What Is Colonialism

Jeju: From peace island to war island

SPEAKING FREELY
Jeju: From peace island to war island
By John Eperjesi

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

Korean-American writer Paul Yoon's 2009 short story collection Once the Shore ( Sarabande ), which won the prize for fiction at the 13th Asian American Literary Awards, is set on a fictionalized version of Jeju Island and deals with the devastating impact of militarism, colonialism, and the cold war on a rugged island culture.

In Once the Shore , Yoon gives us Oceania from below, an island multitude composed of service workers, farmers, divers, fishermen, war orphans, and various others who form strange friendships across barriers of age, gender, ethnicity, and


nationality. The lead story is set in the present and opens with a sixty-something American woman at a high-end tourist resort gazing out over the ocean while thinking about her deceased husband, a Korean War veteran who she comes to realize probably cheated on her and lied about it when he returned from the war.

She befriends a young Korean waiter who often stands behind her listening, "as if it weren't her voice at all, but one that originated from the sea.

Odyssey to the Nation-State: State-building and the legacy of ...

By Younes Abouyoub*

August 10, 2011

Morocco World News

The rolling revolts in many countries in Africa and the Middle East and the split of Sudan into two separate countries in last July raise several problems that a number of post-colonial states suffer from, not the least of which is the nature of the state and the social contracts, if any, that govern relations between the rulers and the peoples. Even though human experiences are most often than not over-determined, and notwithstanding the agency of the peoples and political elites of these countries, especially in the post-independence era, it remains that some historical experiences more than others have had a detrimental effect on the political developments of these nations. The trauma of colonial domination is one of such experiences, which mediated the access of many African countries to ‘modernity’ and the ‘nation-state’.

In their attempt to conceptualize the ethos and the aspirations of the anticolonial movement, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon have defined it as the opposite of what the colonial state once stood for. They described colonialism as a totalizing structure based on brutality, objectification, racism and exclusion .  In their opinion, this was the paradigm against which the postcolonial state should have been constructed. Anticolonialists had to replace a negative structure that limited power by a positive one in the form of a regenerative counter-power . Yet, the history of a vast majority of post-independence third-world states and mostly African ones has been one of reproduction of the bifurcated power paradigm they inherited from colonial powers who had visited on them this extremely violent and sustainably destructive form of rule in the name of the civilizing mission.

Some may argue against this premise by saying that the colonial experience has indeed helped third world countries in the process of state formation, transition to democracy, and institution building. This argument espoused by many apologists of the colonial conquest, and more particularly of the scramble for Africa has triggered the late controversy between Algeria and France over the supposedly “positive legacy” of colonialism as the French president Nicolas Zarkosy described it. In fact, far from being a positive contribution to development and institutional building of a democratic modern state based on the rule of law, colonial powers both through direct and indirect forms of rules they applied to the subjugated natives, have established norms of rule at odds with the concepts of the nation-state, the rule of law, and citizenship. Moreover, in the post-independence era the former colonial powers continued to sustain these types of states that yielded negative political identities through a series of subtle neo-colonial mechanisms and both economic and non-economic coercive policies.

Also like: "what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated"

@ Indeed, I dunno quite what it is that makes us Brits this way. Just centuries of colonialism that bit us in the arse, I suppose.

RT @: China in Africa. - What is the real China-Africa story? Is it “new colonialism”

China in Africa. - What is the real China-Africa story? Is it “new colonialism” or is the West just afraid...

@ Colonialism. I am 12 and what is this.

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