Perspectives: Postmodernism Key Words 5

• The canon
• a text that is accepted as superior to or more significant than other texts within the same field.
• DWEMs
• Stands for: Dead White European Males. A writer, philosopher or other significant figure whose importance and talents may have been exaggerated by virtue of his belonging to a historically dominant gender and ethnic group.
• Phallocentrism
• A belief centered on the phallus, especially a belief in the superiority of the male sex. A term first used by the Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones c. 1927 to focus his disagreement with Freud's theory of female sexual identity as being marked by the lack of the phallus, a sense, in other words, of their castration.
•  Eurocentrism
• A worldview centered on and biased towards Western civilisation. When you consider Europe and Europeans as focal to world culture, history, economics etc.
• Postcolonialism
• The academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonised people and their lands. A theoretical approach in various disciplines that is concerned with the lasting impact of colonisation in former colonies.
• Multiculturalism
• The presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society. A situation in which all the different cultural or racial groups in a society have equal rights and opportunities, and non is ignored or regarded as unimportant.
• Feminism
• The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal and social equality of sexes.