POSTCOLONIAL

mate signs) of personality. Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Pair of

Boots (1888 and 1886 respectively) are early examples of what might
be called this abstracting of portraiture in modern society: the two
pictures are conventionally interpreted now as indications of van
Gogh’s state of mind. Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999), an installation of
what had been her own bed, along with a carefully selected range of
personal belongings strewn upon it and around it, has similarly
become known effectively as a self-portrait.

Further Reading
Bell, Julian 50 0 Self-Portraits (Phaidon: 2004).
Brilliant, Richard Portraiture (Reaktion Press: 1991).
West, Shearer Portraiture (Oxford University Press: 2004).
Woodall, Joanna (ed.) Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester University
Press: 1997).

POSTCOLONIAL POSTCOLONIALISM

One of a cluster of core terms used within theoretical and histor-

ical discourse concerned with issues of how the world, and our
knowledge of it, has changed especially since the mid twentieth
century. Only within the last ten years, however, have these questions
about culture, society, imperialism, and systems of knowledge
found a prominent or consistent place in art^ historical scholarship.
Three of these concepts – postcolonial, postmodernism, and
poststructuralism – share a complex and in some ways confusing
prefix. The difficulty partly arises because these terms have been in
existence now for several decades, though the ‘post-’ might suggest
they’re intrinsically provisional. To the contrary: they are all firmly
established as concepts and forms of analysis which do not function
simply as appendages to earlier or more important notions (those
concepts respectively of colonialism/cultural imperialism, mod-
ernism, and structuralism).
The prefix ‘post’ carries two related senses. First, it refers to a
‘state afterwards’ – a changed situation and how it has been brought
about. Second, it contains the implication that this changed situation
in some way remains significantly intelligible in terms of the prior
condition or state. Posthumous, to take a simpler example, literally
means ‘after being buried’ (from the Latin): the term refers to the
significance or meaning of the person after his or her death.
The ‘afterness’ of death is tied forever to the prior life of the body

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and actual person – death can only be meaningful, indeed, in relation

to this life.
Postcolonial, in turn, refers to the situation of a people or society
or culture after it has been exposed to the presence of those who have
come to that people or society or culture with the intention of sub-
jugating, controlling, exploiting, and even improving it. Though in
popular usage postcolonial is usually intended to refer to the state of
that people or society or culture after the colonising force has left (for
instance, after the British army and colonial administration physically,
politically, and militarily left India in 1947), the term has pressing
analytic value relating to the condition of the subject people or
society or culture as soon as the initial colonial contact occurs. In the
case of India, this was in the seventeenth century, when British tra-
ders, settlers, and government representatives first arrived there and
began to affect the society and its people – inventing, of course, a
name for that country for the colonising population: India (and later,
similarly, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, etc.).
Part of the complexity of postcolonial identity is to do with how a
colonised people or society or culture absorbs the meanings for itself
invented and imposed by a colonising force. When colonised states
achieve their ‘independence’ politically and militarily from a colo-
nising country their new sovereign status is usually an uneasy mixture
of earlier (pre-colonial) elements and forms of identity created during
the colonisation process. This is dramatically the case, for example,
with Iraq – a nation-state whose existence as a unified singly entity
was wholly the invention of the British who occupied and colonised
the land in 1914. The tribal and religious distinctions and divi-
sions within contemporary Iraq have come to the fore – and
impeded the planned development of a western European-style
nation – because the ending of Saddam Hussein’s regime also
removed key parts of the stabilising state-apparatus inherited from the
days of direct colonial rule (ended in 1921) and pro-US ‘client-
regime’ status (ended in 1963).

Further Reading
Chatterjee, P. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton University Press: 1993).
Clayton, D. and D. Gregory (eds) Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Produc-
tion of Space (Blackwell: 1996).
Easton, S. C. The Rise and Fall of Western Colonialism: A Historical Survey from
the Early Nineteenth Century (Praeger: 1964).
Fanon, Frantz Towards the African Revolution (Penguin: 1964).

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 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Over the past twenty-five years, art^ historians have increasingly

turned their attention to the situation of art and artists in countries
subjected to western imperial rule. A new and distinct area of
study, in addition, has developed concerned specifically with the
analysis of all aspects of these societies and their cultures: the
inter-disciplinary field of postcolonial studies. This embraces and inter-
relates traditional^ subjects such as history, geography, sociology,
economics, political studies, literature, and the arts and crafts. The
range of regions, societies, and peoples examined within postcolonial
studies is vast (simply considering the history of western imperialism):
the continents of Africa, southern and central America, Asia, and
Australasia.
Beyond all these peoples and societies and cultures, however,
postcolonial studies’ theoretical scope reaches much further, to
include the history of, for instance, British colonialism in what are
now the sovereign nation^-states of Canada and the United States
of America – two more societies that will forever remain, in one
sense, themselves postcolonial. (The recognition that colonial iden-
tity can never finally be eradicated might partially explain why the
US is fixated with the concept of its independence – from the
British – officially dated from 1776 and why, though the US has over
600 military installations around the world, it would never permit
another country, even a very close ally, to garrison troops in their
own bases on American soil.) But beyond the North American
societies, the extension of the remit of postcolonial studies goes fur-
ther still. Britain itself may be defined, in a variety of important
respects, as postcolonial. Relinquishing its empire fundamentally
changed British society and culture, as well as its importance within
Europe and the world beyond. After the Second World War and the
British exodus from India the country’s economic and political power
declined rapidly across the globe. In the 1950s and 60s Britain took
the decision to admit many tens of thousands of immigrants from its
former colonies (renamed the Commonwealth countries), including
those in the Caribbean, as well as India and Pakistan. These peoples
settled in Britain and their presence has led to profound changes in
the country’s culture and social life – at the most obvious level, for
example, in cuisine and musical tastes. Britain’s former empire of
subject peoples was recreated, displaced from these territories, in the
‘mother-country’ or metropolitan homeland – a process repeated to
a lesser degree in the 1960s in France, Portugal, and Holland. All

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these countries and their cultures have also become in this sense
postcolonial.
Art historians, then, are involved in a much more wide-ranging
investigation than those working in a single discipline may realise.
Their studies of, for example, the power colonial regimes had in shaping
the training of artists and designers in the territories they invaded
and occupied – for example, the establishment of British art acade-
mies, such as the Calcutta Mechanics Institution and School of Art
(founded 1854) – are part of a much broader radical social and cultural
history of colonialism. Both traditional crafts activities and western
notions of art and artistic production became meshed in the crea-
tion of this colonial culture. These societies – even after the retreat
of the imperialists – were changed for ever in this process.

Further Reading
Richon, Olivier ‘Representation, the Harem and the Despot’, in G.
Robertson (ed.) The Block Reader in Visual Culture (Routledge: 1996).
Thomas, N. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Polity
Press: 1994).
Viswanathan, G. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India
(Columbia University Press: 1989).
Zavala, I. M. Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Ima-
ginary (Indiana University Press: 1992).

POSTMODERNISM POSTMODERN,
POSTMODERNIST, POSTMODERNITY

Term used to refer to fundamental developments in culture and

the arts since the 1960s, although some critics and theorists have
claimed that the origins of postmodern^ society can be found
much earlier on in the twentieth century. Postmodernism, like some
related terms (such as modernism and realism) refers, sometimes
confusingly, both to accounts, or theories of things, and to the things
themselves. For instance, one of the earliest theorists of post-
modernism in architecture, Charles Jencks, claimed that the new
buildings he wrote about attempted to pastiche (copy) stylistic ele-
ments associated with classicism (e.g.: Charles Moore’s Piazza
d’Italia in New Orleans (1975–80) and Philip Johnson’s A T & T
Building in New York (1978–83)). This ironic and ‘knowing’ atti-
tude towards the past is a central characteristic of postmodernist
thinking which intrinsically sees its theoretical and critical pre-

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