonized subjects' adaptation of the colonizer’s cultural habits, assumptions, institutions, and values. It locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance and uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of the colonized.

*Hybridity

The creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization.

Allegory

Major features of the movement of narrative, which symbolically refer to an action or situation, that disrupt narrative assumptions of colonialism, such as orthodox history, classical realism, and imperial representation. It acknowledges that the ‘real story’ occupies various horizons of meaning.

Place

A location usually embedded in cultural history, legend and language, without becoming a concept of contention and struggle until the profound discursive inference of colonialism separates it from ‘space.’

Ecocriticism

The interdisciplinary study of the connection between literature and the environment; it focuses on ways in which literature addresses the human relationship to the environment, especially the damaging effects of coloniality on it.

Slow Violence

Violence that is inherent in the structures and institutional practices, and occurs gradually in societies, rather than violence caused by single, distinct acts.

Indigenous Sovereignty

The inherent and inalienable connections to land from indigenous owners of settled colonies who have been denied any kind of sovereign political power.

Diaspora

The voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands into new regions.

*Migration

Patterns and processes of human movement that occur in the context of the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism.

Displacement

Removal from traditional lands and relocation in reserves or missions and consequent familial, social, and cultural fracturing of indigenous peoples.

Borderlands

Peripheral land to barriers between different nations; the point of conjunction, or ‘contact zones’ between groups of differing people, culture, and identity.

Subjectivity

The extent of colonized people’s perceptions of their identities and their capacities to resist the conditions of their domination.

Conversion

A sign of acceptance of modernity, alongside one’s natal culture, and not of capitulation to colonial power.

Syncretism

The state of postcolonial cultures being the product of several forces, variously contributing to a new and complex cultural formation.

Missions and Colonialism

The ways colonized peoples could appropriate and subvert colonial institutions, and bend them to their own ends, even under the most unpromising of conditions.

Religion and the Postcolonial

The ways it could be used as hegemonic control or be employed by colonized people as a means of resistance.

Patriarchy

The social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are held by men. In postcolonial theory, the rule of the ‘father’ or men mirrors the rule of the empire through how ideological assumptions impact colonized society.

Interpellation (Care, Discipline, Fear)

How a subject is located and constructed by specific ideological and discursive operations, particularly formations such as colonial discourse.

Ambivalence

The complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

Agency

The ability of postcolonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or resisting imperial power.

Colonial Governance

A rule where institutions of the colonizers are seen as adjacent to the colonized subjects, to begin a civilizing mission.

Postcolonial State

A state formed after independence that still models itself on that of former colonial powers. They are usually adjacent to the boundaries of colonial administrative units.

Testimonio

A form of autobiographical witness of events that appropriates dominant forms of imperial discourse to create powerful subordinate voices.

Trauma

When the colonizing culture has forced an existential deviation on the colonized subject. It occurs when the colonized subject realizes they can never attain the colonizing traits they have been taught to desire.