Colonial Discourse

1. Colonial Discourse Loomba – p. 43-57 With help from John McLeod’s Beginning Postcolonialism and Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s Key Concepts

2. Edward Said/Orientalism • Representations of the Orient in European Literary texts created a dichotomy between the West and the Rest. • It is built on a whole system of knowledge based on studies in history, anthropology, literary criticism, art and art history, economic and cultural studies which colluded to produce a unified “impression” of the Orient. • This dichotomy did as much to create the West as it did to create the Orient. (p. 47)

3. Orientalism • The significance of Orientalism is that as a mode of knowing the other it was a supreme example of construction of the other, a form of authority. • The relationship between the Orient and the Occident is one of power, domination, and of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. • Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. (168)

4. Orientalism • Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient from the 18th century onwards, there emerged “a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in museums, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe.” • Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. (168)

5. Orientalism • 1. Orientalism constructs binaries – but not equal ones. Negative terms are used to describe the Orient and Orientals and the positive terms are reserved for the West. The West comes to know itself by proclaiming via Orientalism everything it believes it is not. Said says that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”

6. Orientalism • 2. Orientalism is a Western Fantasy – It is a fabricated construct, a series of images that come to stand as the Orient’s “reality” for those in the West. This contrived reality in no way represents what may or may not actually be in the Orient itself. However, though it is an imaginary concept, it has real material effects.

7. Orientalism • Orientalism is an Institution – The imaginative assumptions are taken as hard facts.

8. Orientalism • Orientalism is literary – Philology (the study of the history of languages), lexicography (dictionary making), history, biology, political and economic theory, novel writing and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism. It also make possible new forms of writing that enshrined and celebrated Western Experience abroad.

9. Orientalism • Orientalism is legitimating – Orientalist representations function to justify the propriety of Western colonial rule of Easter Lands. They are an important part of Empire. They legitimate the domination of other peoples.

10. Orientalism • There is ‘latent’ and ‘manifiest’ Orientalism. • Latent Orientalism describes the dreams and fantasies that have remained constant over time. • Manifest Orientalism refers to the myriad examples of Orientalist knowledge produced at different historical junctures. • So, while the manifestations of Orientalism will be different due to reasons of historical specifics and individual style or perspective, their underlying or latent premises will be the same. • Latent Orientalism is a blue-print, Manifest Orientalism is the many different versions that can be build from that same design.

11. Stereotypes of Orientalism • 1. The Orient is timeless – unchanging. The West travels back in time to the Orient. • 2. The Orient is Strange – unusual, fantastic, bizarre. The Orient is irrational, extraordinary, abnormal. • 3. Orientalism makes assumptions about ‘race’: the murderous Arab, the lazy Indian, the inscrutable Chinaman. Created generalized types. The Orient is the place where Westerners encounter races considered inferior to them, which helps to buttress its view of itself as inherently superior and civil

12. Stereotypes of Orientalism • 4. Orientalism makes assumptions about Gender: • Men are feminine • Women are exotic, immodest, creatures seeking sexual pleasure • Orientalism creates gender types that fail to live up to “Western Standards” – strong, active, courageous men and chaste, moral, passive women.

13. Stereotypes of Orientalism • 5. The Orient is feminine – The whole East is feminized, deemed passive, submissive, exotic, luxurious, sexually mysterious and tempting, while the West becomes masculine, active, dominant, heroic, rational, self-controlled and ascetic. • The Orient is penetrated by the traveller whose passions it rouses, it is possessed, ravished, embraced, and domesticated. • The fantasy of the Orient as the desirable repository of all that is constrained by Western civilization acted as a continual stimulus for those who studied it. In writing about the Orient, they were actually writing about their own desires, fantasies and fears.

14. Stereotypes of Orientalism • 6. The Orient is degenerate – Oriental stereotypes fixed weaknesses as cowardliness, laziness, untrustworthiness, fickleness, laxity, violence, and lust. • Orientalism posited the notion that Oriental people needed to be civilized and made to conform to the perceived higher moral standards upheld in the West.

15. Problems with Orientalism • It flattens historical nuances into East vs. West, when really attitudes of the West toward the East have shifted through time and according to context. • Homogenizes the West. • Said concentrates on Western texts, discussing the oppressor’s view, ignoring the views and the resistances of the East.

16. Connection to Foucault • If power is pervasive, then how do we explain resistance? If power works rhizomically or through a kind of capillary system, how do we locate and defeat oppression? • Said doesn’t address this, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. Said’s text was a first step in the direction of colonial discourse, the beginning. Those who follow have addressed these questions of resistance more fully.

17. Other developments in Colonialist Discourse • Gayatri Spivak – searching for the recovery of the subaltern voice, the stories which Said ignored. • Megan Vaughan – discusses the differences between oppression by hegemonic powers in Europe and those in Africa. In particular, she notes the differences in the individuation of the subjects. (p.53) • Jenny Sharpe and the critique of Foucault’s notion that repression is insidious, subtle, whereas, in the colonies it was violent and open.

18. Colonial Discourse • Definition: a way of thinking in which cultural, intellectual, economic or political processes are seen to work together in the formation, perpetuation and dismantling of colonialism. • Colonial discourse studies are interested in how stereotypes, images and “knowledge” of colonial subjects and cultures tie in with institutions of economic, administrative, judicial and bio-medical control.