John

MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Chapter 2: READING
COLONIAL DISCOURSES
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez
In this chapter we will :
 Learn more about colonial discourses and
their importance in Poscolonial Studies.
 Understand how Orientalism was defined by
Edward Said:
 Main features of Orientalism
 Main stereotypes of the Orient
 Findout how this groundbreaking theory was
received.
 Look into Homi Bhabha’s critique of Said’s
theory:
 Ambivalence and Mimicry.
Colonial Discourses
Why are they so prominent in Postcolonial Studies?
Reading and Politics
 In chapter 1 we touched on how colonialism
could not occur without colonial discourses
 i.e.
a set of beliefs that are held to justify the
possession of continuing occupation of other
people’s lands.
 Mutually supportive relationship between material
practices of colonialism and its representations
Reading and Politics
 Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson (De-Scribing Empire
1994: 3):
 «Colonialism is an operation of discourse […] It
interpellates colonial subjects by incorporating them
in a system of representation»
 «Interpellation» (from Louis Althusser) means «calling»:
ideology calls us and we turn and recognise who we
are.
 Ex: Fanon’s being called by others makes him consider
himself in terms of the racist ideology around him.
 But it also works through pleasure: by inviting individuals to
regard themselves in flattering ways
 (ex. Making colonisers feel important)
 Reading and Politics
 «Colonial discouse analysis» (i.e. reading
literature in the context of colonial
discourses)serves several purposes:
 1. It refuses the humanist assumption that literary
texts exist above and beyond their historical
contexts.
 It situates texts in history by exposing
 how historical contexts influence the production of
meaning within literary texts,
 and how literary representations themselves have the
power to influence their historical moment.
Reading and Politics
 2. Criticism of colonial discourses points out
how the «very best» of Western high culture
(opera, art, literature, classical music, etc.) is
caught up in the sordid history of colonial
exploitation and dispossession.
 3. The attention to the machinery of colonial
discourses in the past can act as a means of
resisting the continuation in the present of
colonial representations which survive (neo-
colonialism).
 I.e. «decolonising the mind»
Edward Said’s
Orientalism
Reading Orientalism
 Asdescribed in chapter 1, Edward Said’s
Orientalism instigated postcolonial studies
today.
 It studies how the Western colonial powers of
Britain & France represented
 North African and Middle Eastern lands,
 mostly in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.

 «The Orient» is the collective noun Said uses to

refer to these places.
 «Orientalism» refers to the sum of the West’s
representations of the Orient.
 READING : excerpt from Said’s «Orientalism»
The Shape of Orientalism
Main characteristics
The Shape of Orientalism
1. ORIENTALISM constructs binary divisions.
 The Orient vs. The West.
 They exist in opposition to the other.
 The Orient is conceived as being what the West is not.
 The Orient is frequently described in a series of
negative terms that buttress a sense of the West’s
superiority and strength.
 Ex. Knowledge & learning vs. Ignorance and naiveté.
 In Orientalism, East & West are positioned through the
construction of an unequal dichotomy.
 «European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient»
 The Shape of Orientalism
 2. ORIENTALISM is a Western
fantasy.
 Western views of the Orient
are not based on what is
observed to exist in Oriental
lands,
 They often result from the
West’s dreams, fantasies and
assumptions about this
radically different, contrasting
place.
 Orientalism is a fabricated
construct, a series of images
that come to stand as the
Orient’s reality for those in
the West.
 Orientalism imposes upon
the Orient specifically
Western views of its «reality».
The Shape of Orientalism
 3. Orientalism is an institution.
 The imaginative assumptions of Orientalism are
often taken as hard facts.
 They make possible a whole institutional structure
where opinions, views and theses about the
Orient circulate as objective knowledges, wholly
reliable truths.
 The Orient became an object «suitable for study in
the academy, for display in the museum, for
reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical
illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic,
racial and historical theses … for instances of
economic and sociological theories of
development, revolution, cultural personality,
national religious character»
The Shape of Orientalism
 4. Orientalism is literary.
 It influences the multitude of
literary and non-literary writings.
 Said identifies philology,
lexicography, history, biology,
political and economic theory,
novel-writing and lyric poetry as
vehicles of Orientalism.
 It promoted new forms of writing
that celebrated Western
experience abroad,
 such as the adventure story in
the Victorian period.
The Shape of Orientalism
 5.Orientalism is
legitimating.
 It is a far-reaching
system of
representations
bound to a structure
of political
domination.
 Orientalist
representations
function to justify
Western colonial rule
of Eastern lands.
The Shape of Orientalism
 6. There is a latent and manifest Orientalism.

 Latent Orientalism describes the dreams and fantasies

about the Orient that, in Said’s view, remain relatively
constant over time.
 Manifest Orientalism refers to the examples of Orientalist
knowledge produced at different historical moments.

 Latent Orientalism is like a blueprint; manifest Orientalism

is the many different versions that can be built from
fundamentally the same design.
 I.e.: In an Orientalist representation, the same assumptions
remain constant in spite of the differing styles or forms they
may choose to adopt.
Stereotypes of the Orient
Description of the main ones
Stereotypes of the Orient
 1. The Orient is Timeless.
 The West = the place of historical progress and
scientific development
 the «Enlightened» West
 The Orient =remote from the influence of
historical change.
 Essentially no different in the 12th century than in
the 18th, trapped in antiquity.
 A Western traveller in Oriental lands would be
moving in space but also travelling back in time to
an earlier world
Stereotypes of the Orient
 2. The Orient is strange.
 It is not just different, it is oddly different:
unusual, fantastic, bizarre.
 The Orient’s eccentricity was considered
evidence of its inferiority.
 The Occident is rational, sensible and familiar,
 while the Orient is irrational, extraordinary,
abnormal.
Stereotypes of the Orient
 3. Orientalism makes
assumptions about
race.
 Assumptions are often
made about the
inherent «racial»
characteristics of
Orientals.
 Stereotypes:
 the murderous and
violent Arab,
 the lazy Indian,
 the inscrutable
Chinaman.
Stereotypes of the Orient
 4. Orientalism makes
assumptions about gender.
 Popular gendered stereotypes
circulated:
 the effeminate Oriental male
(considered insufficiently
«manly»).
 In the West, men are supposed
to be strong, courageous,
active,…
 or the sexually promiscuous
exotic Oriental female
 often depicted nude and
presented as an immodest,
active creature of sexual
pleasure.
 In the West, women are
supposed to be passive, moral,
chaste.
Stereotypes of the Orient
 5. The Orient is feminine.
 The opposition of the Occident and the Orient was
gendered too as stereotypical versions of masculinity and
femininity.
 In Orientalism:
 the East was feminised:
 passive, submissive, exotic, luxurious, sexually mysterious and tempting
 the West became «masculine»:
 active, dominant, heroic, rational, self-controlled and ascetic.
 Use of sexual vocabulary:
 the Orient is «penetrated,» «possessed», «ravished,»
«embraced», «domesticated» …
 It reinforced the discourses of heroic, muscular masculinity
 The Orient becomes the site of perverse desire on the part
of many male colonisers.
 They have fantasies about it as a place where they could
indulge in forms of sexual excess.
 So: in writing about the Orient, they were really writing about
themselves.
Stereotypes of the Orient
 6. The Oriental is degenerate.
 Oriental stereotypes fixed typical weaknesses as:
cowardliness, laziness, untrustworthiness,
fickleness, laxity, violence, and lust.
 Orientalism posited the notion that Oriental
peoples needed to be civilised and made to
conform to the perceived higher moral
standards upheld in the West.

 CONCLUSION:
 In creating these stereotypes, Orientalism justified
colonialism
Criticisms of Orientalism
Criticisms of Orientalism
 1.The main criticism of this ground-
breaking text was that it made totalising
assumptions about a vast, varied expanse
of representations over a very long period
of history.
 In that sense, Orientalism becomes
ahistorical because he privileges latent
Orientalism (the blueprint) over manifest
Orientalism (the many different
representations over time).
Criticisms of Orientalism
 2. Said ignores resistance by the colonised.
 He rarely stops to examine how Oriental
peoples received these representations.
 There is little notion of the colonised subject as
an agent with the capacity for political
resistance.
 Result: the colonised is described as passive
 (just what Orientalism does!)
Criticisms of Orientalism
 3. Said ignores resistance within the West
(«counterhegemonic thought», in Gramsci’s term)
 What about those within the West who opposed
colonialism and were horrified by the treatment of
colonised peoples?

 4. Said ignores gender differences within the West.

 The Orient is a male fantasy, so how did Western
women write about the Orient? Did they resort to the
same stereotypes?
 Sara Mills (Discourses of Difference, 1992) argues that
women occupy a complex position:
 Empowered by their position of superiority in relation
to the colonised;
 Disempowered in relation to Western men.
Criticism of Orientalism
 In conclusion:
 Colonial discourses are multiple, precarious
and more ambivalent than Said presumed in
Orientalism.
 They do not function with the complete
success that Said describes.
 Colonial discourses were in constant
confrontation with resistances and contrary
views of various kinds, in the colonies and in
the West:
 so they are by no means homogeneous or
unitary.
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 Colonial
discourses are not always sure of
themselves.
 Dennis Porter: all Orientalist texts can
include moments when Orientalist
assumptions come up against alternative
views that throw their authority into
question,
 i.e.even the most Orientalist text can
articulate counterhegemonic views within
itself.
 Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 Homi Bhabha examines these moments using
psychoanalysis in 2 important essays in his book
The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

 1. «The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination

and the Discourse of Colonialism.»
 2. «Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of
Colonial Discourse.»

 Inthose essays he defines the concepts of

AMBIVALENCE and MIMICRY in the operation of
colonial discourses.
 Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 AMBIVALENCE:
 Although the objective of colonial discourse is to
construct derogatory stereotypes to justify
conquest, this objective is never fully met.
 Why not?
 Because the discourse of colonialism does not
function according to plan and it is always pulling in
two contrary directions at once.
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 Thecolonised subject is seen as the Other of
the Westerner,
 essentially outside Western culture and
civilization.
 Atthe same time, the discourse of colonialism
attempts to domesticate colonised subjects
and abolish their radical «otherness», bringing
them inside Western knowledge.
 The construction of «otherness» is split by the
contradictory positioning of the colonised
simultaneously inside & outside Western
knowledge.
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 How is the East “a fantasy of the West” (Said)?
 Fantasies of the colonial stereotype often appear
as horrors,
 «terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust,
and anarchy.»
 As a result, although colonised subjects are seen
as domesticated, harmless, knowable;
 at the same time they appear wild, harmful,
mysterious.
 Colonialist representations slide ambivalently
between the polarities of similarity and difference.
 Therefore, sterotypes must be frequently repeated in
an anxious, imperfect attempt to secure the
colonised subject into place.
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 So,
for Bhabha, the discourse of colonialism is
characterised by both AMBIVALENCE and
ANXIOUS REPETITION.
 In trying to do two things at one (construing the
colonised as both similar to and the other of the
colonisers), it ends up doing neither properly.
 The very fact that stereotypes must be endlessly
repeated reveals the impossibility of a fixed,
stable position for the colonised.
 Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 MIMICRY:
 The ambivalence of the colonised subject
becomes a direct threat to the authority of the
colonisers through the effect of «mimicry»
 In colonised nations like India, the British authorities
required native peoples to work on their behalf and
thus had to teach them the English language.
 These «mimic men» learn to act English but do not
look English and so they are not accepted as such.
 «to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English»
 Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 Mimic men are invested with the power to menace
the colonisers
 because they threaten to disclose the ambivalence of
the discourse of colonialism which the use of sterotypes
anxiously tries to conceal.
 Hearing their language returning through the mouths of
the colonised, the colonisers are faced with the worrying
threat of resemblance between coloniser and colonised.
 «almost the same but not quite»
 This threatens to collapse the Orientalist structure of
knowledge in which such oppositional distinctions are
made.
 They become a source of anti-colonial resistance.
Ambivalence and Mimicry in
Colonial Discourses
 Thisis very different from Said’s model of
Orientalism, which does not consider how
colonial discourses generate the
possibilities of their own critique.
 Previously, the notion of mimicry had
been seen as a condition of the
colonised’s subservience and crisis, the
measure of their powerlessness.
Before you go…
Check this out!
 Did you understand…
 …why colonial discourses are so important in
Poscolonial Studies?
 …how Orientalism was defined by Edward Said?
 …the main features of Orientalism?
 …the main stereotypes of the Orient?

 …how was his groundbreaking theory received?

 …Homi Bhabha’s critique of Said’s theory?
 …Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence (and anxious
repetition) and mimicry?
John
MacLeod’s
Beginning
Postcolonialism
Chapter 2: Reading
Colonial Discourses
Dra. Pilar Cuder Domínguez