Evaluation of Post-colonialism Theorists - Assignment Example

Comparative Analysis of Post-colonialism Theorists: Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak The collapse of western colonization after the World War II did not, sadly, end the oppression of the once colonised countries. The remnants of western imperialism machinery continue to hound and tyrannize the people who were once the subjects of the colonising powers. To the post-colonial theorists, it is the imagery and the notion of the East as mentally, economically and socially inferior to the West which makes it difficult for such people to successfully rise from the ashes of western imperialism and take their own place in the sun. The Post-colonialism theorists therefore seek to analyse and understand the condition of the once colonised people by rousing the minds not only of these people but of the world as well whose perception of the East has been decided on the merit of what has been written about it in historical and literary texts. Post-colonial theorists like Edward Said, Homi BhaBha, Gayatri Spivak and other writers who hailed from these once-colonised countries but have migrated to western countries have formed the nucleus of the movement which is called Post-colonialism. Most influential theorists of the movement however, do not simply counter what they think are erroneous misconceptions of the East as spread and elaborated by the West but largely used historical writings and texts to illustrate how these misconceptions and erroneous misrepresentations evolved and came about. These writers pored over ancient writings as well as historical, literary, political, economic discursive texts and read traces of colonial misrepresentation of the East in them. Two of the most influential theorists of the movement, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, born in Palestine and India, respectively, but who have eventually lived in the United States and enjoyed academic accolades from their peers gave impetus to the post-colonial theory and made it one of the most controversial contemporary subjects. This paper will focus briefly on the biographical background of these two and extensively on their works and theories which made the Post-Colonial movement a force to reckon with in the twentieth century. As a fitting ending, a comparative analysis of the works of these two will be conducted. I The Theory of Post-Colonialism Post-colonialism is a movement which explains and describes contemporary society and culture by focusing on the effects of the colonial era which began in the 16th century. It necessarily therefore involves the study of countries and places which have become colonies by the western powers like India, Palestine, Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Algeria, Brazil and Vietnam. Post-colonialism implies a condition which comes after the process of colonisation as well as its consequences and the purpose of the movement is to render voice to its victims on the premise that the structural remnants of colonisation continue to oppress the people notwithstanding liberation from the colonising powers. This it does by understanding and analysing these structures and encouraging the people who are presently undergoing liberation and revolution (Fortier 130). It is not therefore surprising that the prime movers of the post-colonialism theory are those who come from countries which once came under colonial rule. Post-colonialism was in fact “created by thinkers and activists in formers colonies,” according to author Chris Gosden “together with theorists from former colonial powers dealing with the unpalatable consequences of racism or other elements of western triumphalism” (18). II Edward Said Biography. Edward Said was born in West Jerusalem in the year 1935 but spent the most part of his childhood in Cairo after his family was driven out of their home in Palestine in 1948. It would be years before he would be able to set foot in his birthplace again. In Cairo, he attended an American school called St. George and later a British school named Victoria College. Eventually, he was sent to a boarding school in the United States and later to Princeton University (Ashcroft 2). In 1966, he wrote his first book on Joseph Conrad. He was then working as assistant professor at the Columbia University. The following year, the war in the Middle East broke inspiring him to write the book Orientalism which examined western writings about the East. In 1975, Said wrote the book Beginnings which largely referred to the war in 1967. He became a member of the Palestine National Council when he was elected to that body in 1977 until his retirement in 1991, during the course of which he published another book entitled The Question of Palestine which is about the denial of the existence of another, referring to Israel’s alleged acceptance of the existence and presence of the Palestine people. Among the many gifts of Said is music. A fine pianist, he had written for The Nation as a music critic and had collaborated with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to produce a new Beethoven concerto and conducted a musical workshop in Germany for young Arab and Israel musicians (Bollas 1-9). Said was a distinguished and brilliant academician. He was awarded full university professorship at the Columbia University and had delivered the Reith lectures for the BBC, the Henry Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University, and the Empson Lectures at Cambridge. He was a member of many distinguished organizations and societies, among them: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Philosophical Society; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition, he had received honorary degrees from top universities and institutions all over the country. He was also a multi-awarded writer having honors and prizes from various award-giving bodies, among them: the New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction for his work Out of Place; the 2000 Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and; the 2001 Lannan Literary award for Lifetime Achievement. He had written and published a significant number of books like the The End of the Peace Process, Oslo and After, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Power, Politics and Culture and The Relevance of Humanism in Contemporary America, among others. He died in 2003 from a lingering illness. Said’s Works. Orientalism, which is Said’s second published work, is acknowledged to be the key that opened the post-colonialism movement. Orientalism is part of the Said trilogy of works, including The Question of Palestine in 1979 and Covering Islam in 1981, which depicted an imbalanced relationship between Islam, the Middle East and the Orient on one end of the spectrum and the American and European imperialism on the other. Whilst Orientalism centered on French and British imperialism, the two other books focused on the covert imperialism of America which underpins its relationship with Palestine and Zionism and the Islamic world (Gandhi 66). In Orientalism, Said depicted the concept of Orientalism as largely a product of western construction of the east and mainly through literary works, “institutions, processes of investigation and styles of thought,” and through which the said construction eventually became institutionalised (Ashcroft 51). Orientalism, according to the book Postcolonial Theory, exposes the hypocritical ideologies that underpinned western imperialism by revealing the connection between colonial power and colonial knowledge. In simple terms, Said posited in Orientalism that the manner by which the West acquired its knowledge of the East was necessarily conducted by the use of western domination (Gandhi 67-68). Although Orientalism is an explanation and exposition of the evolution of the construction of the East by the West, it is largely about Europe as a western imperialist. Thus, instead of outright offering a counter-definition of the East to belie the notion of it as constructed and asserted by the West, Said merely presents and makes an analysis of western textual discourse about the east. It presented the way the European colonisers themselves studied Oriental languages, history and culture, offering pronouncements and judgments on them without questioning their very own supremacy and civilization. This notion of the East which were sometimes merely myth, opinion, hearsay, and prejudice when spread around by influential people were received as gospel truth by others who relied on the veracity of the pronouncements of these influential people (Ashcroft 50-51). Said cites, for instance, Ernest Renan, an influential French historian, who declared that “Every person, however he may be slightly acquainted with the affairs of our time, sees clearly the actual inferiority of Mohammedan countries” (qtd. Ashcroft 51). When such pronouncements proceeded from the mouth of influential historians like Renan, they are received as truth without question and became historically embedded in time. Thus, in 1908, Lord Cromer relying on the pronouncements of Renan as historical fact wrote that “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” (qtd. Ashcroft 51). However, Said asserted that this stereotyping of the East, especially of the Muslims, by the western perspective began even before the modern European imperial expansion and way back into the Middle Ages through trade between Muslims and European Christians. Moreover, contact between these groups took on a more traumatic turn during a series of ideologically underpinned wars in Spain, the Holy Land and in the Balkans. It was during these wars that the Europeans were confronted by the military superiority of the Muslims and began to see them as demonic – the enemy of Christianity. Christian writings thereafter showed Muslims as “tyrannical, cruel, lustful, effete and treacherous” – everything that they perceived European Christians was not. Muslims therefore were perceived as the antithesis of Christians. This perception was thereafter broadened to include everything in the East which was then begun to be seen as decadent, corrupt and ominous. Thus, whilst the West was perceived to be “benign, masculine, civilised, moral and virtuous” the East was the opposite and therefore ‘the other.’ This perception further became one of the underlying factors that impelled the West to invade the East and subject them to colonization and forcibly change its ways. The East’s inferiority and immorality made colonization tenable and justifiable (Webster 97). This anti-eastern perception of the western world intensified during the 18th and 19th century, according to Said in his book Culture and Imperialism. This was made possible through the creation of a “negative non-European other” goaded by the trend in nationalism. Thus, Black Africans, yellow-skinned Chinese, and other indigenous people were inferior and were unfit even to conduct their own affairs. This notion even extended to rival nations but most especially to colonised subjects and lived through even after the collapse of colonialism at the close of World War II. The perception of an inferior East underpinned, according to Said, western responses to political issues around the globe. This same surviving image of eastern inferiority and unfitness to govern itself underpinned American intervention in countries like Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan (Webster 98). III Gayatri Spivak Born in Calcutta in 1942, the year India was hit by the great artificial famine, Gayatri Spivak was a brilliant student at the University of Calcutta graduating with first class honours degree in English in 1959 (Bercovitch and Patell 470) . Before attending the university however, she was taught by tribal Christians, aboriginals who were converted to Christianity by missionaries, in a missionary school. After her university graduation, she went to the United States thereafter to further her studies in literature at the Cornell University where she took up her Masters and a one-year stint as a fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, England. She returned to the States at the end of her fellowship to teach at the University of Iowa at the same time working on her doctoral at the Cornell University under the supervision of Paul de Man (Morton 4-5). She thereafter taught literature and cultural studies in different American universities including Emory, the University of Texas and the University of Pittsburgh (Bercovitch and Patell 470). In 2007, Spivak was awarded full university professorship at the Columbia University. Some of her works include Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats published in 1974 but was actually a product of the thesis she did during her doctoral studies at Cornell University (Morton 5), an English translation with introduction of the work of Jacques Derrida entitled Of Grammatology in 1976, In Other Worlds: Essays In Cultural Politics in 1989 which is a collection of her writings on politics on interpretation, Indian subaltern studies, French feminism and deconstructive, postcolonial and Third World criticisms, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues in 1990 and Outside in the Teaching Machine in 1992 (Bercovitch and Patell 470). Theory. Spivak’s post-colonial theory is best illustrated by her analysis of different classic English literary texts like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre written in 1847 and Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe written in 1719. These critical analyses that “overtly challenge the ideology of colonialism embedded in classic English literary texts” were contained in such essays as Three Women’s Texts and A Critique of Colonialism and Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana. Spivak’s concern as illustrated in these works was the colonial policies that were palpable in these classic literary texts in the education of the elite of India, a fact in which she had first-hand experienced in while in India (Morton 5). Spivak’s criticisms however go beyond colonialism policies to post-colonialism nationalism that has sprouted in previously colonised countries in mid-twentieth century as such nationalism failed to liberate what she calls subaltern groups or groups who are marginalised in societies like “women, the poor, the rural peasants and the illiterate.” As Spivak sees it, post-colonialism nationalism tends to benefit only a select few who have only managed and caused the transition from territorial imperialism to neocolonialism (Morton 6). Spivak’s general approach to the post-colonialism movement is focusing on classic literary texts and countering their cultural authority by rewriting them from the point of the marginal or subaltern characters. In Jane Eyre, for example, Spivak used the character of Creole and in Robinson Crusoe the character of Friday, both minor and marginalised characters to contradict the narratives of colonial authority which are prevailing in the text. The employment of literary, historical, economic and cultural texts rather than historical figures dominates Spivak’s post-colonial style and method (Morton 7). In Jane Eyre, Spivak breaks down and merges the line between fictional discourse and discourse on political and institutional power. Spivak traces a “hidden imperialist sub-text in Jane Eyre’s narrative of bourgeois female individualism.” Thus, whilst the novel by Bronte became a representation of liberated feminism in the 19th century, this was done, according to Spivak at the expense of Bertha Mason, a Jamaican Creole and the wife of Edward, whose character had no development and real identity in the story other than a mad wife whom Edward met in the Caribbean and subsequently hid in a secluded room in his castle. The representation of Bertha Mason therefore as a hidden, mad woman with vague identity is in itself a representation of the East as opposed to the stable, strong-willed, morally upright character of Jane Eyre who implicitly represents the Western woman. The one-sided tale of Jane Eyre therefore, according to Spivak, operates unequally as there is a denial of the rights and freedoms to Bertha that have been afforded to Jane (Morton 87). IV Comparative Analysis: Postcolonial Theories of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, together with Homi Bhabha has been called the “Holy Trinity” by a writer because of their collective significance and role in the Post-colonial movement. Together, the trio had made possible the “turn to theory” in the 1980s using the work of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan in the analysis of the society and culture of those previously placed under colonial rule (Kennedy et al 237). There are however differences between the approach of Said and Spivak in their treatment of post-colonialism analyses. Whilst Said, for example, acknowledges curtly that political economy is an inherent aspect of colonialism, it is however Spivak who is more than willing to dwell lengthily on them. Said had asserted that his role in the post-colonial movement is in the analysis of culture, rather than anything else, in the imperialism process whilst Spivak has shown in her works the enthusiasm to discuss political economic extensively. This is aptly illustrated in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? In which she engages in the critique of globalisation: The contemporary international division of labor is a displacement of the divided field of nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. Put simply, a group of countries, generally first-world, are in a position of investing capital; another group, generally third-world, provide the field for invest- ment, both for the comprador indigenous capitalists and through their ill-protected and shifting labor force. In the interest of maintaining the circu- lation and growth of industrial capital (and of the concomitant task of administration within the nineteenth-century territorial imperialism), transportation, law and standardized education systems were developed – even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country. With so-called decolonization, the growth of multinational capital, and the relief of administrative charge, “development” does not involve wholesale legisla- tion and establishing educational system in a comparable way. This impedes the growth of consumerism in the comprador countries” (Aboul-Ela 169). Another aspect that differentiates the two post-colonial theorists is that whilst Said relied on Foucault in his analysis of imperialism, Spivak depended on the deconstruction theory of Derrida to help her analyse textual discursion of literary, cultural, historical and economic texts. The implication is that whilst Said believes that the misconception of the East is the result of its misconception of influential writers and historical figures in the past which dates back to the middle ages and has been historically institutionalised by subsequent influential figures in history who relied on the veracity of their pronouncements, Spivak believes that the susceptibility of ancient texts to misinterpretation made possible the convergence of imperialism with textual analysis and that these texts must be therefore refined, interpreted and analysed by colonial discourse (Aboul-Ela 171). Thus, whilst Said pointed a finger at the influential historical figures for concocting an image of the East that paved the way for western imperialistic adventurism, Spivak blames susceptibility of ancient textual works to misrepresentation as the root of the present misconception of the east. Although both theorists converge in their perspectives of the breakup and disarticulation of cultural and aesthetic spheres brought about by the dominance of transnational capitalism of the western countries, the two theorists approach this conclusion from different angles. Said saw this as the overpowering effect of Orientalism foisted on the world whilst Spivak, stressing on the hapless conditions of the subalterns, believed in the impossibility of these subalterns to possess a voice that will allow the formation of collectivity and class consciousness amidst an environ of “epistemic violence” without rewriting and correcting the superior and dominant nature of the sovereign over the subject (Liu 63). Both Spivak and Said however, heavily relied on the method of collapsing the distinctions between text and reality, a phenomenon which critic Arif Dirlik called ‘antifoundationalism.’ Dirlik assailed post-colonialism theorists on this ground, among others. Antifoundationalism perspective sees reality as a reflection of the written text or language rather than reality reflecting the written text. That both writers fall into this ‘trap’ is not surprising considering their reliance on Foucault and Derrida in their analysis of the discursive nature of western writings as implicitly imperialistic. This perspective necessarily looks at the world as a product and an end result of language. The point of the antifoundationalist is the fact that post-colonial theorists like Said and Spivak refuse to see and therefore ignore the fact that concrete events like economic and social conditions provide the very foundation of reality rather than mere textual discourse (McLeod 252). V Conclusion Edward Said’s Orientalism successfully made a mark in literary history that opened the way for the Post-colonial movement, a movement that dwells on the present conditions of once-colonised countries and people at the height of western imperialism in the 16th century and onwards. The collapse of colonialism has not ceased the oppression and domination of these people owing to the fact that there are remnants of colonisation that are palpable in the textual discourse of western writings that have been established as historical facts and therefore received as the gospel truth by people all over the world. For Said, who was a disciple of Foucault, these oppression through false imagery began in the Middle Ages brought about by the traumatic contact between the Middle Eastern Muslims and European Christians in three religious wars, and which false imagery was institutionalised through ancient writings of influential historical figures through the ages. For Spivak, who relied heavily on Derrida’s deconstruction methods, these false images of the East were brought about by the susceptibility of ancient texts to misrepresentation. There is therefore a need, according to Spivak to process, manufacture and correct these texts in the light of colonisation to bring about a correct understanding of the East. Said and Spivak, together with other Post-colonial theorists, mostly intellectuals who like said and Spivak were born in countries which were once colonised by the West, are then engaged in the process of “decolonization” or disengaging the minds not only of the once-colonised people, but also of the entire world from the misimpression of the East as anything that is antithetical of the West. This is important for the people on the East to rise from the ashes of colonisation to free them from the shameful and inferior images that were the largely the creation of western construct. Works Cited Aboul-El, Hosam M. Other South: Faulkner, coloniality, and the Mariátegui tradition. Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Ashcroft, Bill and Pal S. Ahluwalia, Edward Said. Routledge, 2001. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Cyrus R. K. Patell. The Cambridge History of American Literature: Poetry and criticism, 1900-1950. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bollas, Christopher. “Introducing Edward Said”, Freud and the non-European. Said, Edward W., Christopher Bollas, Freud Museum (London, England), Jacqueline Rose. Verso, 2003. Fortier, Mark. Theory/theatre: an introduction. Routledge, 1997. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Allen & Unwin, 1998. Kennedy, George, Alexander Christa Knellwolf, Hugh Barr Nisbet, Christopher Norris, Jessica Osborn, Raman Selden, Claude Julien Rawson. The Cambridge history of literary criticism. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Liu, Kang. Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries. Duke University Press, 2000. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester University Press, 2000. Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Polity, 2007. Webster, Anthony. The debate on the rise of the British empire. Manchester University Press, 2006. Read More