Literary Theory

Series II: Handout #7

“Don’t be colonized!”

Edward Said (1935-2003): I met him a few times when he was president of the MLA, and I was on the Delegate Assembly; gracious, elegant, formal, and aloof—sort of like an Oxford don; he was dying of leukemia at the time. One of his last public gestures was to throw a rock at Israeli soldiers in Palestine; Said wanted to make poststructuralist criticism a force for change in the world—an activist as much as a scholar; born in Palestine and educated in Britain and the U.S. at elite schools; influenced, in particular, by Foucault, and the notion of discursive power (though we see the roots of this line of thought in Althusser, Gramsci, and Marx). Said’s achievement was to apply Foucault to the West’s relations with the rest of the world.

Orientalism (1978): an attack on Eurocentrism (remember logcentrism, and phallogocentrism), which asserts superiority of European culture to an understanding of the East as “the Other,” exotic but innately inferior. Westerners inevitably project their worst characteristics on the East: “cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness”; they also tend to see non-Europeans as homogeneous (e.g., one Asian is like another—Europeans can’t tell the difference between a Korean and a Japanese). Westerners cannot see non-Westerners as individuals but as representatives of a notion of racial identity.

Q. How is orientalism evident in Western literature? Any examples?

Q. What is Colonialism? What is it like to be colonized? Consider polyvalent or double identities (parallels DuBois’ notion of African-American double consciousness).

Q. What about Postcoloniality? What happens to a people under colonial rule (India, South Africa, the American Colonies pre-1776)? How do they acquire a separate and equal identity in relation to a former colonial power?

Q. Is all literature political? Embedded in a national and/or racial context?