Abstract

Once western thinking has been unanimously recognized, sanctioned and codified as universally canonic, othering has been achieved in its most radical forms. Thus, the civilizing mission of colonialism becomes not a story of progress and enlightenment, but one of marginalization and destruction. Postcolonial theory is therefore called to expose the ideological processes by which knowledge is acquired under the control and surveillance of the metropole. Postcolonial thinking has stressed the common political, social, and psychological terrain through which all the colonized peoples had to pass. It has recognized the potency of such concepts as ‘Blackness’ at the heart of the oppression and denigration endemic to the colonial enterprise. But it has also recognized the fictionality of such a concept, and the readiness with which the colonized Black could be persuaded to wear a white mask of culture and privilege. Postcolonial theory has brought together the concept of alienation and of psychological marginalization from a kind of Marxist awareness of the historical events within which came into being the ideologies responsible for imposing this alienation.