Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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accounts of the period, coming from both US and Russian sources, reveal that global
thermonuclear war nearly happened three, or four times; the Cuban Missile Crisis being
the most well know.
Current world tensions and realities are inseparable from historic colonial, and neocolonial
relationships. Nationalist movements have been vigorous, especially for nations
formerly of the major Cold War power blocs. These nationalist movements are in some
cases inseparable from religious adherence and the religio-cultural worldview that
dominates many regions of the world. Islamic nations, for example, are rooted in a
worldview that does not legally, or culturally separate religion from government as is
commonly done in the West. These and so many other differences contribute to the
diverse, dynamic and often tense world we live in today.
Postcolonialism per se, is quite similar to postmodernism, yet remains substantively
different. Postcolonialism is a mood particularly expressed as a literary movement, much
as postmodernism is expressed via postmodern deconstructionism. “Postcolonial studies
emerged as a way of engaging with the textual, historical, and cultural articulations of
societies, disturbed and transformed by the historical reality of colonial presence”
(Sugirtharajah, 2002:11). Both postmodernism and postcolonialism are formally textual
practices, yet each has a broader cultural impact. Their respective interests also differ
geographically. Postcolonial writers attempt to unmask European authority, while
postmodern writers attempt to unmask authority in general. Postcolonialism as a literary
form seeks to “highlight and scrutinize the ideologies these texts embody and that are
entrenched in them as they related to the fact of colonialism” (Sugirtharajah, 2002:79).
Postmodernism turns out to be an ally of postcolonialism in that those who are seeking to
come to terms with the experience of colonization and its long-term effects see in
postmodernism not only the possibility of an alternative discourse that affirms and
celebrates otherness, but also a strategy for the “deconstruction of the concept, the
authority, and assumed primacy of the category of ‘the West’” (Young, 1990:19).
Like Foucault, postcolonialists are interested in the way language and power work
together. The relationship between literature (and media generally) and power remains a
vehicle for controlling, and/or manipulating, public and private language, thought and
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa