Essential Concepts in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
Occupation Colonies
An occupation colony is a type of colony occupied by another nation with hostility in order to exploit its natural resources and its native people. Indigenous people were in the majority but were administered by a foreign power.
Exploitation Colonies / Settler Colonialism
Exploitation colonialism is the national economic policy of conquering a country in order to exploit its natural resources and its native population. This practice contrasts with settler colonialism, which is the practice of conquering a territory to establish it as a branch of the metropole (motherland) and exploit its resources and native population.
Indigeneity
The concept of indigeneity is derived from “indigenous”: born or produced naturally in a land or region; native or belonging naturally to a certain place.
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism is the process whereby European nations began to conceive of their own dominant relationship to a non-European world and spread their rule through exploration, cartography, and colonization.
- Europe: Modern
- Non-European countries: Static, traditional, prehistorical
First Nations
First Nations refers to the original inhabitants. This term is used mainly in Canada to refer to an indigenous American Indian community officially recognized as an administrative unit by the federal government, or functioning as such without official status.
Diaspora
Diaspora refers to a scattered population whose origin lies within a smaller geographic locale. It also refers to the movement of a population from their original homeland. It has come to refer to historical mass dispersions of an involuntary nature. Colonialism was a diasporic movement, for example, the Jewish diaspora.
Middle Passage
The Middle Passage is the term used to describe the central section of the euphemistically termed “triangular trade,” in which goods were brought from Europe to exchange for people at “factories” on the African coasts. Upon arrival in the Americas, enslaved people were sold as products and transported back to Europe, forming the “hypotenuse” of the triangle.
Chattel Slavery
Chattel slavery is a type of slavery in which enslaved people are treated as property or material goods, and are sold and bought as such.
Indentured Labor
Indentured labor describes a system that emerged when slavery was abolished in colonial systems, such as in Britain, where formerly enslaved people began to work for income. Apparently, the contracts made between these laborers and white people were often not voluntary, leading this system to be widely seen as forced labor.
Diasporic Displacement Time (D. Coleman)
Diasporic Displacement Time (D. Coleman): This concept suggests that despite the elliptical recurrences of traumatic memory, there is an Imperial Isochronic time: the traumatic and barbaric past will give way to a progressive, civil future. This process is always in progress, and so are we.
Slave Narrative
A slave narrative is a literary genre with a political purpose. These narratives were often transmitted orally from Black people to white audiences (as many Black individuals were denied literacy). Their aim was to abolish slavery by proving that enslaved people were human beings, not dangerous “species.” They allowed individuals to express themselves and share their feelings and experiences.
Neo-Slave Narrative
A neo-slave narrative is a literary genre in which a contemporary author writes a fictional biography, drawing solely on historical information rather than personal experiences. These narratives focus on addressing the wounds left behind by abolition and slavery. While concerned with the past, their implications resonate in the present and future, often employing contemporary literary techniques.
The Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy)
The Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy): Race → Origin, Culture, Identity.
Paul Gilroy uses the Transatlantic slave trade to highlight the influence of “routes” on Black identity. The image of the ship represents how authentic Black culture is composed of cultural exchanges, as the slave trade suppressed Black people’s ability to connect to a homeland. Double consciousness, within the Black Atlantic framework, involves the struggle to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land and their ethnic political constituency.
Subaltern
Subaltern: In critical theory, this term refers to populations that are politically, socially, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structures of the colony and the colonial homeland. In post-colonial theory, it describes the lower classes and social groups who are at the margins of a society. It literally means “of inferior rank.”
Region
Region: A construct, an imagined and strategic sense of cohesion and community, projected from without but also from within. It can be understood as an imposed homogeneity and a basis for unity.