Post Colonial Theory Quotes

Un(der)known Writers: Flavia Dzodan By The New Inquiry Few words define The Netherlands better than "imperialist". In a time of white appropriations of post colonial theory, few pause to realize that no post colonial analysis is possible while we live in a country where the "post" lays within a distant future (i.e. The Netherlands still holds colonial territories in the Caribbean). ~ Anonymous

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all. ~ Arundhati Roy

I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division say, of men into "us" (Westerners) and "they" (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends. ~ Edward W. Said

She was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head. ~ Chinua Achebe

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head.

Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn't they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance. ~ Ngugi Wa Thiongo

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard.
'Is Leela self who write that,' Ramlogan said. 'I didn't ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.'
It read:

NOTICE
NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS!
ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS!

Ganesh said, 'Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.'
That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib. ~ V.S. Naipaul

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don't sit down, sahib? It ain't dirty. Is just how it does look.'
Ganesh didn't sit down. 'Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience. ~ Fred D'Aguiar

I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief. ~ Alan Moore

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it. ~ Isabel Allende

Jonny has a theory that South Africa are doomed to choke in every major tournament for the next fifty years as payment for apartheid. He also believes that England will spend centuries working off their colonial sins by performing miserably at sport. I then ask him why Australia, who wiped out generations of Aborigines, win everything in every sport, and he shuts up. ~ Shehan Karunatilaka

If we expect translation to reproduce the totality of the semantics and affective uses of the original text, then we believe that translation must be loyal to the seminal language system, rather than letting the discourse travel and undertake the adventure of discovering - or creating - a new set of meaning according to the politics of the translation itself. Rigid loyalty to the original in the translated version was, in effect, the intentionality of the translation of the doctrines and precepts that constituted the colonial discourse. ~ Hector Dominguez Ruvalcaba

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial
or is it post-colonial?
cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it
assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers. ~ Salman Rushdie

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know. ~ Robert Antoni

When you have countries that have a lot of minerals and diamonds and oil and are in business with companies from all over the world - but these companies don't share, really, their profits - this is called post-post-colonial. ~ Claire Denis

It was India's forsaken multitudes - whose suitability for democracy was repeatedly questioned and whose disenfranchisement high-mindedly rationalised away by the country's post-colonial elite - who resuscitated the republic [from the Emergency] ~ Komireddi K S

Since the police department is becoming more and more militarized we're stuck in a position where we're reverting to that sort of behaviour that other places still suffer from because they're kept in that post-colonial state of development indefinitely so we can reap the benefits of taking whatever natural resources they have. ~ Immortal Technique

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

'Midnight's Children' falls under the genre of post-colonial writing, and there is a range of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman who popularised it. 'Midnight's Children' was incredibly important in this canon. ~ Satya Bhabha

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) moved from a legitimate to a charismatic role, reversing the course followed by Washington. Yet therewere surface similarities in their careers. Both led military rebellions against English monarchs
Cromwell against Charles I, Washington against George III. Each took local militia
the "train bands" of Cromwell, the colonial levies of Washington
and forged professional armies on a national scale. Each infused a new ethos in his troops
a religious spirit in Cromwell's case, a post-colonial American identity in Washington's. ~ Garry Wills

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough. ~ Jessica Hagedorn

We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust. ~ Patrick Chappatte

African cinema doesn't have an African industry at all and that's where our problem arises. We come to all of these initiatives with a lot of suspicion because we're so inhabited by the notion of being colonized, the post-colonial thought that someone wants us to do something that is their interest and not ours and even it's not true, there's the suspicion of it like where is this going? ~ Jihan El-Tahri

Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing. ~ Charles Krauthammer

For later generations of women - post Sexual Revolution - enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to the list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we're back in the land of dreariness of spirit. ~ Alice Munro

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel's spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel's being set exclusively apart for God. ~ William Lane Craig

We live now in a glorious age which we might term 'Post Frozen'. Frozen – the feminist Disney movie where the idiot sexy prince turns out to be a betraying motherfuck, and the whole plot revolves around, instead, the love of two sisters. ~ Caitlin Moran

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack. ~ Richard Dawkins

Hush," said January. "We may be old, but we're not silly. Satan is a catchall term. It gives identity to our theory of a centralized leadership. Call him what you want, a maximum leader, a caudillo. A Genghis Khan or Sitting Bull. Or a council of wise men, or warlords. The concept is sound. Logical. ~ Jeff Long

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan's hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton's theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein's contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He'd described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

I stood on the old ferry dock and watched the icy sludge slide by. Patches of white ice slipped through, but mostly it was grey slush, sluggish and heavy looking. The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odour of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far bank stood the ruins of Birkenhead, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count. ~ Neil Davies

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. ~ David Deutsch

Proof' is the hallmark of religion. ~ Bill Gaede

As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. ~ H.L. Mencken

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present. ~ Paul Bowles

Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight. ~ Matt Taibbi

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape, from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid-century to the recent collapse of Communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes-not only in the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism. ~ His Highness The Aga Khan