Explain postcolonialism and its influence on identity and the arts.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should include:
- Postcolonial theory refers to any creative act of opposition to the dominant discourse of the colonizer. The postmodernist attack on homogeneous uniformity-its sense of complexity and contradiction, of a "difficult whole"-has served to foreground the diversity of postcolonial thought.
- In Asia and Africa, in the Latino, Hispanic, and American Indian worlds, and in Islam, artists have responded by acknowledging that life in a global world increasingly demands that they accept multiple identities.
- In Portrait (Futago) Yasumasa Morimura poses as both Manet's Olympia and her maid, subverting the idea of Japanese isolationism by staging the photograph with props and sets and then blending the images digitally.
- Shigeyuki Kihara is directly inspired by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of Samoan islanders taken by non-Samoans and challenges accepted notions of identity at every level: in terms of gender roles, colonial assumptions about Samoan culture, and even the authenticity of the photographic image itself.
- The Pakistani painter Shahzia Sikander addresses her heterogeneous background in works such as Pleasure Pillars by reinventing the traditional genre of miniature painting in a hybrid of styles.