Advertising: Introduction to Postcolonialism

 Introduction to Postcolonialism: blog tasks


Create a new blog post called 'Advertising: Postcolonialism blog tasks'. Read ‘The Theory Drop: Postcolonialism and Paul Gilroy’ in MM75  (p28). You'll find our Media Magazine archive here - remember you'll need your Greenford Google login to access.

Answer the following questions on your blog:

1) Look at the first page. What is colonialism - also known as cultural imperialism? 
Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” the belief
that native people were intellectually inferior, and that white colonisers had a moral right to subjugate the local populace as they were ‘civilising’ them: in other words, trying to make them more like Western European society.

2) Now look at the second page. What is postcolonialism? 
Postcolonialism, like postmodernism, refers less to a time period and more to a critiquing of a school of thought hat came before it. Postcolonialism exists to question white patriarchal views with a particular reference to how they relate to race.

3) How does Paul Gilroy suggest postcolonialism influences British culture?
Britain’s ...criminalisation of immigrants and their descendants especially those from the Caribbean and South Asia signifies a melancholic response to these social and political groups that are essential to late modern British life.

4) What is 'othering'?
Othering is the phenomenon whereby we identify something as being different from, or alien to our social identity.

5) What examples of 'othering' are provided by the article?
Things have come a long way since Love Thy Neighbour, the seventies sitcom about a Black family living next door to a white family with a bigot for a man of the house.

6) What is 'double consciousness'? 
This othering can sometimes manifest in a confusion over identity, particularly for people from ethnic minorities living in the Western world. This confusion is referred to as a ‘double consciousness’ whereby people struggle to reconcile two nationalities or identities.

7) What are 'racial hierarchies'?
The idea that some races are superior to other ones.

8) What examples from recent media products challenge the idea of racial hierarchies? 
Nick Fury’s role as director of SHIELD in the Marvel films, striving for a time when a person’s ethnicity doesn’t make a difference to anyone.

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