Lord Macauley, Minute on Indian Education (1835): ‘a class of interpreter between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, in morals and in intellect.’
Karl Marx: It is not the consciousnessof men that determines their social being but, on the contrary, theirsocial being that determines their consciousness.’ ‘falseconsciousness’.
Ernest Renan: ‘Nations … are something fairly new in history. Antiquity was unfamiliar with them; Egypt, China and ancient Chaldea were in no way nations. They were flocks led by a Son of the Sun or by a Son of Heaven. Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens as such. Classical Antiquity had republics, municipal kingdoms, conferderations of local republics and empires, yet it can hardly be said to have had nations in our understanding of the term. (Quoted in Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1990, p.9; cited in Bill Ashcroft, et al., Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Routledge 2000, p.149.)
Rudyard Kipling: ‘Take up thewhite man’s burden’ (1899) - admonition to America not tooffer Filipinos independence after war against Spain in the Phillipines.Also “Recessional”: ‘If, drunk with power we loose /Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, / Such boastings as the Gentilesuse, / Or less breeds without the Law - / Lord God of Hosts, be with usyet, / Lest we forget - lest we forget.’
In Kim, the Creighton Sahib, ‘cover’of the Head of the Secret Service is Director of the General Survey ofIndia.
Max Weber on ethnic groups: ‘human groups that entertain a subjective belief in thie common descent - because of similarities of physical type or of custms or both, or because of memories of colonisation or migration - in such a way that this belief is important for the continuation of the nonkinship communal relationships.’ (Selected Papers, 1968.)
Max Weber [cont.]: Weber regarded rationalisation asa key component of modernisation, but for him it was also a key to itsambiguity .. Rationalisation [rationalism] makes the world orderly butit cannot make it meaningful. If Weber is correct, it would suggest thatimperialism not only is a key aspect of the emergence of modernity andits connection with an aggressive European self-image, but also createsthe cultural conditions for the (post-colonial) disruptions that modernitybrings to European society.
Louis Althusser: Ideology is perpetuated by ideological state apparatuses such as church, education, police, which interpellate subjects, that is, apparatuses that ‘call people forth’ as subjects, and which provide the conditions by which, and the context in which, they obtain subjectivity.
Jacques Lacan (summary): the final stageis an entry into language, a passing from the imaginary phase to the symbolicorder in which the subject comes to discover that the locus of power isnow located in the ‘phallus’. This principle is also the Lawof the Father, and Lacan’s theory asserts that the subject obtainsan understanding of its gender at the same time as it enters into language... the subject is both produced in language and subjected to the lawsof the symbolic that pre-exist it.
Michel Foucault: ‘The author function is therefore characteristic of the moe of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within the society’.
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), b. Martinique. Black Skin, White Masks (1952, trans. 1968); The Wretchedof the Earth (1961.) According to Edward Said, ‘[h]is notion was that unless nationalconsciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into socialconsciousness, the future would not hold liberation but an extension ofimperialism.’
[Fanon - quotations:] ‘A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstractpopulism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature.It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is tosay actions which are less and less attached to the ever present realityof the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made bya people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise theaction through which that people has created itself and keeps itself inexistence.’ (Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press Edn. p.154-5).
‘I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyondthe historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycleof my freedom.’ (Black Faces, White Masks, 1952, p.231.)
‘It is through the effort to recapture the self, to scrutinise theself, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men willbe able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.’(Ibid., p.232.)
Edward Said: ‘“Imperialism” means the practice and theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; “colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.’ (Culture and Imperialism, 1993, p.8.)
[Edward Said - quotations:] ‘Contrapuntal reading’ - e.g., MansfieldPark reveals the extent to which the privileged life of the English upperclasses is established upon the profits made from West-Indian plantations:‘As we look back at the culture archive, we begin to reread it notunivocally but contrapuntally.’ (1993, p.59).
‘[Orientalism is] a way of coming to terms withthe orient that is based on the orient’s special place in Europeanexperience’ or ‘dealing with it by making statements aboutit, authorising views about it, describing it, by teaching it, settlingit, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating,restructuring, and having authority ove the Orient.’ (Orientalism,1978, p.3.) Further, ‘this way of knowing the Orient is a way ofmaintaining power over it.’ (q.p.).
‘A distribution of geopolitical awareness intoaesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philogicaltexts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction… but also a whole series of “interests” which …it not only creates but maintains. It is, rather than expresses, a certainwill or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate,even incorporate, what is a manifestly different world.’ (Ibid.,p.12.)
‘[rhetoricians of imperialism] deploy a languagewhose imagery of growth, fertility, and expansion, whose teleologicalstructure of property and identity, whose ideological discrimination between“us” and “them” had already matured elsewhere- in fiction, political science, racial theory, travel writing.’(Culture and Imperialism, p.128.)
Mikhail Bahktin: Importantly, dialogue is only possible with an ‘other’ so alterity, in Bakhtin’s formulation, is not simply ‘exclusion’ but an apartness that stands as a precondition of dialogue.
Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) argues that colonial discourse is compelled to be ambivalent because it never really wants colonial subjects to be exact replicas of the colonisers [as] this would be too threatening. Hence: Ambivalence and mimicry.
{Homi Bhabha - quotations:] ‘Universalism does not merely end with a view ofimmanent “spiritual” meaning produced in the text. It alsointerpellates, for its reading, a subject positioned at the point whereconflict and difference resolves and all ideology ends. It is not thatthe Transcendental subject cannot see historical conflict or colonialdifference as mimetic structures or themes in the text. What it cannotconceive, is how it is itself structured ideologically and discursivelyin relation to those processes of signification which do not then allowfor the possibility of whole or universal meanings.’ (‘[Ofmimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in October,28, Spring, 1984; rep. as The Location of Culture, Chap. 4.)
Bhabha calls Mimic man ‘almost the same, but notquite’ (Location of Culture) - that is, ‘almost thesame, but not white’. Further, ‘a mimic man’ emergesfrom Macauley’s writing that can be traced through Kipling, Forster,Orwell and Naipaul and is the effect of a ‘flawed colonial mimesisin which to be Anglicised is empathically not to be English.’ (Ibid.)
Bhabha shows that both colonising and colonised subjectsare implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The concept isrelated to hybridity because, just as ambivalence ‘decentres’authority from its position of power, so that authority may also becomehybridised when placed in a colonial context in which it finds itselfdealing with, and often inflected by, other cultures.
Bhabha emphasises that the ‘difference’ hereis clearly connected with the radical ambivalence that he argues is implicitin all colonial discourse. He insists that this same ambivalence is implicitin the act of cultural interpretation itself since, as he puts it, theproduction of meaning in the relations of two systems requires a “ThirdSpace”. This space is something like the idea of deferral in post-structuralism.While Saussure suggested that signs acquire meaning through their differencefrom other signs (and thus a culture may be identified by its differencefrom other cultures), Derrida suggested that “difference”is also ‘deferred’, a duality he defined in the new term “différance”.The “Third Space” can be compared to this space of deferraland possibility (thus a culture’s difference is never simply andstatic but ambivalent, changing, and always open to further possible interpretations).In short, this is the space of hybridity itself, the space in which culturalmeanings and identities always contain the traces of other meanings andidentities. Therefore, Bhabha argues, ‘claims to inherent originalityor purity of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empiricalhistorical instances that demonstrate their hybridity.’ (Bhabha,1994)
‘It is significant that the productive capacitiesof this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For awillingness to descend into that alien territory … may open theway to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticismof multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscriptionand articulation of culture’s hybridity.’ (The Location of Culture, 1994).
‘[T]he interstitial passage [liminality] betweenfixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybriditythat entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.’(The Location of Culture, 1994, p.4.)
‘Even though [nationalism] as an ideology ... cameout of the imperialist countries, these countries were not able to formulatetheir own national aspirations until the age of exploration. The marketsmade possible by European imperial penetration motivated the constructionof the nation-state at home. European nationalism was motivated by whatEurope was doing in its far-flung dominions. The “national idea”,in other words, flourished in the soil of foreign conquest.’ (Nation and Narration, 1990, p.59.)
Frederic Jameson: ‘What all third-worldcultural productions have in common, and what distinguishes them radicallyfrom analagous cultural forms in the first world [is that] all third-worldtexts are necessarily … allegorical, and in a very specific way:they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when,or I should say particularly when, their forms develop out of predominantlywestern machineries of representation, such as the novel. (‘ThirdWorld Literature in an era of multi-nationial capitalism’ in SocialText, Fall, 1984, p.67.) Jameson was criticsed by Aijaz Ahmed for homogenisingeffect (Theories, Class, Nations and Literatures, 1992).
Ngugi wa Thiong’o: […] the very use of the colonial language has been opposed by writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Languagein African Culture, 1981) who, after a succcessful career as a writer in English, has renounced the language of the cormer coloniser to write his novel and plays in Giyuku.)
G. Viswanathan [on English literature]: ‘The strategy of locating authority in these texts all but effaced the sordid history of colonial expropriation, material exploitation, and class and race oppression behind European world dominance […] the English literary text functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state.’
Further: ‘The split between the materialand discursive practices of colonialism is nowhere sharper than in theprogressive refraction of the rapacious, exploitative and ruthless actorof history into the reflective subject of literature.’ (‘TheBeginnings of English Literary Study in India’, in Oxford Review, 1987;vide also Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India,1989).
Gayatri Spivak: Theorists such as Gayatri Spivak drew attention to the danger of assuming that it was a simple matter of allowing the subaltern (oppressed) forces to speak, without recognising that their essential subjectivity had been and still was constrained by the discourses within which they were constructed as subaltern. […] frequently misinterpreted as meaning there was no way in which the subaltern could ever attain a voice. (Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 1985b.)
Spivak critiques the essentialism attributed to the subalternclass in Antonio Gramsci’s conception that it has a history no lessthan the hegemonising class or power.
D. W. Williams: ‘There are no Africans in the new World; there is only African sperm in various states of catalysis, and it is this fact of catalysis which constitutes our difference from all other peoples of the world.’ (Image and idea in the art of Guyana, 1969.) |