Answer

Week 1 Reading Notes

Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/postcolonialism. Routledge. ISBN:0-415-35063-8.

• Colonialism can be seen as a form of Europe’s creation of the Third World via their actions of looking for material wealth and labour using the Negroes, Indians, and Arabs.
• Orientalism can be used to describe how the West has constructed literature surrounding the pervasive and dominant nature of the colonialists.
• Colonial discourse studies in contemporary societies are focused on both delineating the workings of power by the colonizers as well as the various resistances and revolts that the colonized staged.
• Colonialism is responsible for reshaping different structures of human knowledge such as the concepts of land ownership and people’s culture.
• It is due to colonization that there was increased contact between the Europeans and the non-Europeans resulting in different image creations from each of the parties.
• Traditionally, the intersection between colonialism and literature was dealt with majorly by literary criticism.
• Literature has an instrumental role to play in shaping the colonial and anti-colonial discourses between the colonizers and the colonized.
• Differences in cultural and racial differences between the colonizers and the colonized led to various ideological binaries.
• Racism is a mediating factor for the global expansion of capitalism through colonialism.
• Colonialism is responsible for reshaping aspects such as physical territories of states, social terrains, culture, and human identities.
• Despite efforts to make the world post-colonial, terror incidences such as the 9/11 attack make it hard for superpowers to stay without invading other countries.
• Superpowers overdetermine the current global discourse and seek to impose their views on others while incorporating minority views.
• Do anticolonial thoughts and movements affect contemporary global politics and literature?
• Where do we draw the line between the actions of activists with anticolonial thoughts and scholarship demonstrated through literary criticism?