Postcolonial Theory

Prepared by: Dr. Babar Jamil

French philologist and historian Ernest
Renan (1823–92)
 All those who have been in the East, or in
Africa are struck by the way in which the
mind of the true believer is fatally limited,
by the species of iron circle that surrounds
his head, rendering it absolutely closed to
knowledge.
Lord Cromer

 while the European’s ‘trained intelligence works

like a piece of mechanism’, the mind of the
Oriental, ‘like his picturesque streets, is
eminently wanting in symmetry’
Orient?

 The ‘Orient’ meant roughly what we now term

the ‘Middle East’, including the ‘Semitic’
languages and societies, and those of South Asia,
for these societies were most relevant to the
development and spread of the Indo-European
languages
Bill Ashcroft on orientalism

“But despite the complexity and variety of Orientalist

disciplines, the investigations of Orientalist scholars all
operated within certain parameters, such as the assumption
that Western civilisation was the pinnacle of historical
development. Thus, Orientalist analysis almost universally
proceeded to confirm the ‘primitive’, ‘originary’, ‘exotic’
and ‘mysterious’ nature of Oriental societies and, more
often than not, the degeneration of the ‘non-European’
branches of the Indo-European family of languages.
Orientalism as a discourse

“In this respect, Orientalism, despite the plethora

of disciplines it fostered, could be seen to be what
Michel Foucault calls a ‘discourse’: a coherent and
strongly bounded area of social knowledge; a system
of statements by which the world could be known.”
Discourse, rules and orientalism

“There are certain unwritten (and sometimes unconscious) rules that define what
can and cannot be said within a discourse, and the discourse of Orientalism had
many such rules that operated within the area of convention, habit, expectation
and assumption. In any attempt to gain knowledge about the world, what is
known is overwhelmingly determined by the way it is known; the rules of a
discipline determine the kind of knowledge that can be gained from it, and the
strength, and sometimes unspoken nature, of these rules show an academic
discipline to be a prototypical form of discourse. But when these rules span a
number of disciplines, providing boundaries within which such knowledge can be
produced, that intellectual habit of speaking and thinking becomes a discourse
such as Orientalism.”
Knowledge is power

“Focusing on this one aspect of the complex phenomenon of

Orientalism has allowed Said to elaborate it as one of the
most profound examples of the machinery of cultural
domination, a metonymy of the process of imperial control
and one that continues to have its repercussions in
contemporary life. Orientalism, then, pivots on a
demonstration of the link between knowledge and power,
for the discourse of Orientalism constructs and dominates
Orientals in the process of ‘knowing’ them.”
Power of orientalism

Part of the pervasive power of Orientalism is

that it refers to at least three different
pursuits, all of which are interdependent: an
academic discipline, a style of thought and a
corporate institution for dealing with the
Orient.”
Complex web of representations

“The three definitions as expounded by Said illustrate how

Orientalism is a complex web of representations about the
Orient. The first two definitions embody the textual creation
of the Orient while the third definition illustrates how
Orientalism has been deployed to execute authority and
domination over the Orient. The three are interrelated,
particularly since the domination entailed in the third
definition is reliant upon and justified by the textual
establishment of the Orient that emerges out of the
academic and imaginative definitions of Orientalism.”
Foucault and orientalism

 Orientalism is best viewed in Foucauldian terms as a

discourse: a manifestation of power/knowledge. Without
examining Orientalism as a discourse, says Said, it is not
possible to understand ‘the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage –
and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically,
militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively
during the post Enlightenment period’
Colonial discourse

“colonial discourse is a system of statements that

can be made about colonies and colonial peoples,
about colonising powers and about the relationship
between these two. It is the system of knowledge
and belief about the world within which acts of
colonisation take place.”
Discourse and the colonised

“Although it is generated within the society and cultures of the colonisers, it

becomes that discourse within which the colonised may also come to see
themselves (as, for example, when Africans adopt the imperial view of
themselves as ‘intuitive’ and ‘emotional’, asserting a distinctiveness from the
‘rational’ and ‘unemotional’ Europeans). At the very least it creates a deep
conflict in the consciousness of the colonised because of its clash with other
knowledges about the world.”
Authority and orientalism

 As a discourse, Orientalism is ascribed the authority of academics, institutions

and governments, and such authority raises the discourse to a level of
importance and prestige that guarantees its identification with ‘truth’. In
time, the knowledge and reality created by the Orientalist discipline produce
a discourse ‘whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given
author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it’
Occident and orient

 By means of this discourse, Said argues, Western cultural

institutions are responsible for the creation of those
‘others’, the Orientals, whose very difference from the
Occident helps establish that binary opposition by which
Europe’s own identity can be established. The
underpinning of such a demarcation is a line between the
Orient and the Occident that is ‘less a fact of nature than
it is a fact of human production’
Power and knowledge

 An integral part of Orientalism, of course, is the

relationship of power between the Occident and the
Orient, in which the balance is weighted heavily in favour
of the former. Such power is connected intimately with
the construction of knowledge about the Orient. It occurs
because the knowledge of ‘subject races’ or ‘Orientals’
makes their management easy and profitable; ‘knowledge
gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and
so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information
and control’
Construction of the orient

“In Cromer’s and Balfour’s language, the Oriental is

depicted as something one judges (as in a court of
law), something one studies and depicts (as in a
curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a
school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a
zoological manual). The point is that in each case
the Oriental is contained and represented by
dominating frameworks.”
Question of Resistance

“For Said, the location of critical consciousness lies in challenging the hegemonic
nature of dominant culture as well as ‘the sovereignty of the systematic method’
(Said 1978b: 673). By adopting such a perspective, Said argues, it is possible for
the critic to deal with a text in two ways – by describing not only what is in the
text but also what is invisible. His idea of the contemporary critical
consciousness is one that asserts the room for agency, for such a consciousness
detaches itself from the dominant culture, adopts a responsible adversarial
position and then begins to ‘account for, and rationally to discover and know, the
force of statements in texts’ (ibid.: 713). The development of this critical
consciousness is central to Said’s strategy of resistance.”
Culture and Imperialism

 The English poet William Blake (1757–1827) once

wrote that ‘the foundation of empire is art and
science. Remove them or degrade them, and the
empire is no more. Empire follows art and not
vice versa, as Englishmen suppose’
Premise in Culture and Imperialism

 Culture and Imperialism begins from this premise, that the institutional,
political and economic operations of imperialism are nothing without the
power of the culture that maintains them. What, for instance, enabled the
British in India to rule a society of hundreds of millions with no more than
100,000 people? What is it about that presence that induced identification
and sometimes admiration in Indian elites despite the history of expropriation
and exploitation that characterised the Raj? Edward Said’s argument is that it
is culture (despite its sometimes overweening assumptions) that provides this
kind of moral power, which achieves a kind of ‘ideological pacification’
European and other empires

 What distinguishes the modern European empires from the Roman or the
Spanish or the Arab, according to Said, is that they are systematic
enterprises, constantly reinvested. They do not move into a country, loot it
and leave. What keeps them there is not simple greed, but massively
reinforced notions of the civilizing mission. This is the notion that imperial
nations have not only the right but the obligation to rule those nations ‘lost in
barbarism’.
John Stuart Mill and imperialists

 Like English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), who

stated that the British were in India ‘because India
requires us, that these are territories and peoples who
beseech domination from us and that … without the
English India would fall into ruin’ (Said 1994b: 66),
imperialists operated with a compelling sense of their
right and obligation to rule. Much of this sense was
present in and supported by European culture, which itself
came to be conceived, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, as
synonymous with ‘the best that has been thought and
said’
Said on Culture

“all those practices, like the arts of description,

communication and representation, which have relative
autonomy from the economic, social and political realms,
and which often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose
principal aims is pleasure.”

“a concept that includes a refining and elevating element,

each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and
thought, as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s.”
Empire and imperialism

 Empire is the relationship, formal or informal, in which

one state controls the effective political sovereignty of
another political society. Imperialism distinguishes itself
from empire, because while the establishment of empires
by the active colonisation of territories has ended,
imperialism ‘lingers where it has always been, in a kind of
general cultural sphere as well as in specific political,
ideological, economic, and social practices’ (ibid.: 8). Its
very investment in culture makes imperialism a force that
exists far beyond a geographical empire
The Novel and Empire

 The novel is of crucial importance to Said’s analysis of imperial

culture because, in his view, without empire ‘there is no European
novel as we know it’ and, if we study the impulses giving rise to it,
‘we shall see the far from accidental convergence between the
patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one
hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration
underlying the tendency to imperialism’
 Borrowing from Williams’s notion of a culture’s ‘structure of feeling’,
Said calls this a ‘structure of attitude and reference’ that builds up
gradually in concert with the novel.
Contrapuntal Reading

 Contrapuntal reading is a form of ‘reading back’ from the

perspective of the colonised, to show how the submerged
but crucial presence of the empire emerges in canonical
texts. As we begin to read, not univocally but
contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the
metropolitan history and of those other subjected and
concealed histories against which the dominant discourse
acts (Said 1993a: 59), we obtain a very different sense of
what is going on in the text.
Austen’s Mansfield Park

“More clearly than anywhere else in her fiction, Austen here

synchronizes domestic with international authority, making
it plain that the values associated with such higher things as
ordination, law, and propriety must be grounded firmly in
actual rule over and possession of territory. She sees that to
hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial
estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it.
What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive
harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline
of the other.”
Homi K. Bhabha
Basic concepts

 Mimicry
 Ambivalence
 Psychoanalysis
 Third-space
 Uncanny
 Stereotype
Stereotypes and ambivalence

 “Obviously colonialism has been a political and economic

relationship, but it has importantly depended on cultural
structures for its coherence and justification. Because it is
not self-evident that colonial relationships should exist at
all, something needs to supply an explanation for
colonialism. One explanation has often been the supposed
inferiority of the colonized people. Through racist jokes,
cinematic images, and other forms of representation, the
colonizer circulates stereotypes about the laziness or
stupidity of the colonized population.
The importance of mimicry to colonialism

 “Mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of

colonial power and knowledge” (337).
 Mimicry as it operates within colonialism is the “desire for a reformed,
recognizable Other” (338).
 Mimicry is both a) a way to promote reform, more regulation of non-
colonial irregular (read unacceptable) behavior & to remind what is
“appropriate” by providing kindle for mimicry but also b) presents an
opportunity for contesting the “appropriate” by embracing and
hyperbolizing the inappropriate (338).
 The ambivalence (uncertainty of who someone actually is) suggests that
colonial culture has been fetishized (342).
 “The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry- a
difference that is almost nothing but not quite, to menace- a difference
that is almost total but not quite” (342).
The method of operation for mimicry

 “The desire to emerge as “authentic” through mimicry … is the final irony

of partial representation [mimicking]” (339).
 “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce … its
difference [from the original it mimics]” (338).
 Essential to mimicry is the “form of difference that is mimicry- almost the
same but not quite” (340).
 In mimicry the representation of the self through identity and meaning “is
rearticulated along the axis of metonymy” (341).
 In colonialism, saturated with mimicry, there are two attitudes about
external reality (of the colonized): a) reality exists and thus must be
considered or b) reality is irrelevant and should be replaced by desired
life which accepts and reframes “reality” as the mimicry presented (342).
Freud on uncanny

 Let us first take the uncanny effects associated with the omnipotence of
thoughts, instantaneous wish-fulfilment, secret harmful forces and the return
of the dead. There is no mistaking the conditions under which the sense of
the uncanny arises here. We—or our primitive forebears—once regarded such
things as real possibilities; we were convinced that they really happened.
Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of
thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old
ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation. Now, as soon as
something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded
beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny. (2003:154)
 In summary, for Freud the uncanny contains its apparent opposite: if the
canny is the homely, what is close to home, it none the less has a tendency to
morph into the profoundly unfamiliar, the unhomely, which alienates or
estranges us from what we thought was most properly our own. Alienation
would usually be thought of as a problem, but if it is something that is part of
all experience, and is even something that might inspire us to re-evaluate our
identities, then we can understand it as an opportunity. The uncanny, in
other words, opens a space for us to reconsider how we have come to be who
we are.
Uncanniness of culture

 Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary generalizations, its mimetic

narratives, its homologous empty time, its seriality, its progress, its customs
and coherence. But cultural authority is also unheimlich, for to be distinctive,
significa-tory, influential and identifiable, it has to be translated,
disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary, intertextual, international,
inter-racial. (LC: 136–7)