What if Postcolonial now is a path to a non-westernized identity? 

I have heard the term postcolonial before and I simply understood it as the historical period after the abolition of colonialism or the rupture between a colony and the colonizing country which resulted in the independence of the colony and its recognition as a country. After the reading of this week, I comprehend that this term is broader and can have different meanings based on the spelling. In “Defining Imperialism and Colonialism” by Dean Baldwin and Patrick Quinn, there has been some clarification between post-colonial and postcolonial. The latter refers to the influence of the colonizer on education, ideology, literature, religion, culture, and the former to my first grasp of this term. (Quinn)

It Is fascinating how Western countries or natives believed strongly that other cultures were inferior and how persistent they were to impose it on other countries. “The implicit and often explicit message of European missionaries, for example, was that Indigenous religions were “heathen,” “barbaric,” “unenlightened,” and inferior to Christianity.” (Quinn) This assumption was made without any further study. Thomas Babington Macauley admitted in “Minute on Indian Education” that he had no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic and continued to say that a Western education is more valuable than an Eastern one (Macauley, 1835). That raised some questions such as “How did they evaluate one educational system against another one? What metrics did they use? What one can base on to gauge one culture to another?” Macauley’s text reinforced the idea that only Westerners can educate people, civilize them, and guide them toward progress and betterment as human beings. The same ideology is seen in Dean Baldwin and Patrick’s writing on postcolonial which demonstrates that Westernization is a key role in what postcolonial entails.

Western culture or influence remains in some way, even after many civilians fought to remove Western colonizers from their country. During her speech, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie exposed the impact that I had on her as a young writer who used to draft stories about people and places that she could not relate to or has not visited because the books available to her were written from British authors. She elaborated on the danger of knowing only one side of the story which often obscure a broader view on foreign nations and cultures that tend to associate people or countries with one or a few specifics adjectives. For example, she mentioned how Westerners see Africa as a country and automatically connect it with poverty without deepening their understanding of the subject or exploring the numerous aspects that constitute Africa. Edward Said, words reposted in “Defining and Imperialism”, stated the same point as Adichie which can be summarized by the fact that Western scholars, explorers, missionaries, travelers did not investigate Eastern cultures so much and defined the whole idea of “Orient” based in whole or in part on an imaginative construct or a fantasy to impose their superiority.

Western culture has many years of world domination, and its fingerprint can be found explicitly or implicitly in other societies and cultures. Nowadays, there are so many people whose work is to bring awareness on this kind of impact to enlighten others and decolonize the colonized minds. I am wondering if those countries or people could find an identity that would not have any Western influence. In this class, I would be delighted to learn how long did it take for people to realize how westernized they were and the actions taken to remedy that.