| Chapter 1: | The Role Of Public Relations In Global Issues |
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The term postcolonial carries a great deal of various baggage, and we did not adopt its use lightly. Although definitions vary, we side with Quayson’s (2000, p. 2):
A possible working definition for postcolonialism is that it involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies, as well as at the level of more general global developments … Postcolonialism often involves the discussion of experiences of various kinds such as those of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place, and the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics.
Postcolonialism decenters the West while simultaneously engaging with its relevance and influence on the colonized, encompassing the dialectic between colonized and colonizer.
In the final chapter of this volume, we engage postcolonialism as a theoretical concept per se. Since its formulation by Said in 1978, the theory has undergone a number of developments, and one cannot assume a singular understanding of what is meant by the term when used theoretically. In addition, little extant scholarship has integrated postcolonial perspectives with public relations practice (see Munshi, 2005; Munshi & Kurian, 2005; McKie & Munshi, 2007; Dutta & Pal, 2011). For now, we simply note that all too often postcolonial theory has created sharp black-and-white divisions between the active colonizers and the passive colonized, an understanding that ignores the multiple, fractured identities of both inherent in the experience of colonization (Bhattacharya & G, 2011). It is this more dialectic and problematized notion of postcolonialism that we carry into our examination of issues.
We use the term postcolonial at this juncture to represent a turn from the problematic labels that commonly designate countries in varying stages of development, from Third World to Second World, from less-developed countries (LDC) to emerging countries. Such terms are increasingly