Aboriginal
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/indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are those 'born in a place or region' (OED). The term 'aboriginal' was coined as early as 1667 to describe the indigenous inhabitants of places encountered by European explorers, adventurers or seamen. While the terms 'aboriginal' and 'aborigine' have been used from time to time to describe the indigenous inhabitants of many settler colonies, they are now most frequently used as a shortened form of 'Australian Aborigine' to describe the indigenous inhabitants of Australia. The adjective 'aboriginal' has been more frequently used as the generic noun in recent times, the term 'aborigine' being considered by many to be too burdened with derogatory associations. Furthermore, the feeling that the term fails to distinguish and discriminate among the great variety of peoples who were lumped together generically as 'aborigines' by the colonial white settlers has been resisted with the assertion of special, local terms for different peoples and/or language groups such as the use of South-Eastern Australian terms like Koori, Queensland terms such as Murri and Western Australian terms such as Nyoongah. So far, though, no single term has been accepted as a general term by all the various peoples concerned, and the generic term most frequently used for the descendants of all pre-colonial indigenes is 'Australian Aboriginal peoples'.
In the Americas the term 'aborigines' gained currency as a generic term for indigenous peoples as it did in Australia.
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Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts
Book by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin; Routledge, 2000. 276 pgs.
Terms such as 'Indian' and later 'Amerindian', which, like Aboriginal in Australia, accrued derogatory connotations, were employed by settler-invaders (and their descendants). In the twentieth century, terms generated by indigenous peoples themselves, such as 'First Nations', 'Native Americans' have replaced the older settler-invader nomenclatures. The term has also been, and is still used to describe the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of other regions, such as the 'orang asli' of Malaysia and Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) or the original inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent now referred to as the 'scheduled tribes' and Andaman Islanders.
(See settler colony, Third World.)
abrogation Abrogation refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of 'correct' or 'standard' English used by certain classes or groups, and of the corresponding concepts of inferior 'dialects' or 'marginal variants'. The concept is usually employed in conjunction with the term appropriation, which describes the processes of English adaptation itself, and is an important component of the post-colonial assumption that all language use is a 'variant' of one kind or another (and is in that sense 'marginal' to some illusory standard). Thus abrogation is an important political stance, whether articulated or not, and even whether conscious or not, from which the actual appropriation of language can take place.
In arguing for the parity of all forms of English, abrogation offers a counter to the theory that use of the colonialist's language inescapably imprisons the colonized within the colonizer's conceptual paradigms—the view that 'you can't dismantle the masters house with the master's tools'. Abrogation implies rather that the masters house is always adaptable and that the same tools offer a means of conceptual transformation and liberation.
Although abrogation has been used to describe the rejection of a standard language in the writing of post-colonial literatures, it can, like appropriation be used to describe a great
range of cultural and political activities—film, theatre, the writing of history, political organization, modes of thought and argument. Individuals who are involved in these things may abrogate any centralizing notion of the 'correct', or standard, way of doing things and re-define the practice in a different setting.
African-American and post-colonial studies Recent work in post-colonial studies by United States' scholars has stressed the relationship between post-colonial theory and the analysis of African American culture (Du Cille 1996). In practice, the exponents of African American culture have often engaged with classic post-colonial theorists such as Fanon, though not always in an uncritical way (see critical Fanonism). African American studies has been one of the most influential of recent intellectual, social and political movements, not only affecting the US but also influencing many people who have suffered oppression from racial discrimination in other parts of the world. It has had a widespread and often quite separate development from post-colonial studies, to which it is related only in a complex and ambiguous way.
Most post-colonial theorists who have engaged with the issue have seen the study of black culture in the Americas as, in part, the study of one of the world's major diasporas. In this respect, the history of African Americans has some features in common with other movements of oppressed diasporic peoples. Many groups were moved against their will from their homelands to serve the economic needs of empire in the societies that evolved from the wave of European expansion from the sixteenth century onwards. Comparative studies of these movements are a productive development in recent post-colonial theory, not least in the consideration of the different effects of these large-scale events on individual groups that such studies reveal.
Early formulations of African American Studies in the United States and elsewhere reflected the complex relationship between the African source cultures and their adopted societies,
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as they interacted with other influences in the new regions to which Africans were taken (see négritude). The fact that the bulk of African peoples were shipped under conditions of slavery makes the relationship between that institution and the wider practices of imperialism central to an understanding of the origins of African American culture. It also sheds light on the violence that was often hidden beneath the civilizing rhetoric of imperialism (DuCille 1996). Beyond this prime fact of oppression and violence, however, the relationships between the newly independent American societies, the wider diasporic black movement, and the modern independence movements in Africa itself, remain complex.
The history of the struggle for self-determination by African Americans is historically intertwined with wider movements of diasporic African struggles for independence. For example, figures like Jamaican born Marcus Garvey assumed a central role in the American struggle for self-determination. The 'Back to Africa' movement that he initiated, and which has affinities with the modern West Indian movement of Rastafarianism, had its most notable effect in the founding of Liberia, whose national flag still bears the single star of Garvey's Black Star shipping company, set up specifically to facilitate the return of freed black slaves to their 'native' continent. In addition, many of the dominant figures in early African nationalism, such as Alexander Crummell, were exslaves who had their ideas formed in the struggle for African American freedom (see de Moraes Farias and Barber 1990; Appiah 1992).
Of course, African American studies are also concerned much more directly with the history and continuing effects of specific processes of race-based discrimination within US society. In this regard, African American studies investigates issues that share certain features with other US groups affected by racial discrimination, such as the Chicano community. These studies have relevance to movements for the freedom of indigenous peoples, such as Native American Indians or Inuit peoples, despite their very different historical backgrounds (one group being victims of invasive settlement and
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B
binarism From 'binary', meaning a combination of two things, a pair, 'two', duality (OED), this is a widely used term with distinctive meanings in several fields and one that has had particular sets of meanings in post-colonial theory.
The concern with binarism was first established by the French structural linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who held that signs have meaning not by a simple reference to real objects, but by their opposition to other signs. Each sign is itself the function of a binary between the signifier, the 'signal' or sound image of the word, and the signified, the significance of the signal, the concept or mental image that it evokes. Saussure held that although the connection between the signifier and signified is arbitrary (that is, there is no necessity in nature for the link between the word 'dog' and the signified dog), once the link is established, it is fixed for everyone who speaks that language.
While signs mean by their difference from other signs, the binary opposition is the most extreme form of difference possible—sun/moon; man/woman; birth/death; black/white. Such oppositions, each of which represents a binary system, are very common in the cultural construction of reality. The problem with such binary systems is that they suppress ambiguous or interstitial spaces between the opposed categories, so that any overlapping region that may appear, say, between the categories man/woman, child/adult or friend/alien, becomes