Key Concepts: Orientalism, Postcolonialism, Negritude
Latent Orientalism
There is a distinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ Orientalism. Said borrows these terms from Freud.
Latent Orientalism describes the dreams and fantasies about the Orient that, in Said’s view, remain relatively constant over time.
Manifest Orientalism refers to the myriad examples of Orientalist knowledge produced at different historical junctures.
Said proposes that while the manifestations of Orientalism will inevitably be different, due to reasons of historical specificity and individual styles and perspectives, their underlying or latent premises will tend to be the same.
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism in part involves the challenge to colonial ways of knowing, ‘writing back’ in opposition to such views. But colonial ways of knowing still circulate and have agency in the present; unfortunately, they have not magically disappeared as the Empire has declined. Internal colonialism persists in many once-colonised countries. The term ‘postcolonialism’ is not the same as ‘after colonialism’, as if colonial values are no longer to be reckoned with. It does not define a radically new historical era. Nor does it herald a brave new world where all the ills of the colonial past have been cured. Rather, ‘postcolonialism’ recognises both historical continuity and change. On the one hand, it acknowledges that the material realities and discursive modes of representation established through colonialism are still very much with us today, even if the political map of the world has altered through decolonisation. But on the other hand, it prizes the promise, the possibility and the continuing necessity of change, while recognising that important challenges and changes have already been achieved.
Negritude
Negritude has been influential in Africa, the Caribbean and America as a mode which enables oppressed peoples to imagine themselves as a particular and united collective. Today it is most often associated with the work of two Francophone writers and statesmen, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. One of its aims was to unite peoples living in different places through a sense of shared ancestry and common origin, and it retained a distinctly pan-national and indeed pan-continental set of aims. Césaire and Senghor fought back at derogatory views of black peoples in their writing by presenting the condition of being black as profoundly valuable. Whereas colonial discourses frequently represented black peoples as primitive and degenerate, having no culture of any worth, the Negritude writers wrote in praise of the laudable qualities of black peoples and cultures. In the nineteenth century, throughout Europe it was commonly believed that the world’s population existed as a hierarchy of ‘races’ based upon skin colour, with white Europeans deemed the most civilised and black Africans as the most savage. Negritude was an attempt to rescue and reverse blackness from its definition always in negative terms. Blackness was reconstructed as something positive and valuable, behind which black peoples throughout the world could unite as one body.