Postcolonialism

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

As a field of academic study, postcolonialism tends to take its bearings from a handful of very influential writers, including but not limited to Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Before looking more closely at the contribution of these authors and how their writings can help to establish a theoretical framework for case study research, it is helpful to review the theory's genesis through the political, economic, and cultural practices and ideologies that contributed to its development.

The terms colonialism and imperialism are often used together as if there is little to choose between them, but there are useful distinctions to be made for the purposes of understanding postcolonial analysis. Although the diversity of practices known as colonial and imperial make broad generalizations less than helpful, there does seem to be some agreement that imperialism tends to be focused on the concerted expansion of a state's power and political authority over an expanding area of land for reasons that were as much ideological as strategic and commercial. Historical undertakings referred to as imperialistic have been characterized as driven by the will to power of a central, nationalistic authority that understands its own glory and significance to be measured as much by its geographic expanse as by the perpetuation of its political and bureaucratic mechanisms of organization and control. In other words, although the financial benefits that could potentially accrue from such crusades were often substantial, the imperialist mission is as closely tied to an expanding idea of a state's sense of itself as a state and the prerogatives associated with its exercise of military power as well as the perceived virtues of any or all of its political, religious, artistic, and economic cultures.

...