Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to Paul Gilroy's post-colonialist theory. In order to understand this theory you're going to need to understand what colonialism or colonization was, so I'm going to try and explain it in a way that makes it easy to understand. Between the 1500s and the 1900s we had this period of colonialization and what that was was countries deciding that they wanted to go. to other countries and take over, claim them as their own and essentially start running them.
And Britain did this quite a lot. British soldiers, British military and government travelled to lots of places such as India, lots of places within the Caribbean and within Africa. And they essentially sailed there, got out their boats and decided to take over.
They installed their own soldiers, their own military, their own government. And they basically started to act as though they owned that country. And all the people, all the locals that actually lived in that country at the time, then had to start kind of obeying and listening to the British people that were there as their rulers.
We weren't very nice people. And what this meant was that we were kind of trying to increase the British Empire. We were trying to grow our country and to make our country more powerful by doing this.
Now, Paul Gilroy believes that that period of colonisation has had a massive knock-on effect and that we can see that effect in our media even now in 2018 and onwards. So if you have a look at media products, Gilroy thinks that you can still see people from ethnic minorities and in particular from those areas that perhaps we colonised and took over as... being dehumanised, as being marginalised, as being shown as other, which is a term that Gilroy uses, we often put it in quotation marks. And what it means is they're seen as abnormal, they're seen as different, they're seen as strange or exotic.
And they're not seen as being as good or as powerful or successful, or high up in terms of status as people from white British communities. You have a look, for example, at a product like water aid. At the beginning, we are seeing Britain, ostensibly. We're seeing a British radio with a British accent. We're seeing the rainy weather.
And it is very obvious that this is supposed to be somewhere in Britain. And it looks reasonably middle class. The accent is quite upper class. And they've clearly got an abundance of water because of the rain. And then we cut to the scenes of an African country where it's very dry.
It's very arid. Clearly, people do not have access or easy access to the water that they need every day. People are having to walk long distances for it.
And the voiceover is telling us later on in the advert that we need to donate money to help these poor people that need our assistance. And Gilroy might say that this advert has evidence of post-colonialist ideas because we're showing Britain and British people as being more successful and powerful and having the power to save people. in African countries who are powerless. So it's important to be able to look at products and look at status and power and whether that might relate to post-colonialist ideas.