SOCY 227 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Postcolonialism, Signify, Eurocentrism
17 Mar 2016
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Last week: contemporary theories of class, cultural class analysis. Socioeconomic changes: restructuring of economic and cultural positions. Social processes: how class is represented and understood. Personal experience: how we are classed" by our everyday actions. Postcolonialism is an effort to understand the effects of colonization and decolonization on political systems, cultures, and individuals. Postcolonialism critically engages with the universals" that emerged from modern. Europe: the citizen, rational subject, reason, individual equality. Such universals were used to legitimate and entrench colonial domination and systems of power. But they are also the language in which social justice" is spoken. Thus these modern universals are both indispensible" and inadequate". Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (europe) and then spreading outside of it" (chakrabarty 2000: 7) Ideas of progress, revolution, transformation, etc. , hold the colonized in a state of not yet".
