postcolonialism
Question 1. In her introduction to “Remaking Women Feminism and Modernity” in the Middle East Lila Abu Lughod states that “The new literature on the colonial encounter has been exploring how colonialism was not only a process of capitalist expansion, political domination and financial extraction but a process that profoundly transformed the everyday life and discursive terms of the colonized.” Explain what she means by this and how the colonial encounter transformd the everyday life and discursive terms of the colonized. The article of Mitchell and Moore-Gilbert discussion of different post-colonial theorists will be specifically useful in writing this essay. The great majority of scholars of the history of European colonialism concentrate their efforts on the impact of imperialism on the colonized peoples. The impact of imperialism is reckoned through the study of its effects on colonized groups rather than on European capitalists and powers. So there is a radical transformation in the historiography of imperialism and colonization. There is a shift away from the elitist, political and military emphasis of the earlier literature to a focus on social history. They seek to reconstruct the colonial experience by building from the everyday lives of the groups such as peasants, workers and women who were once neglected. Lila Abulughod points this out in her following statement; “The new literature on the colonial encounter has been exploring how colonialism was not only a process of capitalist expansion, political domination and financial extraction but also a process that profoundly transformed the everyday live and discursive terms of the colonized.” These new approaches were produced for an interpretation of materials that were put by scholars such as Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Deriving its essence from Marxist theory which grounds its claims on base and superstructure, Gramsci bases his theory upon superstructure which is composed of two realms, the political and the civil society. The political society is the field of the state where it exerts domination through coercion. Gramsci identifies civil society with the ideological superstructure, the institutions and technical instruments that create and diffuse modes of thought. Culture is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, institutions and of other people doesn’t work through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. The people in the society believe in the legitimacy of order and cannot think of any alternative. As Marxist theory puts, in every epoch the ideas of the ruling class is the ruling ideas. Gramscian framework differentiates from Marxist approach in the sense that Gramsci sees this as a result of the organization of civil society in which consent is created whereas Marx sees civil society as a realm of conflicts and antagonisms.Certain cultural forms dominate over others and Gramsci identifies this as hegemony. This concept is essential for the cultural life in the industrial west and the colonies. Hegemony is the most important face of power, it is never stable, always in progress and it is not singular.