Post-Colonialism: Trying To Regain Ethnic Individuality :: essays research papers fc

Indeed, the stranger has unusual customs. The color man held the paper like a sacred thing. His hands shook, and we mistrusted him... For how numerous moons will the stranger be among us? (Vera 43)The stranger still lives among the stack of Zimbabwe, though the colonial political authority has left. so far I curiosity if the town elder speaking in the above passage from Yvonne Veras Nehanda would distinguish current Zimbabwean authorities as strangers or countrymen. Could he reach to todays government officials and understand the languages which they speak? Would he feel at fireside in an African country with borders defined by European majestic powers without regard to the various ethnic nations involved? Post-colonial theory attempts to explain problems such(prenominal) as these, yet it does so almost exclusively in the languages of the European colonial powers. Europeans even created the word Africa. "To name the world is to understand it, to know it and to flummox control over it" (Ashcroft 283). Because knowledge is power, and words, whether written or spoken, are the mediocre of exchange, using words incurs responsibility.One must use special consider with broadly defined words and terms, such as post-colonial. Post-colonial literature describes a wide array of experiences set in the contexts of heterogeneous societies which themselves represent legion(predicate) different ethnic groups. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin define post-colonial theory as word of "migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe... and the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come into being" (Ashcroft 2). The wide-ranging nature of the term post-colonial threatens to break its usefulness by "diffusion... so extremethat it is used to refer to non only vastly different but even opposed activities" (Ashcroft 2). Post-colonialism encompasses many another(prenominal) of the issues encountered in the work we have discussed thus far in the semester. Yet because vague and generalized theories have limits and tend to oversimplify, clouding over sure problems, one must handle the term with care.Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin suggest that we should trim the term post-colonial to signify after colonialism. "All post-colonial societies are still lawsuit in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, and independence has not solved the problem" (Ashcroft 2). After colonialism, current elites, often in the form of dictators, frequently rose and still cabbage to power in post-colonial countries.