Postcolonialism Blog Tasks
‘The Theory Drop: Postcolonialism and Paul Gilroy’ in MM75 (p28): 1) Look at the first page. What is colonialism - also known as cultural imperialism? From the 16th century onwards, European countries effectively got into a race to see how many undiscovered lands they could conquer first, and by ‘undiscovered’ I mean, ‘countries where the indigenous population didn’t have good enough weapons to fight back’. Countries like France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Britain effectively turned into the seagulls from Finding Nemo, zipping around, shouting ‘MINE’ at every new piece of land they discovered. They fought and conquered the native populations, and often fought each other for the rights to those lands. With that came attitudes that are now collectively known as ‘cultural imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ – the belief that native people were intellectually inferior, and that white colonisers had a moral right to subjugate the local populace as they were ‘civilising’ them: in o