10 activist who fought against colonial rule, and their successors who now engage
with its continuing legacy, challenged and revised domination definition of race, culture, language, and class in the process of making their voice heard.
Postcolonial is the struggle of colonized nation to liberate their nation. Awareness of the colonized about colonizer’s representation is coming in their
mind during this continuing process. Then, they reclaim their past and identity from their point of view. They will react against colonialism.
According to Peter Barry 2002: 194, characteristically, postcolonial writers evoke or create a pre-colonial version of their own nation, rejecting the
modern and the contemporary, which is tainted with the colonial status of their countries. In his book Beginning Theory, he formulated some characteristics of
postcolonial criticism. First, it is an awareness of representations of the non- European as exotic or immoral ‘Other’. The second area of concern in
postcolonial criticism is language. Some postcolonial writers have concluded that the colonizers’ language is permanently tainted, and that to write in it involves a
crucial acquiescence in colonial structures. The third characteristic is the emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable. Then, the last is the stress on ‘cross-
cultural’ interactions Barry, 2002: 194-196.
2.1.3. Forms of Colonialism
Ania Loomba 2000: 2 defined colonialism is the process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the
communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices
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11 including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and
rebellions. Colonizer does not only take the land but also empowers and builds a new culture community domination in their colonial land.
Boehmer gives similar definition about colonialism. According to Boehmer 1995: 2, colonialism involves of imperial power, and is manifested in
settlement, of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitant of occupied lands.
Stephen Slemon, in his essay The Scramble for Post-colonialism published in Postcolonial studies Readers, defines the concept of colonialism as an
ideological and discursive formation with the way in which colonialism is viewed as an apparatus for constituting subject positions through the field of
representation. The description of colonialism’s multiple strategies for regulating Europe’s others can be expressed by the following diagram:
Institutional Regulators Colonialist educational apparatuses
C B
A F Colonizer Colonized
D E
The semiotic field ‘textuality’
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12 The general understanding that is colonialism works on a left-to-right
order of domination, with line ‘A’ is representing various theories of how colonialism oppresses through direct political and economic control. Line ‘BC’
and ‘DE’ are representing differing concept of the ideological regulation of colonial subjects, of subordination through the manufacture of consent. Line ‘F’
representing colonialist power is seen to operate through a complex relationship between the apparatus Ashcroft, 2002: 46.
From the diagram above, colonialism runs in some ways. The first one is called ‘brute force’ or ‘direct political’ of colonialist oppression. The physical
colonialism is usually done when the colonizer doing expands of their territory. The other form of colonialism is by indoctrinating their ideology to the colonized.
It is done softly through the constitutive power of state apparatuses like education and academic field. The other colonialist ways are reproducing ideology through
the strategic deployment of semiotic field of representations, such as literary works, advertising, sculpture, travelogues, exploration document, maps. Those
ways are unified by colonizer to colonize the others. Those constitutive powers are called hegemony.
Colonizer uses hegemony to create unconsciousness of the colonized about the colonialism. in this case, the colonized will have willingness to be
empowered by the colonizer. Gramsci formulated the concept of hegemony. Hegemony is power
achieved through a combination of coercion and consent. He argued that the ruling classes achieve domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by
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13 creating subjects who ‘willingly’ submit to being ruled. In other words, hegemony
is achieved not only by direct manipulation or indoctrination, but by playing upon the common sense of people, or lived system of meanings and values Loomba,
2000: 29. In Postcolonial Studies Reader, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin wrote that:
Education is perhaps the most insidious and in some ways the most cryptic of colonialist survivals, older systems now passing, sometimes
imperceptibly, into neo-colonialist configuration. Education, whether state or missionary, primary or secondary and later tertiary was a massive
cannon in the artillery of empire. The domination by consent is achieved through what is taught to the colonized, how it is taught, and the
subsequent emplacement of the educated subject as a part of the continuing imperial apparatus- a knowledge of English Literature, for
instance, was required for entry into the civil service and the legal professions. Education is thus a conquest of another kind of territory-it is
the foundation of colonialist power and consolidates this power through legal and administrative apparatuses. Education can be a technology of
colonialist subjectification. It strongly reinforced such textual representation Aschroft, 2002: 425.
In colonialism, education becomes an effective media for colonizer to
achieve hegemony. It is a soft way to indoctrinate the mental and ideology of colonized nation. Moreover, in White point of view, educate the colonized is
civilizing the colonized. They create a concept in natives’ mental that White’s concept of education is good. Through education, colonizer constructs the
colonized mind to think and act as White. Indirectly, Whites creates culture domination in their colonial subject because colonized nation will be inferior and
ashamed to act in their culture through this hegemony.
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14
2.1.4. Colonialist Representation and Stereotyping of the Colonized
