Future of Post-Colonial Studies

Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of the thinking activity in which I would like to share my understanding of that.

What is Post -Colonial Studies?

Colonialism can be defined as the conquest and control of other people 's land and goods. Colonialism is something which is done by everybody not only by white people. For example 'Foe' and 'Wide saragaso sea' in which feminism discourse, woman are colonised by man.

Post colonial idea broke the old mentality and you just need to change the form of things and people will happily accept it.

In the article one writer gives the idea about what is imperial, Empire and globalisation.

Hardt and Negri do not identify the United States as this new power, although they do argue that 'Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project', a project which sought to include and incorporate minorities into the mainstream rather than simply expel or exclude them. Likewise, the contemporary Empire is imperial and not imperialist' because it does not consist of powerful nations that aim to invade, destroy and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty' as the old powers did but rather to absorb them into a new international network.

The Empire can only be conceived of as a universal republic, a network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture. This imperial expansion has nothing to do with imperialism, nor with those state organisms designed for conquest, pillage, genocide, colonization, and slavery. Against such imperialisms, the Empire expands and consolidates the model of network power. Certainly... The expansive moments of Empire have been bathed in tears and blood, but this ignoble history does not negate the difference between the two concepts.

Postcolonial studies sometimes encompass, also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial exploitation.

11th September significant event in history but this is good for India because India is only complaining about terrorist and all. As America was attacked by terror group and it's terrible and no one imagined it before this. Colonialism shifted the way of looking at whatever British people do with us, but now our own people started to do that.

What is Globalisation?

Globalisation is a term used to describe how trade and technology have made the world into a more connected and interdependent place. Globalisation also captures in its scope the economic and social changes that have come about as a result.

In Globalisation working with whom and what it is important.

'Globalisation is just another name for submission and domination', an unemployed miner said at a demonstration this week in which Indian women... carried banners denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding the president's resignation. ``We've had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own masters.'

Such a connection is precisely what many of the new writings on globalisation including Empire proclaim. Whereas the advocates of globalisation see the new economic order as already having engendered better lives for people, Hardt and Negri suggest that the new cultural, economic and political flows offer 'new possibilities to the forces of liberation' because global power can then be challenged from multiple sites by its multiple subjects whom they refer to as the 'multitude. They rightly draw attention to Etienne Balibar's important work on neo-racism which points out that a biological understanding of race has given way to a more culture-based understanding of difference.

For example , Indian film industry reached its peak production of 948 in 1990 and experienced a drop to 600 - 700 films by the end of the decade. This downturn reflects the propagation of television and Satellite broadcasting is becoming cheaper. Consequently, leading cinema managers left the profession, which, in turn, depleted the industry's morale. A wave of economic efficiency contributed to the further erosion of Indian cinema. Film production has always had a great gambling element. Innumerable pieces of equipment are required and many workers have to mobilise.

Many of the films were set in Western nations, and this appealed to Indian immigrants in those countries as they could relate to the surroundings, but it also appealed to Indians living within India, as many Indians had a fascination with the West during this time and wanted to immigrate abroad. Bollywood movies featuring famous cities such as New York, London, and Paris were very popular as they gave Indians a glimpse of what the Western world looks like.

The film My Name is Khan, precisely showcases the experiences that many Indians immigrants have faced in Western countries post 9/11. The film tackles themes such as Islamophobia and racism and was very well received for its accurate depiction of the diaspora's experiences.

Market fundamentalism:-

The international financial institutions have pushed a particular ideology-market fundamentalism-that is both bad economics and bad politics; it is based on premises concerning how markets work that do not hold even for developed countries, much less for developing countries. More generally, globalisation itself has been governed in ways that are undemocratic and have been disadvantageous to developing countries, especially the poor within those countries.

Market fundamentalism, also known as free-market fundamentalism, is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated laissez-faire or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used as a pejorative by critics of said beliefs.

For example movie RA-ONE (2011)–The movie started its marketing campaign 200 days before the date of release with putting up 60% of their budget on Digital Marketing.

Making Audience a part of the production process by asking their decisions.

Bahubali (2015) – Makers of Bahubali started its marketing campaigns way earlier and regularly updated their fans with the movie process.

Bollywood Cast would change their social media accounts name in order to spread their upcoming film.

Other movies like ,The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Tiger which talked about the idea of marketing and how employees lose their job within a day or hour.

Market fundamentalism is work on hire and fire purpose. We have examples of Hollywood's film where we found such themes.

Up in the Air (2009)

This George Clooney classic involves him as a “corporate downsizer” whose job is to fire people from theirs. He flies from one destination to another, firing people and gathering miles on his airline travel.

But a new hire comes up with a digital transformation to fire people over video conferences. However, it comes with a fair share of problems in the ultimate lesson of why a “people-first” organisation always wins.

Another one is a book by Chetan Bhagat in which the characters had fear of losing their jobs anytime as they work under an American company. So they are always in a fear that the next morning if they will have a job or not.There is also a movie also based upon this novel named 'hello'.

How did the British Empire work?

The historian Erich S. Gruen has observed that Rome's expansion throughout the Mediterranean littoral may well have been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true for the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. This American imperium is without colonies, designed for a jet-and-information age in which mass movements of people and capital dilute the traditional meaning of sovereignty.

Kaplan offers ten rules for the US Empire, all of which require him to go back to the British Empire, but also to America's own past.

No. 1,- called 'Manliness', invokes the male bonding that supposedly existed between British colonists and the more refined of their subjects.

No. 5,- Be Light and Lethal, asks imperialists to openly appropriate and rewrite history: although many journalists and intellectuals have regarded US policy in Latin America as something to be ashamed of, the far more significant, operational truth is that it exemplifies how we should act worldwide in the foreseeable future'.

The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of 'postcolonial' historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been.

Hardt and Negri, Empire can be challenged from multiple sites and is vulnerable to all manner of rebellions; they gesture towards the global multitudes' who have already begun to rise in revolt.

The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and Cultures at the service of American power'

In another article by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gives the conclusion of the second edition The Future of Post Colonial Studies.

She started with environment- ecology, environmental activist Vandana Shiva has exposed the connection between colonialism and the destruction of environmental diversity. She argues that the growth of capitalism, and now of trans-national corporations, exacerbated the dynamic begun under colonialism which has destroyed sustain- able local cultures; these cultures were also more women-friendly, partly because women’s work was so crucially tied to producing food and fodder. They believe that ecology and human culture are intricately linked. Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez-Alier point out, is evident in American environmentalism and its obsession with the wilderness. Rob Nixon

further notes that this wilderness obsession is celebrated in American literature as well as in natural history, where ‘There is a durable tradition … of erasing the history of colonised peoples through the myth of the empty lands. … a prodigious amount of American environmental writing and criticism makes expansive gestures while remaining amnesiac towards non-American geographies that vanish over the intellectual skyline’.

Post- colonial criticism has not engaged sufficiently either with this history or its legacies. Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg suggest that this is the result of ‘indigenous people’s sense of living under ongoing colonial projects—and not just colonial legacies—and from postcolonial studies’ over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand’.

Palit discusses the ways in which the NBA developed new forms of resistance by drawing on the rich experience of the local people and their knowledge of the land. But its self-conception and practices were also shaped by the methods of the Gandhian anti-colonial struggle, and gathered enormous support from women’s groups, trade unions and left parties in the country, as well as connected with other people’s movements internationally.

The enclosure of the commons was, Karl Marx explained, crucial to the birth of capitalism. He described the process in England: beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, the forcible usurpation of communal property occurred first ‘by means of individual acts of violence’ and later through the Parliamentary Acts for Enclosures of the Commons this is not unlike the US takeover of Native American or Mexican territories, or the process Arundhati Roy describes in the case of the Indian constitutional takeover of tribal lands. Along with slavery and colonialism, the takeover of the commons and the conversion of various forms of collective property rights into private property involved dis-possessing large sections of the population, both in the colonising and colonised countries, so that wealth would be accumulated by a few. Marx described this process of dispossession and proletarianisation as ‘primitive accumulation’, remarking that the concept was as central to political economy as original sin was to theology.

Older histories of race, empire and dispossession are re-inscribed in the pattern of dispossession within the heart of the new empire. Examining subprime and debt crisis in the United States, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva trace the racialized logic of dispossession that is evident in the United States. Asking who is the most vulnerable to dispossession, they note that the question is one that Harvey does not even consider, one that he also seems to see as already asked and answered by the subprime mortgages themselves and their securitization, which is:

What is it about blackness and Latinidad that turns one’s house roof, protection, and aspiration and shelter into a death trap expecting to profit from unpayable loans without debtors who were already marked by their racial/cultural difference ensuring that at least some among them would not be able to pay? This is precisely what makes ‘high-risk’ securities profitable.

Chakrabarty insists that we will have to abandon our previous conceptions of human freedom that entailed thinking about ‘the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems’ because ‘these critiques do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations’.

Examples:-

Climate change and the environmental issues today have brought to our notice the need to address them, create awareness, and take corrective actions. In India, Bollywood has a massive potential to reach out to the masses and create awareness about the same. It has the power to influence people’s actions and thus make a difference. The films can represent environmental issues and community problems efficiently and convey to the people the aftermath of their current deeds.

Kadvi Haava (2017)

This film is inspired by true events from the drought-prone Bundelkhand region. In this film, the village of Mahua is affected by scanty rainfall, barren land, crop failure, and climate change. All these factors add-up to farmers in debt. Farmer suicide becomes a frequent occurrence as they aren’t unable to pay back the debt. In this setting, a blind old farmer makes a pact with the debt recovery agent to save his son from the debt trap. This movie is a precise depiction of how climate change ends up killing people and their morals.

Jal (2013)

The film tells the story of two villages in Rann of Katch and their quest to find water. A young man named Bakka has a skill of divining water spots in the barren lands. A Russian woman comes here in search of flamingos native to Kutch. To her dismay, the number of flamingos had reduced because of water scarcity. Thus, she, Bakka, and a team of ecologists set out to find water. With this backdrop, the movie highlights how lack of water leads to forming classes and strain people physically and mentally. This film is yet another thought-provoking Bollywood drama.

Sherni:-

Sherni’ shows the links between humans, animals and forests. It underlines how the linkages in the ecosystem are being threatened. The film deals with the subjects like human–wildlife conflict and wildlife conservation.The title of the film is a bit of a misnomer, as in Hindi sherni properly refers to a lioness, while the formal word for a tigress is baghin.Though the word sherni is also frequently used to refer to tigresses.Sherni received positive reviews from the film critics for raising awareness about the importance of wildlife conservation and Balan's performance.

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