Postcolonial Quotes & Sayings

Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality. — Namsoon Kang

The stories surrounding eating durians remind us that literature should incorporate low culture, bringing it closer to lived reality. These legends come not from the pens of the elite, but are assembled from the words of the masses, both written and spoken, passed from one person to another - the only way to create a text this deep and compelling. — Wong Yoon Wah

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. — Pankaj Mishra

In the Cold War, Russia effectively occupied all of Eastern Europe, suppressing not only its freedoms but also its ethnic conflicts. For five centuries the Ottomans managed most of the Middle East in the same way. But today we live in a postimperial and a postcolonial world. No great power wants to occupy anybody. As we've seen, the major powers have all learned the hard way that when you occupy another country all that you win is a bill. It is much easier to import a country's labor and natural resources - or their brainpower online - than it is to take them over. Also, — Thomas L. Friedman

In this postcolonial context, my contention is that interreligious engagement is enhanced by renewed attention to the particularity of religious traditions. From a European (Anglican) standpoint, a revised particularist theology of religions is proposed as an appropriate Christian theology for our time that respects the integrity of Christianity and of other religious traditions. This particularist approach concerns Christian terms of engagement with other religious traditions, as these may be understood in Christian theological terms. Having regard to questions raised in the opening paragraph above, centred in trinitarian thinking, as capable of hospitality to the liberative and interreligious concerns of post-colonial, Asian and feminist theologies; respectful interreligious engagement and the pursuit of gender justice amid increasing global diversity need not require repudiation of orthodox trinitarian thought and its liturgical expressions. — Jenny Daggers

The research I present in this book moves within a complex position: palpable tensions exist alongside exciting possibilities. CBPR methodologies emerged from critiques of conventional researcher-driven approaches and from scholarship and activism that names and problemitizes the power imbalances in current practices. CBPR strives to conduct research based in communities and founded upon core community values. With these broader critiques in mind, I wanted to consider how archaeology might be practiced if the concepts of decolonization and postcolonial theory were applied to the discipline. How might archaeological research change to create a reciprocal practice that truly benefits communities, at least as much as it benefits the scholarly interests of archaeologists? — Sonya Atalay

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That s the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I know myself as well. — Aime Cesaire

Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial — Henry Kissinger

If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts;
Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void — Deanne Williams

During the twenty-one year rule of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Egypt.

Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen- the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans- for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honour. These cliches about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves. — Pankaj Mishra

Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together. — Philip Gourevitch

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you'd like to meet some fully realized characters while learning some specifics of Zimbabwe's postcolonial struggles, as I did, you're likely to come away with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. If you're willing to settle for first-rate writing and provocative meditations on memory, corruption and loss, they are all here in abundance. — Jabari Asim

That such people could accomodate conflicting worldly labels... was a talent of postcolonial life, evidence of adaptation by people who have had many different categories foisted on them by outsiders. — Eliza Griswold

So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. — Thomas C. Foster

The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness. — Okwui Enwezor

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. — Jane Goldman