Q. No.1. Write a short notes on the following.

(1) Capitalism (2) imperialism (3) Identity (4) Abrogation and

Appropriation

Capitalism

Capitalism is a system of largely private ownership that is open to new ideas,

new firms and new ownersin short, to new capital. Capitalisms rationale to
proponents and critics alike has long been recognized to be its dynamism,
that is, its innovations and, more subtly, its selectiveness in the innovations
it tries out. At the same time, capitalism is also known for its tendency to
generate instability, often associated with the existence of financial crises,
job insecurity and failures to include the disadvantaged.

There are basic questions about capitalism that have hardly begun to be
studied. What economic and social institutions engender innovation in the
more capitalist of todays advanced economies, and what institutions
function badly in this regard? How large are the benefits of this system both
in productivity and more broadly in the rewards to its participants? How
much worse (if at all) is this system with respect to stability and inclusion -
compared with corporatist systems found in continental western Europe and
east Asia? What changes or additions to those institutions and policies could
be hoped to improve its dynamism, stability or inclusiveness? Are capitalists
systems more or less prone to financial crises than corporate ones? The
mandate of Columbias Center on Capitalism and Society is to advance our
scholarly understanding of capitalisms workings, its social benefits and
costs, and its place in a democracy.

Imperialism

Many ideas emerged in the nineteenth century in support of imperialism and

were even driving forces behind it. Scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge
had a tremendous impact on the language of imperialism and offered
justification for it. One of the most influential ideologies of imperialism came
in response to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin as adapted by
Herbert Spencer, known as social Darwinism. Spencer and others used
pseudoscientific ideas of racial inferiority on the basis of skin pigmentation
and other physical characteristics (such as head size and shape) to justify
imperialism. Accordingly, people were
classified as separate races along an evolutionary scale, and the
subjugation of peoples of color was considered the inevitable consequence of
the superiority of white men. While by no means all Europeans adopted the
stanceof racial superiority dictated by social Darwinists, the pseudoscientific
origins of racism were to have a virulent and long-lasting impact around the
globe.

Identity

Identity is a state of mind in which someone recognizes/identifies their

character traits that leads to finding out who they are and what they do and
not that of someone else. In other words it's basically who you are and what
you define yourself as being. The theme of identity is often expressed in
books/novels or basically any other piece of literature so that the reader can
intrigue themselves and relate to the characters and their emotions. It's
useful in helping readers understand that a person's state of mind is full of
arduous thoughts about who they are and what they want to be. People can
try to modify their identity as much as they want but that can never change.
The theme of identity is a very strenuous topic to understand but yet very
interesting if understood. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia
Alvarez and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki are two remarkable
books that depict the identity theme. They both have to deal with people
that have an identity that they've tried to alter in order to become more at
ease in the society they belong to. The families in these books are from a
certain country from which they're forced to immigrate into the United States
due to certain circumstances. This causes young people in the family trauma
and they must try to sometimes change in order to maintain a comfortable
life. Both authors: Alvarez and Houston have written their novels Is such an
exemplifying matter that identity can be clearly depicted within characters
as a way in adjusting to their new lives.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez is a tale of four girls
who are forced to leave their country, Dominican Republic. This occurred
because their father got into police problems ...

Abrogation and Appropriation

The development of Ngritude and a writing which clearly establishes the

legitimacy and validity of the indigenous culture of a colonised country is
demonstrating a rejection of the coloniser's values and culture; it is an
abrogation of the colonising culture. The ideal of abrogation is to cast off the
coloniser in order to completely shake off European legitimacy, culture and
influence in order to return to the essence of the colonized people, with its
own values and organisation.

On the opposite side of this argument are those who appropriate elements of
the colonising culture and claim them for their own, adapting them for their
own use. This refusal to reject the coloniser outright might be seen as more
open-minded; it shows a greater ability to adapt to changing times and
conditions. It is perhaps Okonkwo's inability to appropriate and adapt with
the arrival of the whiteman that leads to his downfall in Achebe's Things Fall
Apart. On the other hand, Karanja, who appropriates so much of the English
view of Kenya that he becomes a homeguard serving the British
administration in Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat, is clearly portrayed as a traitor.

These two character examples highlight the opposition of views exemplified

by Achebe's and Ngugi's approach. Ngugi's novel is a much more anti-
colonial polemic, although his characterisation of both black and white
characters is balanced. Achebe's novel takes a much more open and non-
judgemental approach to colonisation, acknowledging the Ibo culture's
difficulty in adapting to the arrival of Europeans. A sign of Ngugi's abrogation
of European expectations and traditions was his refusal in 1977 to write in
English, using instead Gikuyu, his own Kenyan language. This was a
conscious rejection of the language of the coloniser and a decision to write in
the language of ordinary Kenyans, rather than the British-educated elite.

Q. No.2. A lot of postcolonial literature deals with the colonial

encounter between European and non-European. So is the term
postcolonial literature valid for the explication of the literature
written in regions have colonial and then post colonial background ?
How postcolonial is postcolonial literature?

Q. No.3. Write a detail note on the role of postcolonial trinity in

promotions and propagation of postcolonial literature in the world

At the beginning, the Holy Trinity of post-colonial theorists was presented,

including their respective ideas: Edward Said, an American literary theorist of
Palestinian descent, Homi Bhabha, an Indian cultural scientist at Harvard
University, and Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak, an American literary theorist of
Indian descent at Columbia University.

Said coined the terms Orientalism and Othering. He emphasized that the
Oriental culture was constructed in a permanent contrast to that of the
Occident. Even though this merely represents a discourse and thus a
theoretical construct, it becomes practically relevant due to the subsequent
institutionalization and the ensuing orders.

Bhabha tried to overcome this concept of dichotomy by invoking the notion

of hybridity. In his view, there have always been adjustment processes that
have left their marks on both the colonizers and the colonized. The Christian
missions, which were adopted by the colonized but fused with their own
religious rituals, are a rather tangible example of this concept. Bhabha
nevertheless also refers to negative consequences, claiming that the
colonized have adopted the colonizers view in as much as they feel inferior
to the latter. Hence, the constructed world materializes through this
institutionalization.Spivak coined the term subaltern, who, according to
Spivak, is unable to express him- or herself, focusing in her studies especially
on women. She thus developed the view that the white (colonizing) men are
saving the brown women from brown men.One main objective of all three
theorists is to deconstruct the existing discourses regarding the global clash
of the powerful and the subaltern, in order to end the power asymmetries
existing between the Global North and South. One term not mentioned
during the session, but one just as important, is the epistemic violence of the
North.A condition for this discourse is pluralism, meaning that every subject
can contribute, with their own selective world view, to the entire and thus
often incoherent perspective on the (social) world.This notion fundamentally
differs from universalism, which presumes an absolute basic concept of the
world and is often associated with imperialist practices. In order for this aim
to be achieved, all players involved need to be guaranteed agency,
endowing every subject with the opportunity to participate in the
discourse.This approach exposes a fundamental problem, given that the very
method that was supposed to ensure an equitable exchange is a Western
creation, whose rules have to be accepted by every agent in order for them
to be heard. After all, all three aforementioned theorists teach at universities
in the US.Nevertheless, we were able to identify independent tendencies that
break out of this pattern, especially in Latin America. One example is the
lifestyle of the Zapatistas in southern Mexico. We also mentioned certain
research groups that work by the concept of borders, in order to dissociate
themselves as well as their practice from others. In political and economic
terms we established that the Global South cannot be regarded as a
homogeneous inferior community, given that, for example, countries like
Venezuela have developed bilateral partnerships with other Latin American
countries and Angola.Another important post-colonial theorist is Frantz
Fanon, a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, who initially worked in
Algeria and later actively participated in the Algerian Revolution. He
personally experienced the different treatment of black people in various
parts of the world.

Q. No.4. Homi Bhaba is the leading contemporary critic who..

Discuss
The term hybridity has become one of the most recurrent concepts in
postcolonial cultural criticism. It is meant to foreclose the diverse forms of
purity encompassed within essentialist theories. Homi Bhabha is the leading
contemporary critic who has tried to disclose the contradictions inherent in
colonial discourse in order to highlight the colonizers ambivalence in respect
to his position toward the colonized Other. The simple presence of the
colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the
ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim
for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity.

Along with Tom Nairn, Homi Bhabha considers the confusion and hollowness
that resistance produces in the minds of such imperialist authors as Rider
Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. But while Nairn sees their
colonialist grandiose rhetoric as disproportionate to the real decadent
economic and political situation of late Victorian England, Bhabha goes as far
as to see this imperial delirium forming gaps within the English text, gaps
which are the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the
English book. They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations
by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climatic
differences which emerge in the colonial discource as the mixed and split
texts of hybridity. If the English book is read as a production of hybridity,
then it no longer simply commands authority.

His analysis, which is largely based on the Lacanian conceptualization of

mimicry as camouflage focuses on colonial ambivalence. On the one hand,
he sees the colonizer as a snake in the grass who, speaks in a tongue that
is forked, and produces a mimetic representation that emerges as one of
the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge
(Bhabha 85). Bhabha recognizes then that colonial power carefully
establishes highly-sophisticated strategies of control and dominance; that,
while it is aware of its ephemerality, it is also anxious to create the means
that guarantee its economic, political and cultural endurance, through the
conception, in Macaulays words in his Minute on Indian Education
(1835),of a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we
govern a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals and in intellect that is through the reformation of that
category of people referred to by Frantz Fanon in the phrase, black
skin/white masks, or as mimic men by V.S.Naipaul. Friday could be one of
these mimic men; but as we have already seen, the process of colonial
mimicry is both a product of and produces ambivalence and hybridity.

Bhabha explains that Macaulays Indian interpreters and Naipauls mimic

men are authorized versions of otherness: part-objects of a metonymy of
colonial desire, end up emerging as inappropriate colonial subjects [who],
by now producing a partial vision of the colonizers presence (88). What is
left in the repeating action of mimicry, according to Bhabha, is the trace, the
impure, the artificial, the second-hand. Bhabha analyses the slippages in
colonial political discourse, and reveals that the janus-faced attitudes
towards the colonized lead to the production of a mimicry that presents itself
more in the form of a menace and rupture rather than than a resemblance
and consolidation.

Hybridity, Bhabha argues, subverts the narratives of colonial power and

dominant cultures. The series of inclusions and exclusions on which a
dominant culture is premised are deconstructed by the very entry of the
formerly-excluded subjects into the mainstream. The dominant culture is
contaminated by the linguistic and racial differences of the native self.
Hybridity can thus be seen, in Bhabhas interpretation, as a counter-
narrative, a critique of the canon and its exclusion of other narratives. In
other words, the hybridity-acclaimers want to suggest first, that the
colonialist discourses ambivalence is a conspicuous illustration of its
uncertainty; and second, that the migration of yesterdays savages from
their peripheral spaces to the homes of their masters underlies a blessing
invasion that, by Third-Worlding the center, creates fissures within the
very structures that sustain it.

Q. No.5. Examine the concept of orientalism as pronounced by

Edward said in his orientalism.
Orientalism is a study of how the Western colonial powers of
Britain and France represented North African and Middle East- em
lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Orientalism by Edward W. Said is a critique of the study of the Orient and its
ideology. Said examines the historical, cultural, and political views of the East
that are held by the West, and examines how they developed and where
they came from. He basically traces the various views and perceptions back
to the colonial period of British and European domination in the Middle East.
During this period, the United States was not yet a world power and didn't
enter into anything in the East yet. The views and perceptions that came into
being were basically the result of the British and French. The British had
colonies in the East at this time; the French did not but were trying to acquire
some.

The beginning of the study of Orientalism is traced to the early eighteenth

century and focused on language. This early study consisted of translating
works from the Oriental languages into European languages. The colonial
rulers could not rule properly, it was believed, without some knowledge of
the people they ruled. They thought they could acquire this knowledge from
translating various works from the native language into their own. The Orient
existed to be studied and that studying was done by Westerners who
believed themselves to be superior to the "others", which is how they
described the East. They were basically the opposite of the East and
considered to the active while the Orient was considered to be passive. The
Orient existed to be ruled and dominated.

The Orientalist scholars did not distinguish among the countries of the
region. The term "Oriental" was used to describe the Middle East and Near
East and Far East. All of these different cultures were basically lumped into
one for the purposes of study. The reason for the study was political also. The
focus is on language and literature and the study in the area of philology
where the already written texts and other works were translated as a means
of studying the culture. The misrepresentations of the Orient and the various
aspects of the Orient led to confusion and misinterpretation by the scholars
and politicians.

Said points out the errors in the ways of these early Orientalists. He
questions the claim that the Orient was biologically inferior to the European
and thus required domination. Said wants the study to focus on the human
experience of the cultures and societies. He points out the errors in many of
the earlier studies. The Orientalists, and therefore the Europeans, did not
understand the Muslim or Oriental and were afraid, based on their fears.
Their studies propagated these fears and persisted until a certain level of
understanding was reached. This occurred after World War I when the study
of the Orient shifted from Europe to the United States and became part of
the area studies of various social science departments at universities. The
Orient should be viewed for itself and its own cultures and societies and not
viewed in the concept of Western perspective. Said's perspective basically
led to a difference in the way the Orient was approached in studies, which
led the field into a more modern approach.