Hi Class,
These terms are complex and their definitions (like narrative and story) are not settled. I present a few ideas on these terms that are not included in most dictionaries.
COLONIALISM:
Professor Ania Loomba of the University of Pennsylvania says in her important book Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2005) that colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, but there are important differences. “The word colonialism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), comes from the Roman ‘colonia’ which meant ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’, and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their citizenship.” But rather than just agree with the OED’s definition of colonialism as “a settlement in an new country…a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state,” Loomba wonders why the emphasis in on the colonizers and not the colonized. Going further, she says that “colonialism was not an identical process in different parts of the world but everywhere it locked the original inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history” (7-8). Continuing, Loomba reflects: “so, colonialism can be defined as the conquest and control of other people’s lands and goods. But colonialism in this sense is not merely the expansion of various European powers into Asia, Africa or the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards; it has been a recurrent and widespread feature of human history” (8).
For example:
-The Roman Empire stretched from Armenia to the Atlantic in the 2nd century AD.
-In the 13th century, Genghis Khan and the Mongols conqured the Middle East as well as China
-The Aztec Empire was established during the 14th century
-In the 15th century, various kingdoms in southern India came under the control of the Vijaynagar Empire
IMPERIALISM:
Imperialism is a term often linked to economic and political systems of power and control. Loomba says that while colonialisation is the takeover of territory, appropriation of material resources, exploitation of labour and interference with political and cultural structures of another territory or nation, imperialism is a global system. “Thus,” says Loomba, the imperial country is the ‘metropole’ from which power flows, and the colony or neo-colony is the place which it penetrates and controls. Imperialism can function without formal colonies (as in United States imperialism today) but colonialism cannot” (12).
POSTCOLONIALISM:
In Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), Professor Robert J.C. Young of the University of Oxford, provides readers with a series of definitions that I have collected in the following order:
1. Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed a body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western and non-western people and their worlds are viewed. What does that mean? It means turning the world upside down. It means looking from the oterh side of the photograph, experiencing how differently things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather than Berlin or Boston, and understanding why.
2. Postcolonialism claims the right of all people on this earth to the same material and cultural well-being. The reality, though, is that the world today is a world of inequality, and much of the difference falls across the broad division between people of the west and those of the non-west.
3. Postcolonialism names a politics and philosophy of activism that contest that disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past. It asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to access resources and material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their cultures, cultures that are now intervening in and transforming the societies of the west.
4. Postcolonial cultural analysis has been concerned with the elaboration of theoretical structures that contest the previous dominant western ways of seeing things.
5 Postcolonial theory involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west.
6. Above all, postcolonialism seeks to intervene, to force its alternative knowledges into the power structures of the west as well as the non-west. It seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between the different peoples of the world.
7. Postcolonialism disturbs the order of the world. It threatens privilege and power. It refuses to acknowledge the superiority of western cultures. Its radical agenda is to demand equality and well-being for all human beings on this earth.
