Postcolonial Sally Morgan

Define postcolonialism

While "colonialism" can be defined as a political, economic, and social formation involving the conquest and control of foreign territories by various European powers. Postcolonialism can be defined as a term coined to describe the issues which followed colonialism. Everyone knows approximately what the term means, which is to suggest that former colonies and colonists share certain qualities and experiences, the term is used when discussing history, literature, politics, culture and identity. This could for instance be language that the settlers forced upon the natives, this was done in for instance Australia and India by the British people but other European countries did it as well, the French did it in Africa and today Portuguese is used in other continents such as South America.

This clash between two different cultures and the problems resulting from it must be regarded as a major theme in postcolonialism, for centuries the colonial suppressor often had been forcing his civilised values on the natives this could be language again, national days, going to church every Sunday. Some of these values still exist in the previously colonised countries and it can be very difficult to create you own identity and values as an independent nation if you don't have anything you can return to in your history/culture. It can be very difficult to be truly independent if you don't have anything to go back to, and because of that some nations still have a presence of their former colonists culture/values that can be almost impossible to be decolonized of.

You could take Australia as an example, a lot of British people remained in Australia after their independence and therefore a lot of the values and culture from the colonialism are still present today. They still have the same Queen, the same language roughly, the Australia people have changed the language a bit to make it their own and step away from the former colonists, but if you are a British traveller in Australia today you would have no trouble making an understandable conversation with an Australian. They did not have anything to go back to, most of the population did not have any relations to the aboriginal culture and turned away from it and because of that they had to make minor adjustment to get their own identity and be separated from The British Empire, they got their own government, own national days and so forth.

If you consider Indian on the other hand they had a very old culture to refer back to after their independence, they started to use their former language and returned to own values, but even in this case the British language are still used in India as a "second" language and it is often used when talking about post-colonial issues.

To give a conclusion of it all, one might say that post-colonialism