English 381

A partial glossary in progress

Binary/Binary opposition: the term is used to describe a way of thinking that splits the relation between concepts into antithesis (i.e. good and evil, white and black, male and female) as if the opposition were self-evident and natural. In such oppositional thinking, the first concept is privileged and assumed to be normative. 

Colonialism: settlement, rule and control of an area and its people, usually for financial and ideological reasons. Imperialism refers to the control, direct or indirect, but not necessarily settlement of other lands. Historians read the age of empire starting in the mid l8th century, with l875-1914 as the period of a particularly expansive, ideological, and aggressive formal empire. 

Commodification: the turning of value into things, of goods and service, land and labor, into products for sale. Implies the loss of human value in capitalist production and exchange. Commodity fetishism refers to the belief that objects have magical powers: eg. Praying to ivory or contemporary brand names.

Cultural Imperialism: a type of cultural hegemony, through media and other discourses, that allows some cultures to impose, without force, their views, ways of life, and values on others. 

Diaspora: from the greek dia (through) speirein (to scatter); the dispersion of peoples away from their homeland; a historically specific, transnational dislocation that is the result of either forced or voluntary displacement or exile, whose contemporary forms are economic, political, and cultural. 

Discourse: refers to language identified by its institutional and/or cultural context; a group of statements which provide a language for talking about (representing) a particular kind of knowledge about. a topic—such as the discourse of sports or medicine or law. Discourses are ways of talking, thinking or representing a particular subject or topic. The world isn't simply "there" to be transparently talked of. Rather it is always mediated through discourse. Those who have power generally have control over what is known and who has access to that knowledge.

Colonial discourse generally refers to the special language used to shape and naturalize colonial values and its ways of seeing and thinking and imagining itself in relation to others (“savage” vs “civilized”). Produced out of the culture of the colonizers, it is part of the structure and system of knowledge about the colonized—often internalized by the colonized. 

Feminism: is relevant to colonial discourse and postcolonial theory because of its critique of rigid binary oppositions listed below, of patriarchy and imperialism as analogous power structures. 

Gender: the social construction of sexual difference. Identity is defined in terms of difference (boys don’t cry; real men don’t eat quiche). Language creates gender differences and groups masculinity with such virtues as thought, reason, and activity vs. women who are grouped under the opposite. 

Debt Crisis: the inability of developing countries to return loans or service its external debt. In the l980s this resulted in huge debt burdens that led to the expansion of IMF ‘s program of conditional debt management. Such management meant giving loans on the condition of the states readjusting their internal structures of welfare to enable them become creditworthy for future private borrowing.  

Free Trade: trade of goods and services across national borders without restrictions like tariffs, taxes, quotas. Allows corporations freedom to choose the locations of their production and distribution. Eg. NAFTA: the North American Free Trade Agreement (l995) between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. 

G8: the eight major economic powers (U.S., Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Canada, and Russia) who consult on political and economic stability and growth. 

Globalization: the process of integrating individuals and local communities into global, inter-national or larger systems of global capital, dependence and interdependence. 

Hegemony: influence and control over others; Antonio Gramsci’s concept for the ruling class’s promotion of its own interests; authority and class domination not exerted through force but through education and media that represent ruling class interests as “common” and “natural.” 

Ideology: used in two ways: (a) as false consciousness, or the system whereby the oppressed participate in their own oppression by adopting the ideas of the ruling class; (b) as socially shared meaning, a body of assertions, theories, and aims that people use to imagine and practice their understanding of and relation to the world. 

Identity: literally “identity” means "the quality of being the same" (Latin idem: same); implies homogeneity but is produced and constructed within cultures and often defined in terms of difference (what it is not). The concept of identity has been argued by essentialists and anti-essentialists, and most usefully, by the constructionist and historicist position of Stuart Hall: “identity is always in a state of becoming rather than being.”

Intertextuality: the ways that texts are inscribed and informed by other texts, repetitions, allusions, and transformations. 

Nation: an “imagined community;” not a natural entity, a social construction invented in response to human desire for unified land, language, historical identity, and social and political order. 

NGO: Non-governmental organizations. Includes INGOs (International nongovernmental organizations) eg. Red Cross, Amnesty International, Women’s Rights organizations.

Orientalism: A field of study; for Edward Said, Orientalism is a principle of organization, an instrument of power through knowledge, an artificial "European invention" –part of a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient which it produced as the negative of the West and as its inferior. 

Postcolonial: with a hyphen, refers to a historical period following decolonization; without a hyphen, refers to a way of knowing, seeing, and critiquing colonial and imperial practice. Part of the process of decentering colonial ways of seeing and knowing, a way of “decolonizing the mind” (Ngugi). 

Representation: how facts, places, and people are fashioned (mediated) in the context of social and political culture. Language and knowledge are not transparent, but rather part of a process and history of creating meaning. How we “know” Africa or the Middle East, for instance, changes depending on who we read, or whether we are reading colonial or postcolonial histories and literatures. Texts and contexts produce the meanings of the object of our knowledge depending on how that object is represented. Said’s Orientalism is a major study of how the west represents “the rest.” 

Race: a term for the classification of human beings into physically, biologically and genetically distinct groups. Pertinent to rise of colonialism because such evaluative rankings of human society were necessary to justify the domination by colonialist powers of subject people.

Many thanks to Zohreh Sullivan, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, for the idea!