Expanding the Critical Lens of Postcolonial Theory
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2020-07-17
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en
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Jackson (2012) states that if China were to establish a relationship with Africa, this would be comparable to a North-South relation but should be described as a South-South relation, as China could not be considered a First World country. In this hypothesized relationship, the equivalent of the North, in this case China, is considered dominant. In his paper on Postcolonialism and Organizational Knowledge in the Wake of China’s Presence in Africa, Jackson (2012) attempts to create a new critical theory that explains China’s effect on knowledge transfer in Africa by examining China’s relationship with Africa. He tested the relationship by attempting to create a new critical theory from postcolonial and dependency theory. The goal of this thesis is to elaborate on Jackson’s research by attempting to expand the critical lens of postcolonialism through the examination of a possible emerging South-South relation between China and South America. Postcolonialism argues that the First World suppresses the Third World by influencing the region. By hypothesizing that China is approaching South America in a similar way to how the First World approaches the Third World, an attempt will be made to expand postcolonial criticism to countries outside of the First World. Jackson (2012) focused specifically on the dimension of knowledge transfer in postcolonialism rather than giving a critical analysis of the First World as a whole. This dimension was extracted from Biswas (2016) alongside the dimensions of development and monetary policies. These dimensions helped establish hypotheses in which China is criticized in postcolonialism as the dominant actor and is positioned similarly to the First World in the known North-South relation. The following, briefly stated, hypotheses were established: China is suppressing indigenous voices and people; China gives aid to South America from the perspective of modernisation theory; and China is causing debt accumulation in South America. South America, which is the most prosperous Third World region and is therefore reasoned to be the least likely region to be dominated by China, was studied as a least-likely case in collaboration with the congruence method. Results show, however, that China could not be perceived as a comparison to postcolonialism’s criticism of the First World. In order to expand postcolonialism it is crucial, according to the created hypotheses, that there is evidence of development approaches. However, evidence has been found that China is attempting to enrich itself. This thesis argues that the lack of evidence about China’s approaches being comparable with the First World approaches regarding the Third World, made this research argue that: postcolonialism’s criticism of the First World cannot be expanded with the help of a possible South-South relation between China and South America with China as a dominant actor
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen