Cynical Theories Ch 3 Postcolonial Theory: Deconstructing the West to Save the Other
Although today most people would agree that colonialism was bad, it dominated global politics for five centuries, from about the fifteenth until the middle of the twentieth. At the time there were undoubtedly some enlightened people who frowned upon it, but it was largely accepted. The French used the phrase, 'la mission civilisatrice' (the civilizing mission) and in North America they used the phrase, 'manifest destiny'. Following WWII especially, these ideologies quickly lost favor and decolonization proceeded quickly, so that by the early 1960s, academia and the general public agreed on the immorality of colonialism. This also happens to be the time that postmodernism was coming into vouge, so postcolonialism is best seen as a narrowing of the focus of postmodernism to deal specifically with the problems of colonialism. For postcolonialism, it is not enough that we simply all agree that colonialism was bad, nor is it enough to try to address the political and econom