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Between Past and Present: The Sociopsychological Constructs of Colonialism, Coloniality and Postcolonialism

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Abstract

If one of the major aspirations of postcolonial theory is to re-establish a balance in the relationship between the (former) colonizer and the colonized by engaging the voices of the “subaltern”, and on the other hand to illuminate how power relations of the present are embedded in history (Mills 2007), we argue that important theoretical insights might inform research by anchoring post-colonial theory within a sociopsychological framework. While there is a growing corpus of sociopsychological research articles focusing on how major geopolitical events and historical processes bear on people’s lives, we aim to investigate the theoretical potential of postcolonial theory within the disciplines aiming at a sociopsychological approach. By focusing on the social dynamics of power imbalances, post-colonial theory finds its operational meaning: the feelings stemming from actions committed in the past are indeed crucial in determining reparatory attitudes and policies towards members of former colonized groups. Firstly, drawing from the sociopsychological scientific production related to consequences of colonial past, seen in recent years as a growing research interest in the field, we will explore patterns and trends through a thematic analysis of literature. Social Psychology as well as adjacent disciplines can greatly benefit from this theoretical fertilization, especially in the way post-colonial ideologies relate to the symbolic promotion versus exclusion of indigenous culture (Sengupta et al., International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 36(4), 506–517, 2012). Furthermore, by comparing and contrasting the ideological cosmologies relating to this particular topic, this study aims to establish the state of knowledge in the field, to identify how research methods and thematic fields are paired, to find “gaps” and create spaces for research that become integrative of postcolonial theory. While focusing on academic production, we also hope to contribute to develop the idea of cosmopolitism within academia but also beyond academic doors.

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Notes

  1. (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1979; Spivak, 1993)

  2. (Asad, 1973; Clifford & Marcus, 1986)

  3. (Adas, 1989; Alvares, 1980; Prakash, 1999)

  4. As of September 3, 2014 [update], the multidisciplinary coverage of the Web of Science encompasses over 50,000 scholarly books, 12,000 journals and 160,000 conference proceedings. PsychInfo includes more than 2450 journals in 29 languages, from more than 49 countries since 1806, representing the reference research database for psychological related disciplines all over the world.

  5. Developed by Pierre Ratinaud

  6. None of these produce clear ‘results’, but instead the researcher interprets all the specific outcomes, along with the original text, in order to build understanding of the discourses at stake. The most plausible inferences from the data are upon the researcher’s responsibility, which is of fundamental importance in the design of the study, organization of collected material, and the analysis process, as the software simply aids in the organization (Chaves et al. 2017). In fact, the software accomplishes this using only a statistical approach to analyze the distribution of words in the corpus, while remaining completely deaf to the meaning of words themselves.

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  1. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Ana Tomicic & Filomena Berardi

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  1. Ana Tomicic
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Tomicic, A., Berardi, F. Between Past and Present: The Sociopsychological Constructs of Colonialism, Coloniality and Postcolonialism. Integr. psych. behav. 52, 152–175 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9407-5

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