The Power of One and Pocahontas

Post-Colonialism Reflective Essay

The historical attempts of Europeans to claim lands that are not their own and forcibly take them from previous owners have created a repeated scenario of fierce conflict between the colonizers and the colonized. This scenario is seen so often in history that it has become a sort of universal theme, a fact not missed by writers and filmmakers. In both The Power of One and Pocahontas, the colonization of an existing culture creates tension between the colonizers and the colonized. This tension creates prejudice, and the prejudice often manifests itself in violence, whether it is the violence of a culture acting on their prejudices or the violence of a culture responding to the prejudice of another. The former, as well as the prejudice itself, is a part of the post-colonial theme of Othering; the latter is a part of the theme of Anti-Colonial Resistance. To explore these themes further, I will use my previous examples, The Power of One and Pocahontas, to show that the tension caused by colonization often affects cultures in a similar manner.

The Power of One is the story of an English boy named P.K. growing up in South Africa during the apartheid. He has no prejudice against the colonized cultures in South Africa because the nanny that raised him was a Zulu, one of the colonized people. Because of this, he is able to see that the prejudice of others is wrong, and he is appalled by the things that many of the colonizers do to the colonized people as a result of their prejudice. The belief that most of the colonizers hold to – that the colonized people are inherently inferior to their own race – is the post-colonial theme of Othering. In these situations, the people of the colonized culture are ...

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...sparks the conflict that brought about the impromptu portrayal of Othering described above. The Native Americans then proceed to make preparations for war with the English colonizers, a sure sign of vigorous Anti-Colonial Resistance. Such blatant opposition of the colonizing culture seems for the most part to be a peculiarity of colonialism in its early stages, when the colonizing and colonized cultures first come into contact with each other. This is certainly the case with Pocahontas, in which the Native Americans do not realize that the Englishmen are better armed than they are, and have a high chance of beating them in battle because of a technological advantage. In areas that have already been thoroughly colonized, the colonized people have learned that outright rebellion against the colonizers is extremely dangerous and unlikely to work anyways.