Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Algeria, Angola) or diplomatic means (for example,
Cameroon, Sri Lanka), won for themselves the status of
self-governing nation-states. At the same time, because
the term ‘‘postcolonialism’’ has proven to be a lightning
rod for rigorous and ongoing debate, it, unlike colonialism,
cannot be divorced from the context of its coinage.
Thus it has come to refer as much to the largely academic
discourse from whence it emerged as to the historical era
it purportedly describes.
With the publication of his landmark text
Orientalism in 1978, Edward W. Said set the stage both
thematically and methodologically for the critical and
theoretical corpus that would subsequently take shape
under the rubric of postcolonial studies. In this foundational
work, Said, inspired by the writings of the French
philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), examined
the means by which ‘‘the West,’’ principally Britain,
France, and North America, produces knowledge about
and thereby exerts power over ‘‘the East.’’ The resulting
mode of discourse, which Said dubbed Orientalism,
locks East and West into a mutually exclusive and
oppositional relationship by producing ‘‘the Orient’’ as
the sensual, emotional, inscrutable, and fundamentalist
Other to ‘‘the Occident,’’ defined by comparison as
cerebral, rational, transparent, and secular. Since the
late 1970s, a vast array of scholars have built upon
Said’s interest in the protean form and enduring legacy
of colonial relations, thereby expanding the boundaries
of his seminal project considerably. The first wave of
such scholars, who gained prominence in the 1980s,
were typically either literary critics with an interest in
work produced during the age of empire or by postindependence
Third World writers (such as Homi
Bhabha); politically engaged in tracing the emergence
of the nation as a distinctly modern formation (such as
Benedict Anderson); or members of the Subaltern
Studies Group, which took as its charge the rewriting
of India’s history so as to account for the political
agency of the socially disadvantaged (such as Gayatri
Spivak). Beginning in the last decade of the twentieth
century, the field became even more multidisciplinary,
inciting interest from and exerting influence on academics
across the humanities and social sciences, including a
good many devoted to the study of visual culture in
general and cinema more specifically.
Despite the fact that postcolonial studies is characterized
by a diversity of perspectives and plurality of
approaches, certain generalizations about it can be made.
What unifies the field first and foremost is its object of
study, which includes both the colonial and postcolonial
periods, with an emphasis on the various ways power is
exercised, resistance is mounted, and identity is constructed
therein. Second, insofar as postcolonial theory
has been profoundly influenced by poststructuralist
thought, with its deconstructionist methodologies and
anti-essentialist premises, it tends to regard its favored
subject matter—power, resistance, and identity—as necessarily
contingent, unstable, contradictory, and/or in
process. Finally, postcolonial studies tends to be highly
self-critical and thus continually engaged in an active
questioning of its own assumptions and assertions, even
problematizing its very name.
While the term ‘‘postcolonialism’’ has proven to be
troubling to theorists for a number of reasons, the most
noteworthy of these is the fact that the prefix ‘‘post’’
posits a relationship of succession and thus a definitive
break with that which it precedes syntactically. Yet there
is, in fact, a great deal of continuity between those eras
designated as colonial on the one hand and postcolonial
on the other due to the effects of a neocolonialism
wherein power is consolidated not through conquest
and annexation, but through control of the international
marketplace and culture industries. Thus, as problematic
as the terms ‘‘First World’’ and ‘‘Third World’’ are due
to their purchase on Eurocentric notions of progress, they
capture a differential that is as relevant today as it was
when they were first coined in the 1950s; that is, many
formerly colonized nations, despite their political independence,
remain economically dependent on Western
superpowers due to the international division of labor
and circulation of goods that has emerged in the era of
globalization. Moreover, for settler societies like the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the
label ‘‘postcolonial’’ is an outright misnomer. While all
of these countries have been self-governing for at least a
century, they nonetheless continue to assert sovereignty
over those aboriginal populations whose ancestors were
regularly rounded up, shuttled about, or killed off by
European settlers pursuing a policy of manifest destiny.
In order to draw attention to such populations and foreground
the specificity of their situation, the World
Council of Indigenous People, under the leadership of
George Manuel in the 1970s, popularized the notion of
a ‘‘Fourth World’’ and thereby staked out the conceptual,
if not geographical, territory for a nascent pan-indigenous
movement.
EUROPEAN COLONIAL CINEMA
By the time cinema was invented, well over half of the
world’s land mass was under the control of a handful of
European powers, and a complex network of trade and
travel routes traversing the globe had already been established
in order to ensure the transnational flow of
populations, capital, raw materials, and consumer goods.
As a result, the equipment needed to make and view film
moved fairly freely between the European metropolises
and various colonial outposts, enabling cinema to assume
326 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM