Respected Sir,
This blog is my response to the task assigned to us about the Postcolonialism Today and the key ideas discussed by Bill Ashcroft.
First of all I would like to say thank you to our Professor Dr.Dilip Barad Sir for giving us this wonderful opportunity to attend the session of Bill Ashcroft and many more such educational sessions for a better knowledge and experience.
Postcolonialism is constantly changing and developing. Post colonial theory is that branch of contemporary theory that investigates and develops prepositions about the cultural and political impact of European Conquest upon colonized societies and the nature of those society's responses. So there's two aspects to it. It's the analysis of the impact of European colonization. That's where Edward said, it's orientalism comes in but it's also the examination of those societies' responses and particularly in literature. Post colonialism is above all a way of reading. So it's a reading practice that draws attention to the profound and continuing effects of colonization upon literary production on anthropological accounts, historical records and scientific and administrative writing. But above all it is a reading of post colonial literature.
Post colonial theory embraces a wide range of different approaches and different specializations. It looks at the operations of language, racism and various other aspects of colonial existence. Post colonialism and globalization are similar that they have at least two important things in common. Firstly, they're concerned with explaining forms of social and cultural organisation whose ambition is to transcend the boundaries of the nation state. And secondly, they seek to provide new ways to understand cultural flows that can no longer be explained by a homogeneous eurocentric narrative of development and social change. Post colonialism doesn't simply refer to 19th century British Imperialism. It has models, techniques, tools to help us understand the operation of power in the world today.
We are going to see 3 things of Postcolonialism
1. Post colonial utopianism
2. Borders and bordering
3. The concept of transnation
Now the post colonial utopianism is a very interesting phenomenon. Utopian studies society was formed in 1988. "The Empire writes back" book by Bill Ashcroft was formed in 1989.
This book "Utopianism" is by Bill Ashcroft really talks about this, so the real driving force of this was earned blocks magisterial the Principle of Hope. It was translated in 1986 into English and was written between 1938 and 1947. Very interesting time when Adolf Hitler was thrilling the wrist and so there was a very great need for a sense of hope, a sense of a different kind of future. And it's very important to recognize that there's a very great difference between utopia and utopianism. Utopia is often used as a derogatory term. People say you're are just utopian, which means you've got your head in the clouds, your wishful thinking, you know a vein idea of a perfect world. So the utopia the place may well probably can never exist. Utopianism is absolutely critical. It's what Lyman Tower Sergeant calls social dreaming and Wrist Levertis says the desire for a better way of living expressed in the description or the different kind of society that makes the alternative way of life possible and so this is the key. This is the key to post colonial utopianism. There's a very great irony in post cloning and utopia because when we read Thomas Moore's Utopia, we see King Utopus invades the land of the Abraxas, changes name, civilizes the indigenous inhabitants and cultivates the natural waste land. Now here we have a classic model for the operation of colonialism itself. So Thomas Moore's Utopia was the consequence of an imperial and colonizing movement, a colonizing invasion. So it's extremely well ambivalent, I guess at the idea of Post colonial utopianism, but it is explained by the notion of the anticipatory function of literature. That's why literature is so important so valuable in the anticipation of the future. Binary says writers are the dream mechanism of the human race which puts it beautifully.
'Highmap' is a very interesting term. It's the home we've all sensed, but never experienced or known. Highmap as utopia that determines the truth content of a work of art. Jewish Marxist taking that term and making it refer to something entirely different, the idea of the home that we've not experienced. But the home we sense, the possibility that allows in the future, now that has been the possibility the driving force of decolonization, and it remains a driving force within the literature because the idea of a different world never comes to conclusion and the idea of different world is particularly presented in literature is not that we know, literature is never necessarily always optimistic or utopian in itself. But it has the capacity to imagine a different kind of world and the imagination is absolutely critical in helping us to understand and formulate the possibility of liberation and freedom. Highmap always lies beyond the border.
Borders and Bordering
Just think about what the world would look like without borders? Just think what kind of world would it be? What the world would look like without National borders? And we realise that of course it probably couldn't happen there. It would be a totally different world. A border is not a thing but a practice. It's both a consequence and production of power relationships. In a sense this utopian vision is a disruption of the idea of the border itself. And so it's a very interesting image because it brings together two of the things that we see post colonialism moving towards the idea of possibility that the utopianism that gives us hope. Utopia may be a fantasy but without hope we cannot live and that hope is something that has driven post colonial literatures.
Now let's see the poem
Waiting For The Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians is a Greek poem by Constantine P. Cavafy in his Collected poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. The poem was written in November 1898 and first published in 1904. It depicts a day in an unnamed city state where everything has come to a halt because the population is awaiting the arrival of "the barbarians", whom they plan to welcome. Waiting for Barbarians ends with the Empire's government officials abandoning the town as winter approaches, in fear that the barbarian invasion.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Here in the above poem it brilliantly captures as perhaps only poetry can do the complex role that borders have. The barbarians, the others those who are just beyond our borders, they're the ones who because of their difference help us to understand who we are. They are a kind of solution because they demonstrate who we are not and that gives us some kind of purchase on the idea of self then particular on the myth of National self. This poem shows us that borders are unfortunately very important. They're important to the state. They're very important in helping people understand or think that they understand who they're by defining who they are not. Now borders because borders are a practice. They don't just go around the outside of the state. And metro sets the boundary of the state never marks a real exterior. It's a line drawn internally, the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained. Once we realise that borders are not structures but practices, we see this bordering practices extending within the nation, state and these include rules, laws, restrictions, surveillance and more subtle forms of pressure.
The literature is incredibly important in overcoming those borders. These are the ways in which we cross borders, these are the ways in which the nation, state fails to be able to control us. And the imagination is something that can't be bordered and that burns block for a writers of a sense. This is why literature is so powerful and so important. Literature being a border crosser, crosses the borders of the nation, crosses the borders of the state. Writers of dream mechanism, of the human race, and those dreams always cross borders.
High map, the home that we've not yet experienced, but the one that is always there is not the nation, but it is the horizon of possibility and horizon of possibility is the possibility of the people. Inhabitants of the nation being able to circulate around the borders of the state, internal borders of the state. Borders are the multiple ways of surveilling and controlling the populations of different states.
The Concept of Transnation
All these subjects, all these citizens moving around the borders of the state, the nation has always tried to identify a certain identity for itself. Now in young nations such as Australia, this becomes almost an obsession. As it grows people are obsessed with the idea of Australian national identity and probably an India too. The idea of national identity is something that people are can escape really whether they are drawn to it or not. But this picture shows the actual multiplicity of a nation of the different strands that go to make it. It could be put in another way that a nation is a big tossed salad. As we know a tossed salad doesn't have an identity, a single strand running through it, but it's made of many different factors, features, ethnicities, peoples and this we call the transnation.
It's a very ambivalent sort of situation because Tagore to cause a poetry became the basis of both the Bangladeshi and Indian national anthems. Gandhi became a secular site. It's influence was very important for neighbour to establish the independent union state. So a transnation is in a sense simply the nation, but say it's a Transnation because it's capacity is our ultimately mobile. It's capacity for mobility is unmatched.
Since black lives matter and the protests have been going on in all around the world. There's been a lot of study of the ways in which successful protests operates and non violent protest operates very effectively by withdrawing your labour, withdrawing your service, withdrawing your custom from the economy. So there are various ways in which nonviolent protests can work and this is the operation of the Transnation and it operates to change the political scene but it also represents a tremendous threat to the state because it is the constant capacity of the Transnation to circumvent the bordering practices of the state.
The creative spirit is the ultimate border crosser because as we've been seeing with the idea of utopianism, the idea of writing as a dream mechanism of the human race. As Salman Rushdie has been urging, we see that the creative spirit and in particular literature is the ultimate border crosser because literature can't be trapped into nationality. So these three things:
1. The idea of utopianism
2. The operation of the borders of the state and
3. The movement of the Transnation around these borders.
These are the ways we see post colonial literature. So thank you very much.
Works Cited
1. Ashcroft, Bill. "YouTube." YouTube, iSPELL, 22 Nov. 2020, youtu.be/LdxRt_LhmQk.
2. Cavafy, C. P. "Waiting for the Barbarians by C. P. Cavafy." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians.
Approximately 1912 words.