Post-colonialist Culture Jamming

Hand painted movie posters from Ghana from the 80s and 90s

The new hybrid subjectivities represented in these posters, slipping between the boundaries of the grand Hollywood narratives of heroism and nationalism, are an important constituency for post-colonial studies and Culture Jamming.

Movie heroes assumed an important function in imperial discourse, in which movies have often been created as allegories of imperial power. Consequently, one form of post-colonial response to this has been to appropriate allegory and use it to respond to the allegorical representation of imperial dominance.

The fallacy of making simplistic and stereotypical distinctions of race and gender and to suggest that the range of difference within these categories is a matter of representation and discursive construction.

The “Hollywood Hero” narrative is a clear example of Universalism

(…) the assumption that there are irreducible features of human life and experience that exist beyond the constitutive effects of local cultural conditions. Universalism offers a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant culture are held to be true for all humanity.” *

* Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (1998), B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin, Eds. London: Routledge.