Hello and welcome to this video on post-colonial theory. The ideas here will help you interpret crucial concepts in all four of the novels we'll be reading this semester. Make sure to pay careful attention. There will be a quiz the next time we meet.
This video focuses on relationships between in the Western world and many parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. These relationships were all shaped by imperial conquests. These were not equal relationships.
This is a very important thing to keep in mind. mind. All of the texts we'll be reading this semester have something to do with colonialism and its aftermath.
Our first text, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, was written at the high point of European imperialism and focuses on the Dutch Empire in the Congo. Our second text, Jean Rees's Wide Sargasso Sea, deals with British imperialism in the Caribbean. Our final two texts are set in the period after the European empires. had been dissolved.
Roddy Doyle's The Commitments is set in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland was a British colony for about 230 years before 1922. Finally, Hanif Qureshi's The Boot of Suburbia is set in London and focuses on characters from pre-partition India and their children. You'll be able to understand all of these texts much more richly and critique them more complexly once you've read them.
once you understand the basic ideas of post-colonial theory. So first of all, what is post-colonial theory? As you can probably tell from the name, post-colonial theorists are interested in what happens to a people during and after colonialism. This by the way does not imply to colonialism in the American states.
That's a totally different concept but we'll talk about that in class. While many authors have talked about the effects of imperialism or imperialism as a around the globe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia. In this class, we're mainly interested in European colonies and former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, Ireland, and India. We'll also be talking about three main theorists in this video.
Their names are Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Edward Said is often considered the founder of post-colonial theory. Said had a long career as an English professor at Columbia University.
He was born in Palestine before the State of Israel came into being in 1947. At that point, his family, who were Arabs and Protestants, moved to Egypt. Said was educated in the Middle East and America. Said's book Orientalism, published in 1978, argues that the Western powers engaged in colonialism, particularly Great Britain and France. France created a version of the Orient for Western consumption that had little to do with the actual Orient.
This is the time period when they used to say the sun never sets over the British Empire. If somebody let's say in the 1850s or 60s in Paris or London wished to talk about or read about India or Egypt or Syria there would be very little chance for that person to to simply address the subject. As we like to think in a kind of free and creative way.
A great deal of writing had gone before. And this writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science, you know, what I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up, you know.
The sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man. The East is a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters. You know, the marvels of the East was a phrase that was used. And the more I looked, the more I saw... that this was really quite consistent with itself.
You know, it had very little to do with people who had actually been there. By Orient, Said makes it clear that he means the Middle East. Orientalism, the book, also discusses India and Africa and other parts of the world. But his main concern is the Arab world.
Said writes that the Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies. the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the other. None of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.
Orientalism is a style of thought based upon a distinction made between the Orient and the Occident. Thus, a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, mind, destiny, and so on. The phenomenon of Orientalism deals principally not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and the ideas about the Orient, despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a real Orient.
Let's consider some of the key aspects of that very long bit of text I just quoted to you. First, Said writes that the Orient is a place, a site of colonies, civilizations, and languages. All of this is self-evident. But the key to Said's argument is what follows that.
The Orient, he writes, is one of the West's deepest and most recurring images of the other. The crucial terms there are image and other. The Orient and the people who live there are other, different, separate from the West and Westerners. The people of England, France, the Netherlands, the rest of Europe, and the United States know this because Western writers, artists, thinkers, and politicians have generated and reinforced an image or many images.
the East. Over centuries, Western scholars and artists have created libraries and museums full of writings and images that create a version of the Orient for the Western world. For example, today I am wearing a tie with images on it from the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone, the actual physical item that helped people decode Sanskrit, was found in Egypt.
It was found there by Napoleon's soldiers. It was brought to London because the English eventually beat the French and took over Egypt. The British Museum is basically filled with plunder from the Middle East. It is mostly an archaeological museum and those archaeological artifacts are things that were brought back from the Middle East to the West for the West to study them.
At the center of the museum is the Royal Palace. of the British Museum is the old British Library Reading Room. The library has since moved about half a mile to a magnificent modern building. But this room stands as a monument to British literature and the study of Orientalism. Here you can find the great 18th and 19th century British novels that so often represented the East and the Empire.
Here's a copy of Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre has a subplot that has to do all with the Caribbean. Here is Bleak House by Charles Dickens, another subplot that has to do entirely with Africa and English colonialism in Africa. So it runs according to Said all throughout Western literature. He actually argues that the 19th century Western novel is the novel of imperialism.
Said argues that that the process of building this massive archive began in the 16th century and took on a decidedly imperial tone in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's a complex argument, but there's a simple enough large point he's making. Knowledge leads to power. In this case, Western knowledge of the East leads to Western control over the East.
The writing and painting were done first. along with map making and the study of Eastern languages and cultures. That academic and artistic knowledge was highly useful in the economic, military, and political control the West began to exert over the East in the 18th century. Representation also leads to power. The West represents the East in a thousand ways.
All of them add up to create a version of the East that is a strange, exotic. sensual, barbaric, cruel place, the opposite of the rational, just, normal, civilized West. The second theorist we're going to discuss today is Gayatri Spivak.
Born in India, she was educated there and in the United States before taking a position at Columbia University. Spivak published a long, complex essay with the title, Can the Subaltern Speak? It has received an enormous amount of attention since its first publication in 1988. Spivak's title refers to the least powerful in society, the subaltern. Subaltern is a term for those of a lower economic and cultural status, the masses who exist outside of the power structure of a given society.
It's an important term in the writings of Spivak. of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist thinker, and was taken from his prison notebooks by a group of Indian intellectuals who formed the Subaltern Studies group. Spivak's question is a direct response to work by this group.
She particularly focuses on subaltern women. The term speak isn't entirely literal for Spivak. She means, can the lowest members of society express their concerns, enter into dialogue with those who have power?
And also, if they do speak, write, or otherwise communicate their concerns, will they be heard? What we mean by... attending to the subaltern classes is, they do speak, they resist, they form collectives, but there is no infrastructure for, again, to go back to the metaphor, for them to have their speech act.
completed. In other words, those around them with the power, state power or non-state power, do not have the infrastructure to be able to attend to these things. On the way to answering this question, Spivak identifies four class positions in Indian society.
The first, dominant foreign groups. which include colonial powers such as the English and French, international powers such as the Americans and Russians, and international corporations. The second, dominant indigenous groups at the national level. This includes Indian politicians and business interests, so the national government and national companies in India.
The third, dominant indigenous groups at the regional and local levels. And finally, the people. and particularly the subaltern classes. She answers her question in the last paragraph of her essay. No, she writes, the subaltern cannot speak.
She argues that female intellectuals must speak for the subaltern. concern. She does not like this answer, since she sees it as a kind of ventriloquism.
Think back to Said's theory and the importance of representation in maintaining colonial control. Spivak is also talking about representation, but in her case it isn't just the colonizers who represent the colonized. There are layers of representations. The female intellectuals sympathetic to the plight of the subaltern are representing them.
She would agree with Said. that every representation is a misrepresentation. A picture, in other words, no matter how perfect, is not the thing it represents. But Spivak thinks that until the subaltern is able to develop a political consciousness and to express it, that this representation is the best option available.
Moving on from Spivak, we come to the third of the three theorists this video is concerned with, Homi Bhabha. I think we need to make a distinction between the humanities as a certain set of disciplines. which have always been associated with the humanities. Literature, religion, philosophy, classics of various cultures.
These are the disciplines, languages, these are the disciplines we usually recognize as being the humanities disciplines. Baba, like Spivak, was born in India. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Mumbai before going to Oxford for his PhD. He has taught at several institutions in Britain and the US.
the director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, where he's also an English professor. One of Baba's central ideas is mimicry. This concept is related to what we mean when we say multiculturalism.
in a sort of rough sense. But many post-colonial critics dislike that term. They argue that it's a simplification and that it's too optimistic. Sort of the can't we all just get along view of cultural mixing. For Bhabha, mimicry is the effect of the doubling that takes place when one culture dominates another.
Some of those dominated will attempt to mimic those in the dominant culture. Members of the dominant culture will encourage mimicry among those they dominate. This applies to the colonial situation, obviously, but also to post-colonial ones, where there's a strong push for minorities to assimilate to the majority culture.
Hybridity takes the colonized away from his or her own culture and identity, shaping a people who are neither themselves nor their colonizers. So in other words, they're people who are sort of in between, without an identity, without a really usable, effective identity. Baba sees ways in which mimicry challenges dominant cultures.
For example, if an Indian can learn English as well as an Englishman, act English, play cricket, drink tea, do all the other things that make up Englishness, the dominant culture can seem like it's a performance. It's not something you're born with so much, something you learn, something you do, something you perform, something you act out. As Babo writes, colonial mimicry is a form of self-reflection. In other words, the colonizer wants to colonize so many people that they want to colonize ...subject to mimic the dominant society, but wants that subject to get it a little bit wrong, wants that subject to be a little bit ridiculous in its performance or failed performance of Englishness or Frenchness or whatever it is. that it's putting on.
Okay, I realize that's a lot to take in. That's why I made this a video rather than a class lecture. Rewind this as much as you need to. Go back over the things that are complex, that are difficult.
You might start with thinking about the basic idea. ideas associated with each of the three theorists I've discussed. Edward Said argues that knowledge and representation are tools the West uses for dominating the East. Many of the people who wrote the books and painted the paintings that make up Orientalism did so out of an academic or artistic curiosity.
And if we were to look back here again and look at Bleak House, Dickens wasn't trying to colonize anybody. But he included the discourse of Orientalism because it was in the air. It was what people were talking about. Gayatri Spivak asks if the subaltern, the weakest members of society, can speak.
She argues that they can't because of the way society is structured and that intellectuals sympathetic to their plight must speak for them. Finally, Homi Bhabha takes on the diversity brought about by cultural encounters. In his writings, Europe and the U.S. don't simply dominate the countries of the developing world.
They encourage mimicry. of Western culture, and in the process, a kind of hybridity develops. That's it for now. I'll see you in class where we'll go over these ideas further.
Make sure to bring your questions, to bring any ideas to class that you feel need clarification, and we'll do everything we can to make this make more sense. Okay? So I will see you then.