By Bart Moore-Gilbert
This can be a accomplished survey of the sector of postcolonial thought. The ebook systematically examines the objections which were raised opposed to postcolonial idea, revealing the simplifications and exagerations on either side of the argument. It offers a close institutional heritage of the ways that the connection among tradition and colonialism has been characteristically studied of different kinds of postcolonial research of such questions. a lot controversy has lately come to enclose the prestige and price of postcolonial concept. Postcolonial concept has been challenged on numerous fronts: on its interdisciplinary competence, at the politics of its institutional position, and on its implicit domination of others of postcolonial research, a lot of which were tested much longer than postcolonial thought itself. the consequent debate has usually turn into so heated, even presonalized, that the problems at stake were obscured. The ebook offers the advanced paintings of the 3 relevant representatives of postcolonial concept, Gayatri Spivak, Edward stated and Homi Bhabha, and considers the criticisms they've got confronted, from an alleged Eurocentrism to an obfuscatory prose type. ultimately, Bart Moore-Gilbert assesses the overlaps and transformations among postcolonial thought and different kinds of postcolonial feedback, and considers the ways that postcolonial research could be hooked up with assorted histories of oppression. Bart Moore-Gilbert is the writer of "Kipling and 'Orientalism'", and editor of "Literature and Imperialism", "Cultural Revolution?", "The problem of the humanities within the 1960s", "The Arts within the Seventies: Cultural Closure?", "Writing India: British Representations of India 1857-1990" and "Postcolonial thought: A Reader".
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Example text
Is one to approach Kipling, for instance, simply in terms of how he reflects the dominant ethnographic, anthropological and political thought of his period and in terms of the way in which he reinforces the vision of India in earlier fictional representations of the sub-continent? Or is one to approach him as a writer whose 'unique' personal style and vision question and even challenge the dominant ideologies of imperialism and received traditions of writing about empire? Said never quite solves the problem of how to conceptualize the relationship between the 'latent' and 'manifest' aspects of Orientalism, a failure which certainly partially explains his often radically contradictory accounts of a number of key thematic issues in the discourse which he analyses.
Such study in turn enables hegemony to be confirmed or extended, for instance by providing knowledge of the customs of subject peoples, which then forms the basis for administrative policy and action. Meanwhile 'primary' representations of the colonized (the fictions of Rider Haggard or Kipling, for example) circulate in the metropolis, encouraging support for intervention in, or further Westernization of, the conquered territories. CONTRADICTIONS IN ORIENTALISM For five years or so after its first appearance, the argument of Orientalism remained largely uncontested--a tribute to its power and the originality, or unfamiliarity, of the terms in which it was constructed.
Thus far in his argument, Said is justifiably accused of homogenizing the sites of enunciation of Orientalist discourse, and in the process of suppressing important cultural and geographical, as well as historical, differences in the varied cultures of Western imperialism. Indeed, in this respect it can certainly be argued that Said repeats in reverse the alleged tendency of colonial discourse to homogenize its subject peoples, by implying that colonizing cultures 'are all the same'. By contrast, Dennis Porter suggests in 'Orientalism and Its Problems' that the distinctions between 'national' discourses of empire and the divergent patterns of representation to which they give rise are much greater than Said recognizes.