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
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.
AGENCY
Agency refers to the ability to act or performan action.In contemporary
theory, it hinges on the question of whether individuals can freely
and autonomously initiate action, or whether the things they do are in
some sense determined by the ways in which their identity has been
constructed. Agency is particularly important in post-colonial theory
because it refers to the ability of post-colonial subjects to initiate action
in engaging or resisting imperial power. The term has become an
issue in recent times as a consequence of post-structuralist theories of
subjectivity.
ALTERITY
Alterity is derived from the Latin alteritas,meaning ‘the state of being
other or different; diversity, otherness’. Its English derivatives are
alternate, alternative, alternation, and alter ego. The term alterité is
more common in French, and has the antonym identité ( Johnson and
Smith 1990: xviii).
The termwas adopted by philosophers as an alternative to ‘otherness’
to register a change in the Western perceptions of the relationship
between consciousness and the world.
AMBIVALENCE
A term first developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual
fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite. It
also refers to a simultaneous attraction toward and repulsion from an
object, person or action (Young 1995: 161). Adapted into colonial
discourse theory by Homi Bhabha, it describes the complex mix
of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between
colonizer and colonized.
ANTI-COLONIALISM
The political struggle of colonized peoples against the specific ideology
and practice of colonialism (see colonization). Anti-colonialism
ANTI-COLONIALISM
11
signifies the point at which the various forms of opposition become
articulated as a resistance to the operations of colonialism in political,
economic and cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to reject
colonial power and restore local control.
APARTHEID
An Afrikaans term meaning ‘separation’, used in South Africa for the
policy initiated by the Nationalist Government after 1948 and usually
rendered into English in the innocuous sounding phrase, ‘policy of
separate development’. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and
1936 by the Land Acts which restricted the amount of land available to
black farmers to 13 per cent. But in 1948 the Apartheid laws were
enacted, including the Population Registration Act, which registered
all people by racial group; the Mixed Amenities Act, which codified
racial segregation in public facilities; the Group Areas Act, which
segregated suburbs; the Immorality Act, which illegalized white–black
marriages; and the establishment of the so-called Bantustans, or native
homelands, to which a large proportion of the black population was
restricted.
APPROPRIATION
A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take
over those aspects of the imperial culture – language, forms of writing,
film, theatre, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism,
logic and analysis – that may be of use to them in articulating their own
social and cultural identities. This process is sometimes used to describe
the strategy by which the dominant imperial power incorporates as
its own the territory or culture that it surveys and invades (Spurr 1993:
28).However,post-colonial theory focuses instead on an exploration of
the ways in which the dominated or colonized culture can use the tools
of the dominant discourse to resist its political or cultural control.
AUTHENTIC/AUTHENTICITY
The idea of an authentic culture is one that has been present in many
recent debates about post-colonial cultural production. In particular,
the demand for a rejection of the influence of the colonial period in
programmes of decolonization has invoked the idea that certain
forms and practices are ‘inauthentic’, some decolonizing states arguing
for a recuperation of authentic pre-colonial traditions and customs.The
problem with such claims to cultural authenticity is that they often
become entangled in an essentialist cultural position in which fixed
practices become iconized as authentically indigenous and others are
excluded as hybridized or contaminated. This has as its corollary the
danger of ignoring the possibility that cultures may develop and change
as their conditions change.
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.