Modernity emphasized on two aspects:-
1. Rational and optimal use of resources in order to achieve maximum profits.
This was directly linked to the economic system of capitalism where profits and efficiency were seen as intimately linked.
2.The other side of this modernity was that as it expanded, more countries in
Europe sought greater profits, resources and labour outside Europe.
That is, modernization and industrialization (after the seventeenth century) needed sources of labour and raw materials and markets for their products.
European markets and factories could not generate profits from within European sales alone. This meant that European countries began to look at Asia, South America and Africa as sites providing them the much-required resources. In this way, modernity directly led to voyages of discovery (for trade routes) and conquest (for control over resources in other parts of the world).
Colonialism emerged out of this process of industrial modernity and its
capitalist modes of production.
For various nations in Africa, Asia and South America modernity has
historically been characterized by the rule and dominance of native cultures
by non-native, usually European ones.
Modernity has thus been colonial
modernity for many regions of the non-white world. Colonialism can be
described as the process of settlement by Europeans in Asian, African and
South American territories.
Colonization found its climactic moments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was an exploitative mechanism—
economic exploitation of resources, the use of native peoples, the conquest of territory and markets—based on the difference in race, culture, forms of knowledge, technological advancement and political systems between the Europeans and the natives.
Structures of colonial domination were, of course, racialized in the sense
that they were created and administered by acknowledging and reinforcing the racial difference between the natives and the colonial masters.
The European master possessed the power to govern, and the natives were
subjects to the systems created by the master.
Colonial presence produced images and representations of natives—essentially, non-white races and ethnic
groups in Africa, Asia and South America—that were consumed by both
colonial races back in Europe as well as the natives themselves. This latter
phenomenon, where the native assimilated and believed his/her prejudiced, skewed and often downright false representation of him/herself by the European was made possible through the education system, religion and the law.
The history of nations like India and countries in Africa is, therefore,
very often, a history written (documented) by the Europeans.
Colonial modernity is thus a conjugation of acts of representation and acts of political and economic power.
They interpreted colonialism as something more than mere military-political power, viewing it
as a process of cultural domination through representation, discourse and
documentation.
This critique of colonial racialized acts of representation in law, history writing, literature, religion and educational practices provides the opening moves of what has come to be known as postcolonial theory.
Postcolonial theory focuses on question of race within colonialism, and shows how the optic of race enables colonial powers to represent, reflect, refract and make visible native cultures in particular ways.
It begins with the assumption that colonial writing, arts, legal systems, science and other socio-cultural practices are always racialized and unequal where the colonial does
the representation and the native is represented.
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