Hello Readers!
Colonialism/Postcolonialism is a book written by Ania Loomba. The work situates the discourse of colonialism and postcolonialism in current time and looks towards various aspects such as globalization, market capitalism, market fundamentalism, imperialism and so on.
When postcolonial studies were newly introduced by Edward Said, it was only looked with singular perspective. It was limited only to racism, class conflicts, wars, colonizers and the colonized. But Ania Loomba tries to go beyond the boundaries of this study and locates the discourse in new ways.
In the first chapter, there is a dictionary meaning of Colonialism and Imperialism.
"a settlement in a new country … a body of people who settle in a new
locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers
and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with
the parent state is kept up." (Oxford English Dictionary)
This definition is given support by the example of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Mongols conquering the Middle East and China.
In a general way, colonialism can be defined as the conquest of land by fighting, killing or abducting the original habitants, and controlling their land and goods.
The conclusion of the book contains a very remarkable and striking thought regarding the perspective of looking at imperialism and postcolonial studies. It says as follows,
"If universities are to remain sites of dissent and free intellectual inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of American or any other power, critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be more necessary than ever." (Loomba, 228)
References:
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism-postcolonialism. 2nd ed., PDF, Routledge, 2005.
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